Reading Room, Jonathan Lunn Dance Company, at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, Wednesday 14th May 2008

The Bury Festival offers the most varied programme of visual and performing arts across three weeks, that you will see in Suffolk. To go to the newly renovated and restored Georgian Theatre Royal and see contemporary dance was an almost surreal experience at times. Performances such as this, part of the festival but co-produced with DanceEast, always attract a younger audience and the majority of this audience was, I guess, aged under forty.   

The performance opened with the traditional proscenium-arched stage divided across it’s width by what looked like a solid wall with a single door. It was only when the lights went up behind the screen that it became a transparent gauze screen and revealed the narrator for the evening, film and TV actor Dexter Fletcher, most recently seen playing the concierge in Hotel Babylon. 

The performance comprised a series of scenes that combined contemporary dance with readings written by Billy Collins, Raymond Carver and Samuel Beckett. Whether rhythmic or robotic, each scene flowed into the other as solo dancers, duets or all five members of the dance company performed to a pulsating beat and music from Scanner, Slipper/DJ Shadow, Tom Ze, Aphex Twin and Matmos.

If you are more of a Phil Collins fan or prefer your dance Swan Lake-like this might have been a problem, but the skill of the dancers and the choreography of the gliding gauze screens that they repositioned as they danced, forming new performance spaces, held the audience’s attention even when some members were slightly baffled by what was happening on stage!

The least successful scene in my view was Stirrings Still, which involved Dexter Fletcher sitting at a desk reading Beckett, enclosed by four transparent walls, while dancer Chris Evans, listened and reacted. Think of Waiting for Godot and you will have the idea. Clever, amusing at times, it just went on for too long!

As Reading Room tours it invites a local dance group to perform one of the scenes, and in Bury St Edmunds it was the turn of the twelve-strong team from the Bury Dance Company. With many supporters in the audience, their performance of Disassembly fully justified their inclusion in this critically acclaimed work. 
 

The whole dance performance was developed from a shorter piece Self Assembly, choreographed by Jonathan Lunn, and written by his friend, the director Anthony Minghella, who recently died. His voice was heard narrating this part of the evening and it was undoubtedly the highlight of the performance. The idea is that people communicate in more ways than words, and dancers Carly Best and Chris Evans combined their movements with the music and words to ensure that assembling flat-pack furniture will never seem the same again!

Rachel Sloane, 15 May 2008.

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