Reading With Bach
Lizzi Kew Ross and Co.’s Reading with Bach brings us dancers and musicians, and takes us into the territory of books. Reading with Bach is a kind of excavation, where the real and imagined worlds collide. Through movement and music, we watch, see, listen, engage and speculate on that strange solitary act that is reading.
For what is it to hold and handle the physical reality of a book? What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into minds, bodies, objects, space, architecture, netherworlds underworlds and other worlds? What is to be charmed, seduced or even bludgeoned by language, images, and actions? All this happens in our imaginations and we construct these worlds within ourselves.
Like death, we read alone. Each person’s experience is solitary, individual, and unique: the list of books we read, re-read, wish for and avoid is as personal as a fingerprint. This work from three dancers and two live violinists was developed from choreographer Lizzi Kew Ross’s Walking and Talking Books events, where participants discussed one of a series of books while walking a number of interconnected routes through the City of London. It gave Lizzi the chance to observe people as they walked among crowds, closing themselves off from the exterior world by reading, in an interior world of their own. What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into nether / other worlds? Not only do we construct these worlds within ourselves but what we imagine can become so vivid, that the real and the imagined collide.
Choreographer - Lizzi Kew Ross, devised with the company
Composer - JS Bach, Ruth Elder
Performers - Fred Gehrig, Henry Montes, Alice Sara, Una Palliser and Ruth Elder
Costume Designer - Susan Kulkarni
Lighting Designer - Fay Patterson
Dramaturg - Mary Ann Hushlak
Producer - Martin Collins & Arts Trust Productions
Reading With Bach
Stage Production Trailer
Reading with Bach was supported by Arts Council England in 2014 and performed at Laban Theatre in Trinity Laban as part of the professional theatre programming. It toured libraries in greater London, and was supported by Picador publishing, who gave a choice of 6 books for the audience to take home at each performance. The original cast was 3 dancers and 2 musicians.
Reading with Bach leads us in two directions. Reading, like death, we do alone. The entry is inward, we become absorbed and yet it takes us outward, to somewhere else- “Reading leads us everywhere” Stephen Fry. We asked the cast for their personal choices of reading and used this discussion as an emotional framework in creating the work, as we all bring ourselves to what we read and what we hear.
“Can I, as a choreographer, through dance and music explore the notion of public and private with the world of books and Bach as a starting point? As soon as the dancer opens the book on stage, we go into her head, we hear the music she hears and as she is lifted up reading, she is taken by them on a journey. But who is leading who? Are they figments of her imagination, characters in the book she is reading, or are they, as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, manipulating her vision, and writing the page before she reads it? We will play with the rhythm of this dynamic, asking the audience to ‘read’ the work in a variety of ways”