A slow start to a riveting piece of dance / physical theatre!
Sunny Side by Yorkshire based Northern Rascals finished its tour at Dance City last night. At 85 minutes without interval, Sunny Side is like a two-act play using dance and physicality, accompanied by recorded text, that includes taut and beautiful poetry, all written by Anna Holmes. This text is based on the testimony of 1,420 young people aged 14 to 30 years old across the UK. The theme of young men and mental health felt all too relevant.
Sunny Side opens on an intriguing and scruffy bedroom belonging to 18-year-old K, played, almost innocently, by Soul Roberts. He’s dreaming, shown by flickering film, projected on the bedroom wall and created by Aaron Howell; K wakes to his alarm.
K goes through his daily routine: dresses, eats toast offered by an unseen person, presumably his mum, leaves, probably to some utterly meaningless job, returns, sleeps. Put this on repeat and it all felt really slow, but of course this was the whole point.
A text from his mate Danny, so well and edgily performed by Ed Mitchell, sets things in motion, and next is Danny’s visit.
Scene by scene, we see first K’s yearning love for Danny, then his relationship with his girlfriend, the versatile and incredibly expressive Sophie Thomas; there are some superb, simple, moving and nuanced duets between them, his paltry relationship with his parents and the grey monotony of his life.
Although there’s no interval, whilst K and Danny take the train heading off for a night out, there’s a clever set change, set design by Caitlin Mawhinney, into a simpler space, representing variously a train station, a bus stop, a disco room and finally a ‘nowhere’ space.
At the disco, Danny meets a girl, and the complexity of K and Danny’s relationship is further revealed in a long trio dance. How K, as a secretly gay, working class man, navigates all this is deeply moving and even uncomfortable.
The final scenes, first a duet, then a solo, then just music, composed by Wilfred Kimber, are mesmerising.
Where Northern Rascals has succeeded so well is to not hurry anything, to let things develop and use music that supports rather than drives the action. Props and sets are well used, everything is down-at-heel, including the low, shadowy, slightly depressing lighting by Barnaby Booth.
The lives portrayed are the result of political actions starting in the 1970s (the Thatcher years), and these stories need to be told. The performers are wonderful, and I only wish they’d taken more bows so we could show them better.
The performance was followed by a Q & A in Dance City’s spacious foyer—a good way to learn more about dance, physical theatre and visiting companies.
Northern Rascals is small and super professional. It was formed in 2017 and is led by Anna Holmes and Sam Ford, who also created and directed the show. Both trained at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds; Northern Rascals is part of our vitally important network of regionally based companies.