'Tiny Dancers' review or 'Talking Heads'

Tiny Dancers, Isley Lynn 

NYT YouTube, 23 July 2020

Written for The Guardian 

It’ll come as no surprise that Tiny Dancers, a collection of sketches devised during lockdown, is all about the struggle to connect. Written by Isley Lynn and performed by the National Youth Theatre’s Playing Up company, Tiny Dancers reveals a young generation isolated, frustrated and often just very, very sad. We watch two lovers share a dinner (and disastrous fight) over the internet; a young woman talks to a long dead relative somehow contained in cyberspace, and an astronaut tries to make contact from out of space. This vibrant mix never merges into a satisfying whole but there’s an intensity of emotion in here, and a powerful desire simply to be heard, that’s undeniably potent.

There’s a general air of restlessness and entrapment to many of the sketches but, while lockdown is mentioned explicitly a few times, the time zone of Tiny Dancers is all over the place. A few of the sketches have a futuristic sci-fi feel to them and are the least successful of the lot, often hinging on an element of surprise that winds up feeling laboured.

The seemingly simple sketches are the most complex and powerful of the bunch. Kc Gardiner instantly captivates as a young woman, frozen with fear outside a party she cannot bring herself to join. In another scene, a young man (Mars Sams) calls his hospitalised brother (Jonathan Price) and tries desperately to console him. Milli Bhatia directs the sequence with visual flair: we initially see the brothers as two separate floating heads but, as the conversation continues, the two begin to mirror each other’s actions until they are almost, tantalising, touching each other across the divide.