Description
Mountains are places of ‘great cultural importance’, geographer Martin Price has observed. They are constantly being shaped by human hands, sometimes benignly and sometimes with permanent malignance. Culture plays an integral part in this process and has done for centuries, producing an extraordinarily varied gallery of mountain performances. On Mountainsdocuments some of this history. It explores how performance practice is making sense of mountains, celebrating the range of approaches being mobilized to do this thinking: from practice-research and phenomenological enquiry, to historiography, gender studies and performance analysis, and, in the case of a clutch of articles, wild speculation and thought experimentation. In artist pages, discursive writing and richly illustrated photo essays, this issue centres on performance makers’ and scholars’ capacity to reflect on, intervene in and translate the complexity of mountain environments, drawing on vivid examples from India, China, the UK, the United States and Europe.
Introduction : On Mountains
Jonathan Pitches
Found Constraints and Followed Contours : The Barkley Marathons
Curt Cloninger
A Mountain as Multiverse : Circumnavigating the realities and meta-realities of a Kailas pilgrim
Simon Piasecki
Searching for the Perfect Welsh Mountain : A performance of tactical absurdity
Dave Ball
Into the Mountain [artist’s pages]
Simon Kenyon
Black Rock : Routes through scenographic translation, from mountain climbing to performance
David Shearing
Peaceful Waters [artists’ pages]
Deborah Norris, Jeremy Ward
Naming (and Claiming) Vertical Territories
Kate Lawrence
word-mntn
Alec Finlay
Performing Mountains
Harriet Fraser, Rob Fraser
Performing Socialism at Altitude : Chinese expeditions to Mount Everest, 1958–1968
Maggie Greene
Healing the Mountain’s Wounds : Reflections on two Chinese site-specific mountain performances
Shi Ke
Articulating Mountains Through Mofussil Aesthetics : A study of operatic theatre tradition in India
Prateek
Landslide from Ben Bulben : Mountain activism and the Irish abortion referendum
Evelyn O’Malley
#NeverLeaveTheDogBehind : How climbers’ dogs perform mountain landscapes
Helen Mort
Looking at Malla / Steaming Earth
Annette Arlander
Picturesque Lost : Martin Conway’s experimental travels into geography
William Bainbridge
Dorothy Wordsworth and her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy : A feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to the creation of walking-performance in mountainous landscapes
Louise Ann Wilson
Figure with Landscape : A scenographer walks
Susannah Henry
