When the Oscar-winning film-maker Anthony Minghella died suddenly in March, the choreographer Jonathan Lunn lost a friend, and nearly lost his new show as well.

Reading Room is a touring theatrical encounter between a group of dancers and one high-profile actor per performance. Minghella himself was scheduled to appear on June 27-28, in Eastleigh.

Lunn is still struggling to cope with the shock of Minghella’s death, and considered cancelling the show as a mark of respect. “We were incredibly close. Friends said, ‘Anthony wanted you to do this so much. It’d be letting him down if you don’t.’ So I thought: ‘If I can’t do it with him, I can do it for him.’ ”

In Reading Room, the dancers do their stuff while the actors do theirs, reading from a series of short texts. These include an ambiguous Raymond Carver poem, the riveting Stirrings Still (the last major prose work by Samuel Beckett), and a glorious monologue from Minghella’s 1988 radio play Cigarettes and Chocolate.

Many of the thespians involved are household names: Juliet Stevenson, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman, Toby Jones, Dexter Fletcher. All are friends of Lunn, 53, who in 1990 worked with Stevenson and Rickman on the Minghella film Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which he took the part of a ghost.

The ghost that now hovers around Reading Room is, of course, Minghella’s.

Lunn had known him since their days at Hull University. As a theatre-obsessed student of English and drama Lunn had a “conversion” when the now-defunct London Contemporary Dance Theatre came to Hull to do a residency.

He, Minghella and the latter’s future wife Carolyn Choa would get up early every morning for dance class. “Sometimes Anthony would accompany our contractions or whatever on the piano,” says Lunn. “Then we’d go back to bed and miss our lectures.”

After Hull, Lunn trained at the London Contemporary Dance School, the home of British modern dance and the seedbed for such talents as Richard Alston and Siobhan Davies. There he distinguished himself as a dancer and choreographer.

Over the years Minghella collaborated with Lunn on several dance-based projects. Most recently he had written and delivered, via voiceover, the witty text for Self Assembly. Commissioned for the 2006 Place Prize, for which it was a finalist, this clever duet juxtaposes a troubled relationship against words from a mock flat-pack instruction manual. It will serve as the coda for Reading Room and in counterpoint to Disassembly, a new work to be performed by different youth dance groups at each venue.

After London Contemporary had folded, Lunn embarked on a successful career in opera and theatre in the US and Europe. Until Self Assembly he hadn’t fashioned his own work in the UK for close to a decade.

Despite his grief, Lunn is clearly excited by the jigsaw of speech and movement that is Reading Room and the challenges it offers. “The point is not to have Juliet Stevenson prancing around the stage, or to get dancers performing Shake-speare, but to exploit the best of everybody’s skills. I want to see if it’s possible to make something in which you don’t try to find literal movement for what’s being said, but instead discover a way to weave dance underneath and in between it.”

Given its literary bent, not to mention its starry casting, Lunn hopes that Reading Room will attract an audience that might not normally attend dance performances. In the bigger picture, he says, it reflects his desire “to map out all the unspoken interactions between people. How we try to communicate and connect. How we sometimes fail miserably, talk at cross-purposes or don’t tell the truth. How we delight or disappoint one another.”

As for Stevenson, she claims to have no relationship with dance “other than taking a lot of ballet classes between the ages of 9 and 16”. She is in awe of the five dancers cast in Reading Room: “To be so conscious of every part of your body, and so in control of it. Actors are slobs by comparison.” Words, she says, “are about distilling and containing meaning, or pinning something down so you can get hold of it. Dance does something different. It’s taking something, throwing it up in the air and watching it catch the light in a hundred different ways.”

Reading Room is on a UK tour until June 28, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, Thur and Fri (www.southbankcentre.co.uk, www.turtlekeyarts.org.uk)

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