It's usual to hear music by Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev blaring from the state-of-the-art sound system rigged up in Scottish Ballet's rehearsal room three.

Not today. Instead, Estonian principal Eve Mutso and London-born coryphee Jamiel Laurence are listening to the deep, booming voice of actor Richard Burton - listening and dancing as Burton reads Dylan Thomas's The Hunchback In The Park, from the poet's 1946 collection Deaths And Entrances. At points it's so quiet you can hear the pigeons cooing on the roof of the company's Tramway headquarters, an image Thomas would probably have liked. "They nest up there," says Mutso, laughing and gesturing with her thumb.

In 1955, Burton recorded 15 of Thomas's poems for an LP, and Hunchback is one of ten from it which soundtrack the appropriately named Ten Poems, a 2009 piece by celebrated British choreographer Christopher Bruce. It receives its UK premiere in Glasgow this week as part of a double bill with the world premiere of The Crucible by Brooklyn-based choreographer Helen Pickett. It's an adaptation of Arthur Miller's famous play of the same name, first performed in New York just months before Thomas died there in 1953.

That's where the comparisons end, however. While Pickett's piece uses music by British electronica star Jon Hopkins alongside selections from the work of Bernard Hermann, Alfred Hitchcock's go-to movie composer, Ten Poems relies on words alone. It trusts the dancers to find a rhythm in what isn't there as much as what is.

From her seat in front of the mirror which runs the length of the room, rehearsal director Hope Muir leads Mutso and Laurence through the poem's opening sequence. It brings Laurence, clad today in a ragged tramp's coat, into the scene from stage right. He moves slowly and silently. After seven steps, the melancholic verse begins: "The hunchback in the park," Burton intones. "A solitary mister/Propped between trees and water ..."

Later, Muir makes the dancers play and re-play the last sequence, as Laurence smothers a supine Mutso with his coat and we see her hands reach out, tremble, then flop down, apparently lifeless. There's talk from Muir of beats, phrases, pauses and arabesques as Mutso and Laurence stand and listen. They in turn raise their own concerns about lifts and rotations and which foot should be where, and when, and why. Muir, whose connection with Bruce goes back to her days performing under his tutelage at the equally celebrated Rambert Dance Company, consults her notes and gives advice.

Afterwards, slouched on the rehearsal room floor in that elegantly poised way only dancers can pull off, Mutso and Laurence talk about a piece which now forms one of the more unusual works in the Scottish Ballet repertoire.

"I find the words are my notes," says the Estonian. "I've danced to songs before where there were very strong cues to certain words, but with this the way it has been recorded and the way the sentences flow, for me it is like music. So I don't think about the meaning any more, I think about the way it sounds and the way I can hit the lines with my body."

Although it's unusual for a ballet company to dance to spoken word alone, Laurence has done it in work he has choreographed himself. "But for me this is the most poignant text I've danced to," he adds. "I find the whole piece quite moving. The movement is not basic, it's complicated, but you watch it on such a primal, basic level because it describes these great phases of life in such detail."

Ten Poems opens with In My Craft And Sullen Art, where Thomas talks about the act of artistic creation and the loneliness it confers. It closes with The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower, written when Thomas was 19 and widely regarded as the poem which made him famous. Among the other works are Fern Hill, a series of recollections of Thomas's Welsh childhood; Lament, in which a man looks back on the long span of "a roaring life"; and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, which Thomas wrote about his dying father and which features one of the poet's most famous lines: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

For Bruce, who turns 70 next year and was in his early sixties when he created the piece, it was those themes of loss, longing and nostalgia which were particularly appealing. That said, Ten Poems had an unlikely genesis: Bruce walked into a music shop near his home in Somerset, saw a CD of the readings sitting on the counter with Burton's face staring out from the cover, and bought it on impulse.

"This was work I knew from my teens, so it was like a little trip back to that time in my life," he explains. "I played it and started listening and instantly what struck me was the musicality, the rhythm of the readings. It was almost like listening to music and I thought I'd like to make a dance."

Initially, he intended to simply use the poems as abstract sounds and choreograph the piece around any ideas that came from them. "But as you get listening and you listen to the themes and the drama in the poetry, you begin to express what's in there. That's basically where it came from."

Where it went to was Kiel on Germany's Baltic coast and a 2009 world premiere in the hands of the city's dance company, Ballet Kiel. From there, it came to Glasgow, in part through Bruce's own growing association with Scottish Ballet - they performed his piece Shift at the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival - and in part through Hope Muir herself. She was in Kiel with Bruce to help with rehearsals for Rooster, his famous 1991 piece set to the music of the Rolling Stones, and it was her who recommended Ten Poems to Scottish Ballet's own artistic director, Christopher Hampson. Next month's centenary of Thomas's birth makes it a particularly appropriate counterpart to The Crucible.

Bruce spent 10 days in Glasgow working with Mutso, Laurence and the other six dancers who appear in the piece. Although he regularly uses song in his work, he had only once before used spoken word only, and that was in the second piece he ever created. But like the dancers themselves he sees no real difference between moving to words and moving to music.

"Good dancers are sensitive to whatever they are dancing to," he says. "It isn't so complicated for them. They get used to it, they get to know it and you trust their artistry. But what was difficult for me, as with anything that's narrative and using the spoken word, was to interpret the words but not to do it in any way that appears banal. In the choreography, one has to say what the poems are saying but find a unique and individual way of doing it."

Back in our Glasgow rehearsal room, unique and individual are words Hope Muir has no difficulty applying to Bruce himself.

"He's from that generation of choreographers that actually have a language, which is getting more and more rare," she says. "And he has developed a way to work where everyone who works with him, with every new encounter, they know a little but more."

Mutso and Laurence now count themselves among that number.

"Nobody else but Christopher Bruce could take this subject and give it this earthy balance, this beauty," says Mutso. "It's perfect."

"He is," adds Laurence simply, "an entity."

The Crucible with Ten Poems opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on Thursday before touring to Inverness, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, www.scottishballet.co.uk