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

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

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.