Jonathan Lunn's new touring show is a polished attempt to marry the body language of dance with spoken text. The British choreographer has invited a different high-profile actor - Juliet Stevenson, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman or Dexter Fletcher - to deliver the same set of writings at each performance while five creditable dancers dance in a fidgety, resolutely contemporary style.

Lunn is testing what these two forms of expression can jointly reveal about our (in-)ability to communicate. Stevenson set the tone of the evening at the London premiere, reciting a wry, self-referentially literary poem by the American Billy Collins. She then exited, allowing Carly Best to articulate a quirky solo structured as a string of claustrophobically neurotic, broken poses.

Best is like an enormously adept but slightly soulless machine. I felt a greater affinity for Rachel Krische, a dancer of exceptional wit, character and compact power who warms up Lunn's work by several degrees.

Featuring prerecorded music by Scanner, Aphex Twin and DJ Shadow, the performance is smoothly staged. The designer, Peter Mumford, sheds immaculate light on the moveable walls of a set that keeps shifting between room-like spaces. Stevenson was a slippery presence. Reading Samuel Beckett's typically gloomy, precise prose, she was both a witness and an accompaniment to Chris Evans's dismayingly overliteral solo. She vanished after delineating a Raymond Carver poem, paving the way for a troubled relationship duet by Chris Rook and Lilou Robert that felt familiar but was well done.

At each venue Reading Room spotlights a different youth dance company. On the South Bank it was EDge, the postgraduate performance group of London Contemporary Dance School. Nice work, even if their ensemble moves exposed Lunn's habitual reliance on seemingly arbitrary gestural filigree.

The performance concludes with a clever duet, Self Assembly. Here the uncertainties and cracks in Best and Evans's partnership are refracted through the late Anthony Minghella's voiceover, a series of flat-pack instructions marked by self-congratulatory irony.

Touring. Details from www.turtlekeyarts.org.uk.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010