Lizzi Kew Ross & Co

on aiming to reach a 'feeling of DISAPPEARING moment'

10/4/2015

In late September, I will walk into a studio with 16 dancers, a composer and a string quartet, and begin creating a dance music piece.

Where a choreographer starts to work, in terms of inspiration, can be drawn from a variety of places. For me, the people in front of me will determine what happens in the next five weeks and will be the unique character of the resulting end piece. Creating the right conditions in the studio is essential in what is actually going to develop; it is rather like working in a good noisy kitchen where communication and a positive working environment, including pressure, is the key to people giving of their best. I want the dancers to engage and contribute and be fired up by working with each other and shared ideas. There is no blank canvas in front of me, but people, with their own bodies and qualities of moving and it is how the choreographer works with the specific nature of this materiality and deals with the dynamic of creating with others, that lies at the heart of the devising process.

Images and especially poetic images are hugely important to me in developing an underlying landscape to the process. The work of RS Thomas, the poetic films of Andrei Tarkosky, and the submerged quality of the shipping forecast, have all elicited responses in me feeding the creative process. Last year, with a company of dancers and violinists, we created a piece, Reading with Bach to tour libraries. In our research, the company were interviewed by a dramaturg on their desert island book choices, and a reading list developed that we used in the studio. Edmund de Waal’s, Hare with Amber Eyes, was part of the list. I had watched programmes on de Waal, and know that he is affected and inspired by poetry and music when he is making work.
The sight of Atemwende, as it was displayed at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, immediately gave me a visceral visual sense of a score of music in their curation- in vitrines framing the vessels- giving them space and presence, In conversations with composer James Keane, it is this ’other’ quality of presence and spaces in- between that excites us both; and in writing for a live string quartet, the delicacy in the quality of touch on the strings will be paramount, reaching for ’a feeling for the disappearing moment’ (Hare with Amber Eyes, page 77)

The physical presence of the vessels, grouped together, had a strongly emotional effect on me; many of the first tasks when beginning to make work, are done ’blind’ with touch as a central force to make connections between the dancers. De Waal’s tactile and visual work will be a constant reference for me.

Edmund de Waal’s exhibition, white is on at the Royal Academy Library till January 2016.

The dance/music piece, will be performed at Laban Theatre, Deptford, October 22 23rd 2015. Dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, will tour until December, adapting the work to different stages and halls in school and colleges, as part of their third year BA professional training.

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Instruments Having Their Own Histories (blog by composer Ruth Elder)

5/6/2014

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As I play Bach’s solo violin works, I often think that this music was composed nearly 300 years ago and the fact that it still inspires and moves people today. I find myself feeling a connection not only with Bach and the many people who have listened to his works over the 300 years but also with the people who performed his pieces and have inspired other performers to interpret the music in certain ways, influencing how we all hear it today.

Along with the listening and performing history, the instruments themselves have their own histories. When I play Bach on my 250-year-old violin, I connect with all the previous owners who have played the same music on it. The instrument itself has already played these pieces many more times than I ever will, and knows them far better that I do, and always will.

The historical implications of an instrument can be compared with those a book that is hundreds of years old. Those who have handled these books and instruments have left their mark; we can feel the impact of the hours spent with them. There’s the appearance and smell, and the evidence of the physical journey their owners have taken them on. As we read these books and play these instruments, we are in a shared past and future. I often wonder if the next person to own my violin will be able to feel the time, effort, energy and emotion, all that I’ve poured into this instrument.

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Before I Read the Pages Within (by Mary Ann Hushlack)

4/22/2014

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Yes, I have a Kindle. Yes, I have an iPad. And of course reading a book on a Kindle can be more practical, especially if it’s the hardback of, say, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote or Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, both of which could be categorized as door-stoppers. And yes to read magazines with images on my iPad is like having a backlit light box, colours as luminous as a Medieval manuscript. And both the Kindle and iPad are a pleasant size. But there’s something beyond fingertips, beyond the soft swiping, caressing motion.

What is it about the weight of a book? Of going beyond the abstract tally of how many pages compared to feeling the weight in one’s hands. My whole hand and wrist, not only my fingertips. The difference between Murakami’s 1Q84: Books One and Two and Truman Capote’s novella-length Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or the recent Penguin Great Ideas series which, in its bite-size format, adds size to weight and brevity. Compared them to, say, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings (Pietro C. Marani) for which I need a solid table or desk as support. Definitely not for reading in the bath, that one. Mind you, I never use my Kindle or iPad in the bath either.

I find myself experimenting. Can I pick up the Leonardo da Vinci with one hand? Nope, need both hands and am reminded of how strong our lower arms are. I can, though, slip Great Ideas paperbacks – I pluck Machiavelli’s On Conspiracies and Charles Dickens’ Night Walks from my shelves – into my raincoat pockets.

Then, reaching down to a stack of ‘gotta read or reread soon, very soon’ books on the occasional table nestled in the corner next to a sofa, I check out what size of book I could tuck under my arm. Paperback much better than hardback, I discover.

While remembering my teenage days of aiming for good posture, I test out which is best for placing and balancing atop my head.

As for covers, long before I focus on the design images, my fingertips register the texture. Cardboard smooth or glossy sheen smooth? The linen of a back issue of McSweeney’s; the hint of a velvety texture and slightly raised lettering of Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary.

And this territory of texture leads me to riffle pages. Some paper is crisp, other paper almost flimsy thin. Once again, though, size and shape enters.

It’s Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Ana Sanchez-Colberg’s dance and the performative. Not a particularly thick paperback but with a wider format and quality- weight paper, I tilt it upright, cupping its spine in my hand and I especially like to riffle these pages, doing it over and over, revelling in it. There are dance photographs interspersed with the text and it’s as if I’m creating my very own flip-book performance. I’m reminded of Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux. I’ve not thought of it in years and I’m sure it’s online and I’ll be able to watch it in its full glory on my iPad. Later, though. After I finish my own self-created performance. Only then.

Of course I wouldn’t give up my iPad and Kindle. But neither do I want to abandon the physicality of a book. The physicality – all that I engage with, all that I surmise, all well before I read the pages within.
Mary Ann Hushlack is the Dramaturg for Reading with Bach and Lizzi Kew Ross an Co. Associate Artist

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Reading with Bach - point of departure

4/13/2014

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Lizzi Kew Ross lifts the veil on her inspiration for Reading with Bach

Reading with Bach - The Point of Departure from Martin Collins on Vimeo.

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Pace, Tempo

4/9/2014

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Reading with Bach composer Ruth Elder writes about her process

When playing Bach I often think about what was going on in Bach’s life when he wrote the music. Bach always takes us on a musical journey. He begins with a statement and that statement develops, taking the listener to a wide range of expressive places. I like to think that his expressive choices are linked to his surroundings and situation at the time.

I relate the expressions and effects in Bach’s music to how books can change pace. Sometimes you’re reading at such a fast pace because the material is just so exciting that you can’t wait to turn over that page to see what happens, while at other times your pace is slower simply because the subject matter is troubling to take in. The pace of reading about a death in a love story or a chase scene in a thriller can, I think, be linked with Bach’s choices of tempo directions for particular movements and this can help the performer communicate the overall feel of that piece.

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Reading With Bach - Rehearsals in pictures

3/30/2014

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READING WITH BACH LIBRARY

2/20/2014

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A Step One

‘Okay,’ I begin, pressing the record button of my handy-dandy new recorder. I’m the dramaturg for Reading with Bach and am about to chat - a kind of ‘interview’ - with each of the cast and creative team. ‘These conversations,’ I say, ‘are a step one of the rehearsal process . . . a way of preparing.’

I explain that when Lizzi and I had started talking about how we read and what we imagine when we read this or that, I had this flash of thought, namely, that we don’t ever read in abstraction. We may talk about reading in general, but in practice when we read we’re reading something. A newspaper or book or brochure – specific.

Of course with every dance or performance piece, those coming in as performers are individuals, but here, especially, it seemed to me that everybody would arrive with their own particular history and relationship to the subject matter of reading and books. Which books we read (or don’t) or reread (or not) is very individual.

And so, with this background set out, each cast member and I proceed to talk about books as well as music, films and/or art. The focus is on what he or she finds meaningful. These could be books that you’d want to revisit or those that are markers. Or simply something more casual, that you enjoyed or remember for no good reason. Or even a book you’ve meant to read (or something you’ve meant to listen to or a film or art work you’ve wanted to see) but haven’t.

What a range of titles emerged. What a range of books. Books that reflect what we’re made of. As personal as our signatures.

We physically brought some of them into the studio for the R&D; others were what we carried in our imaginations and memories. In devising movement material, we handled the physical books and peered inside, bending back the spine and reading, a first sentence, a second sentence, a paragraph, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently, becoming interested, even absorbed. We became aware of titles new to us and from there it was a small step to being curious about everybody else’s list of favourite stories or books.

By the end of the R&D we realized we’d generated a Reading with Bach Library. A portable library – that we work with, that we work from.

Our July 2013 titles are: [link]

Mary Ann Hushlak

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The Library

2/20/2014

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The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

The Wake by Margo Glantz

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral

In my Garden: The Garden Diaries of Great Dixter by Christopher Lloyd

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Merival – A Man of His Times by Rose Tremain

Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Homo Faber by Max Frisch

The Visit of the Old Lady by Friedrich Durrenmatt

The Physicists by Friedrich Durrenmatt

“The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (Sherlock Holmes) by Arthur Conan Doyle

“The Red-Headed League” (Sherlock Holmes) by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Unlikely Pilgrimmage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding

The Time-Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Simmons Roberts

Lines: A Cultural History by Tim Ingold

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal Lines: A Cultural History by Tim Ingold

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome

Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern

Collected Works of R.S. Thomas by R.S. Thomas

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

There But For The by Ali Smith

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses by Julian Pallasmaa

This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor,

Memory Palace by Hari Kunzu

McSweeney’s Volumes 16, 18 and 25

“A Boring Story” by Anton Chekhov

Icefields by Thomas Wharton

Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

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Join Lizzi Kew Ross in London’s Winter Walking Weekend

2/17/2014

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London academics share unearthed mysteries from the capital through specially curated art and history walks

Fri 28 Feb – Sun 2 Mar 2014 | Across London | tickets £8.00 | http://bit.ly/1bk5yZH

Ever wondered where London’s first theatre was built? What it was like to live in the Jewish Ghetto of Victorian East London? What links a samosa to The Odeon in Whitechapel, and where King’s Cross really is? The Cultural Capital Exchange (TCCE), a membership network for London’s academics are putting on a weekend of walks, where expert London academics will share their painstakingly researched secrets from London’s history with members of the public.

The range of highly eclectic and unusual walks will take place over the weekend in King’s Cross, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, Mile End, Farringdon and the City, spanning many topics and disciplines to include: The Lost Theatres of Shakespeare, Cinema and Migration, Public Lettering and Typography, Jewish Immigrant Life in London’s East End, Developing a Phenological Clock, Locating King’s Cross, and Walking and Reading in the City. Each walk lasts between one and two hours and costs £8, with bookings available online at: http://bit.ly/1bk5yZH

Phil Baines, Professor of Typography at Central Saint Martins will lead the walk Exploring London’s Rich Tradition of Letter Writing. He says, “This is walking with a purpose, looking up and down more than ahead. Seeking out the traces of who went before, and what they did, as well as admiring the skill and artistry of the letters they carved, painted, gilded or glazed.”

Tamara Atkin, Medieval and Renaissance English Lecture at Queen Mary University will lead the walk on The Lots Of Theatres of Shakespeare’s London. She says, “When you jump on a tube at Moorgate and emerge two stops later at Farringdon you imagine that you have travelled some considerable distance. But walking the same route, it’s immediately apparent just how small the city of London really is. One of the things I love about walks is the way they encourage us to reassess distance, to reimagine the ways that spaces are connected, both geographically, and also by and through the people and places that once populated familiar landscapes. Bringing together research into late medieval and early modern theatrical practice, this walk aims to animate the Elizabethan and Jacobean past, both through invoking the words spoken in theatres, taverns and on the streets of Shakespeare’s London, but also through the traces of his London that live on in the names of modern streets and buildings.”

Evelyn Wilson, Director, The Culture Capital Exchange, adds, “Walking is an activity that so many of us enjoy and there is always so much to discover about our city, its history and how we inhabit it today. Our research communities are continually at the forefront of revealing new and compelling stories about so many facets of our city, past and present, so curating the Winter Walking Weekend feels like a timely opportunity to bring to wider public attention some of the outstanding work taking place in our universities.”

Walking and Talking Books
Walk Guide: Lizzi Kew Ross & Co, Trinity Laban
Meet at 4pm, Paternoster Square

In Walking and Talking Books walk participants will discuss one of series of books while walking through a number of interconnected routes in the City of London. The idea is based on an upcoming dance performance piece, Reading with Bach, which is inspired by observing people reading as they walk and read through the city. The books and their subjects that will form the starting points for these conversations include: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell; Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal on the collection of objects and Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wildness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts on the contrasts of urban space and our ideas of wilderness.

All the walks can be seen here.

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The Square Mile

12/3/2013

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Martin and I made this film as a way of documenting a beginning and start a conversation about the initial ideas that underpin Reading with Bach. I live in the City of London’s square mile, and 300,000 people come to work in the mile every day. Looking at the hundreds of hunched figures over London Bridge is like a Lowry painting, and no one is touching anyone else. Taking my young son across the city, crossing through the busiest intersection, Bank Station where 400,000people pass through every day, I wondered why I was so tired?; The very many adjustments, my mind was having to make- ‘shall I go this side of him?’, ‘where is she going?’; thoughts that are internal and hardly conscious when negotiating such a large mass of people every day, take up a huge amount of energy, as well as the emotional turmoil that one reads easily on people’s faces, if one pays attention. It was creating a game that made me begin to think of the ideas for this dance/music piece: we used to count the number of people who emerged from the tube, reading a book, continuing along in the flow of people, taken to work amidst and part of the stream of humanity, at least 4 or 5 a day.

Reading is, mostly a solitary act, and I mused, where do we go in ourselves when we read? We are taken into imaginary places and situations and yet these readers, allowing themselves to be buoyed by the crowd, continue to read in the midst of the public. This led me to consider the internal world of the reader and the juxtaposition between a private act and a walking presence in a public space. The use of ear phones, Kindles and texting has made these observations commonplace, but it was the people with a book that we noticed.

Bach has been a constant companion to me these last few years. I grew up in the 60’s listening to the Swingle singers and Jacques Loussier and love the rhythmic play between jazz and Bach. Having worked with musicians closely over the last 10 years, I enjoy the conversation that occurs between live musicians and dancers who share the same space. Dancers and musicians inhabit space in very different ways, but when the musicians move and the dancers sing, they play and move better with a deeper integration with the body as a source for playing and moving.

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, like Shelly’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.

Reading with Bach - The Point of Departure from Martin Collins on Vimeo.

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on aiming to reach a 'feeling of DISAPPEARING moment'

Instruments Having Their Own Histories (blog by composer Ruth Elder)

Before I Read the Pages Within (by Mary Ann Hushlack)

Reading with Bach - point of departure

Lizzi Kew Ross lifts the veil on her inspiration for Reading with Bach

Pace, Tempo

Reading With Bach - Rehearsals in pictures

READING WITH BACH LIBRARY

The Library

Join Lizzi Kew Ross in London’s Winter Walking Weekend

The Square Mile

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