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Martha Brim, a distinguished professor emerita of dance at Columbia College, founded The Power Company Collaborative, which stages performances in a variety of unexpected spaces across South Carolina and the world.
Photo by Crush Rush
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Longtime dance teacher Martha Brim’s next project is The Movement Lab, a community arts and wellness center located in a former mechanic shop in Columbia.
Photo by Crush Rush
Martha Brim
Resides in: Columbia.
Age: 71.
Honored: Brim has received the S.C. Arts Commission Choreographic Fellowship and the S.C. Dance Association Advocacy Award.
From one art to another: Brim first studied visual arts in college before pivoting to dance.
She wants you to know: “My spine is my tool. My material is humanity. My process is a serious, disciplined play.”
Only someone as improvisational as Martha Brim could turn a flat tire into a 43-year dance with South Carolina.
In the summer of 1983, Brim was a freelance choreographer traveling with her husband from Washington, D.C., to Florida when their tire blew outside of Charleston. During the necessary overnight stay, Brim flipped through a tourism brochure about the Spoleto Festival.
“I said it out loud,” Brim recalls with amusement. “I want to come back here.”
A few days later, Brim learned of an opportunity to teach choreography at Columbia College, and she made a pivot turn back to the Palmetto State.
Ever since, Brim has expanded what people think of as dance, and she has become a distinctive artistic voice in South Carolina.
“Creative movement allows you to express your humanity in a way that nothing else does,” says Brim. “We speak with our bodies, with our postures, with the energy that we put out.”
A native of Columbus, Georgia, Brim discovered modern dance and choreography while she was in college.
“I found that I could make things from scratch, but do it more physically,” she says.
Since her first position teaching choreography at Columbia College, she continued teaching for 35 years, “graduating” in 2018 to distinguished professor emerita of dance.
“I resisted the word ‘retired,’” she says. “I had learned so much there, and I was going to go on and continue my artistic practice.”
In 2000, she founded The Power Company Collaborative, or PoCoCo, a Columbia-based dance and arts company. The group has staged performances in a variety of unexpected spaces across the state and internationally, showing that art and movement belong to everyone. They have commissioned works at ArtFields in Lake City, in old buildings in Sumter, at the opening of Liberty Bridge in Greenville and at the Prague Quadrennial in the Czech Republic.
“Dance is very community oriented,” says Brim. “A lot of people declare that they’re not dancers, and that’s one thing we’ve tried to address with The Power Company. Everybody is a dancer. If you have a body, you’re dancing.”
Brim’s next project is The Movement Lab, a community arts and wellness center located in a former mechanic shop in Columbia.
It’s another improvised step in a life full of them.