Conversation Piece

A group of actors and dancers meet on stage and begin the show with a short conversation about… Well, we don’t know yet. Each night it will be a different conversation – just an ordinary preshow chat like you might have yourselves – and this short conversation will form the basis of the rather surprising performance that follows.

It sounds like it shouldn’t work. But in the hands of Guerin and her remarkable cast it does. The project began as a simple experiment: what happens when you put three dancers and three actors together in a room? The result is both a mesmerising cultural encounter between two art forms, and a kind of x-ray of the surprising hugeness that lies beneath our daily chitchat.

At the time of writing, Lucy Guerin’s dance-theatre work Human Interest Story is surprising regular Belvoir audiences in the Upstairs Theatre. With Conversation Piece, artistic director Ralph Myers continues his commitment to bringing new experiences to Belvoir.

Myers compares the experience of the show – which underwent three weeks of development before even being programmed – to “growing a crystal garden” onstage every night. “The basic idea is to take three actors and three dancers and push them together in a piece of theatre,” says Myers. “It becomes about theatre and dance and the relationship between the two things.”

The other thing to note is that, just because the piece is a conceptual collision of theatre and dance, Belvoir isn’t skimping on talent on either side of the equation: Alison Bell (onstage later in the year in As You Like It), Megan Holloway (recently seen in Belvoir’s own Neighbourhood Watch) and Matthew Whittet are as renowned for their theatre work as Alisdair Macindoe, Rennie McDougall and Harriet Ritchie for their dance work.