Catherine Wreford: The dancer with an ‘invisible disease’

You could easily go and see Catherine Wreford perform in a show and not know anything was wrong.

A professional dancer with a huge number of stage credits to her name, it’s perhaps only when you look at the show programme that you’d find out she has brain cancer.

“I always put it in my bio because I want people to know I’m on stage and still performing, but I have an invisible disease,” she tells BBC News.

“And I want people to know the invisible disease I have will kill me at some point, but not now. I can still dance, and because I can still dance, that’s what I’m doing.”

When the 39-year-old was first diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma (a malignant brain tumour), she was told she had between two and six years left to live.

That was six years ago.

But despite 2019 being the year that her determined time should be up, she is preparing to appear in a new production of Romeo and Juliet in her Canadian home city.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) has invited her back, along with her close friend Craig Ramsay, two decades after the pair trained at the company’s ballet school.

Together, she and Craig will portray Lord and Lady Capulet when the production opens on 13 February.

“Rehearsals have been going really well, everyone is so kind and accepting of us,” Wreford says of the last few weeks.

Tara Birtwhistle, associate artistic director of the RWB, says she’s “thrilled” to have Wreford and Ramsay back.

“We are proud of all that they have accomplished and to have them here, performing with the company, rehearsing in the studios where they learned their craft, is incredibly emotional, even more so in context of Catherine’s story,” she tells BBC News.

Despite training as a dancer and going on to star in Broadway shows, Wreford had actually given up her career in the entertainment industry more than a decade ago.

BBC