1 week ago
14
This bedroom looks like it has been ripped out of a building. Its walls are edged with an exposed, skyline-like mesh. Here, 18-year-old Yorkshireman K is clinging on. His routine replays, every morning a Monday. The alarm is followed by bleary stretching, then he’s out the door, a growing mound of abandoned breakfasts in his wake.
If K feels his horizons are shrinking, the looser-limbed Danny’s seem to expand – he has left their valley to study in Manchester. K longs to be beside him again. Each visits the other’s home in this frequently arresting piece of dance-theatre from Northern Rascals (created and directed by Anna Holmes and Sam Ford) which captures disconnection in young adulthood and the gap that grows between old and new experiences. You sense K’s relief when his and Danny’s movements fall into step, feel his dejection when he gets a matey slap on the back.
The detachment is heightened by Holmes’s script, often in the second person and delivered in a performance poetry style as a voiceover, the rhymes tumbling out alongside dancer Soul Roberts’s yearning solos expressing K’s constraints. The occasional dialogue is distorted and half-heard, like the news reports and domestic arguments that come through these thin walls.
Sometimes, the movement would be better left to speak for itself as we hear what is already implicit in this exploration of class, masculinity and isolation. While enacting a sense of monotony is essential to the story, the script could gain greater power if its imagery was more sparing. The production as a whole could be condensed – it drags towards the end of its 85 minutes.
But Roberts partners evocatively with Ed Mitchell as Danny and Sophie Thomas as another of K’s loves, the choreography delicate and refreshingly imaginative in its exploration of sexuality. The movement also deftly suggests the characters’ relationships with the streets that become childhood playgrounds and the wide open spaces that fill their lungs and send them spinning.
In these moments, a breeze is felt through Wilfred Kimber’s music, Barnaby Booth’s lighting and Caitlin Mawhinney’s set which are otherwise marked by desolation. Their designs complement adept work by digital artist Aaron Howell, a melodramatic dream sequence the only odd note in a video design featuring lairy smartphone videos and tender footage of young K playing in the pool with his mum. “I’ve got you,” she says with reassurance. Often a tough watch, Sunny Side shows how we never grow out of that need to be held.
