To think I paid only £2.50 for it.  That’s an indication of how long I’ve had it.  A Penguin edition, published in 1982.  It’s one of the very few books that I want to have within reach, always.  Not one I want to loan to anyone.  How many copies I’ve bought for friends, just so my own can stay near to hand. Even to bring it to rehearsals gave me a minor twitch. How many evenings I’ve thumbed through this slim volume, stopping and staring at one or another of the photographs of people reading.

It could be the one of the man on the rungs of a ladder, so engrossed that he’s not bothered to come down. Or the two young men, propped up against a tree trunk, in a park on a summer’s day,  casually absorbed. Five children on a bench, their knees crossed, open books on their laps and especially their hands and fingertips on the pages. A view through a window of a young woman making use of the daylight on a Rue Du Couedic; a view down onto a roof and another woman lying on a towel, she propped against a brick wall, her open book held by both her hands. 

How ‘elsewhere’ they are; how held by whatever the written words are. And how still they sit. But of course if our eyes are not to lose focus of the letters, words and sentences, we must keep still. Yet in our minds, in  our imaginations, we can go everywhere and anywhere.  We can be frivolous; we can be serious.  We can do anything; we can doubt everything.

These photographs allow me to reflect on how solitary and personal the activity of reading is.  I suspect that is precisely why I like to look at them again and again.

Mary Ann Hushlak
Dramaturg, Reading with Bach
8 September 2013

This R&D period has produced some key moments that we hope to develop further next year. The cast of 6 – 4 dancers and 2 violinists had not worked together as a group before- although some of them knew each other from other work they had done together. I had worked with the violinist Ruth Elder on a project for Dance United and Megan Saunders was in Without Warning at The Old Vic Tunnels last year. I am so aware that creating a good positive working environment helps to produce openness and vulnerability in the devising process, so we took time to develop movement connections between all the cast.I approached the rehearsal room with a huge amount of information about the performers reading habits, and with the support of Tim O’ Dell at Lambeth Libraries, had visited and spent time researching in them for two days prior to meeting up with the performers. Mary Ann Hushlak, the company dramaturg had interviewed each of the cast to identify their’ Desert Island’ reading choices, and  these interviews connected with a whole range of their reading preferences and how they read also, giving us a slice or snapshot of them; this was hugely helpful in making the beginnings of a ‘map of thinking’ for me, in devising the work.

Allowing time for imaginative things to develop is vital at this stage, and having such a stellar cast, I knew extraordinary moments would happen practically all the time.  I was keen not to pressure the situation and over produce the material- so these clips show a beginning point, and are not sequential. I know we want to make an hours show with an interval for libraries and arts centres as venues.