Performing Mountains (Performing Landscapes) 1137556005, 9781137556004

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Performing Mountains Jonathan Pitches

Performing Landscapes

Series Editors Deirdre Heddon Department of Theatre Film & TV Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Sally Mackey The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama London, UK

Performing Landscapes offers a critical study of generic and complex sites for performance, including forests, ruins, rivers, home, fields, islands and mountains. Distinctive to this series is that such landscape figures will be located both on and off the theatrical stage, approached as both material and representational grounds for performance-led analyses. With its unique focus on particular and singular sites, Performing Landscapes will develop in novel ways the debates concerning performance’s multiple relations to environment, ecology and global concerns. Editorial Board Professor Stephen Bottoms (University of Manchester) Professor Una Chaudhuri (New York University) Dr. Wallace Heim (independent scholar) Professor Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow) Professor Theresa J. May (University of Oregon) Dr. Paul Rae (University of Melbourne) Professor Joanne Tomkins (University of Queensland)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14557

Jonathan Pitches

Performing Mountains

Jonathan Pitches School of Performance and Cultural Industries University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Performing Landscapes ISBN 978-1-137-55600-4 ISBN 978-1-137-55601-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Alberto Perer/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Series Editors’ Preface

The Performing Landscapes series provides an international platform for the first comprehensive critical study of generic but complex sites of performance landscapes, located on and off the theatrical stage and within and beyond the frame of cultural performance practices. Acknowledging and engaging with the nature–culture dynamics always already at play in any concept of and approach to ‘landscape’, authors’ original research and innovative methods explore how landscapes—such as mountains, ruins, gardens, ice, forests and islands—are encountered, represented, contested, materialised and made sense of through and in performance. Studies of singular landscape environments, experienced from near and afar, offer up rigorous historical, cultural and critical discussion and analysis through the dynamic and interdisciplinary lens of performance. In the context of the twenty-first century climate changes the series also directs attention to performance’s diverse contributions to environmental debates.

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Performing Landscapes aims to understand better how specific landscape locations function as sites of and for performance and what performance practice and analyses does to and for our understanding of, and engagement with, landscapes. Professor Deirdre Heddon University of Glasgow Professor Sally Mackey The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London

Preface

The perils of getting lost walking in the mountains need not be overstressed. Disorientation in the mist or simply taking a wrong turn in clear conditions can lead to all sorts of confusion. Imagine (or perhaps recollect) the embarrassment of returning to an unexpected valley with the car in the neighbouring dale; visualise the bewilderment of circling round a mountain top ticking off repeating features with growing uncertainty. Yet flirting with getting lost is the very reason so many people enjoy immersing themselves in mountain environments: to experience a frisson of insecurity, and then to rely on one’s wits with compass and map (or GPS) to overcome the danger. Strangely, in the UK there is vocal resistance to the use of sited and explicit navigational aids being used in the mountains themselves: signs, even life-saving ones, are often frowned upon by many lovers of the outdoors. This is despite national Mountain Rescue services being called out on countless occasions to save stranded hikers: those making the same cardinal errors time and time again. Similar, if less life-changing, questions surround the navigation of mountains in writing. How to balance a sense of discovery with a clear direction? How to offer guidance for mountain initiates whilst avoiding offence for those familiar with the conditions of the English Lake District, Australia’s Great Dividing Range or the South American Andes? To address this craggy question my approach in this book is to blend the certainty of conventional academic discourse with an altogether more experiential register of writing, collected together in what I am calling

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Handrails (the term is explained in Handrail 1). It is no mistake that the main navigational support for the reader comes from these shorter, less formal and deeply personal vignettes. They are my answer to the nagging question I ask myself when mixing with established mountain writers: ‘who are you to write about mountains?’ The handrails have a dual function: to evoke a set of ideas germane to the book’s treatment of Performing Mountains (on site, dramaturgy or ritual, for example); and to narrate my personal story of a dozen years of domestic mountain research conducted in the Lake District, prior to, and during, the writing of this book. The handrails can be read together as a freestanding narrative, telescoping those twelve years into six short punctuation points, or they can be experienced as they have been primarily designed to function: as a gentle jarring, diverting the reader briefly away from ‘big picture’ analysis towards the quotidian and introspective. Both scales of perception, I argue, are needed for this book to function effectively.

Fig. 1 A Map of Performing Mountains (© Jonathan Pitches)

Beyond the guiding handrails, there are three main parts to the book— as visualised in Fig. 1. Part 1 is a critical and theoretical introduction to the meeting points between Performance and Mountain studies. Part 2

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systematically examines three forms of mountain cultural production—rituals, plays and site-related performances across three respective chapters. Part 3 draws on key processes of theatre and performance (training , scenography and acting -spectating ) to examine mountains themselves, again in three separate chapter-cum-case studies. By the end of the study, then, readers will have been exposed to a number of inter-related perspectives on Performing Mountains: a mapping of the key theoretical ideas relevant to the study of mountain performance; a theory-informed analysis of selected examples of mountain cultural performances, practices and texts; and, a performance-informed analysis of selected mountains and mountain ranges. These are threaded together by my account of the highly performative mountain activity of peak bagging, or, in these ‘handrails’, of the Cumbrian variant, ‘Wainwrighting’. A final guide to the sometimes-esoteric languages of mountains and climbing is included as an appendix—a glossary of terms. Leeds, UK

Jonathan Pitches

Acknowledgements

More than any book I have written, this project has benefited from the generosity of others’ contributions. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has made themselves available for interview, read drafts, suggested ideas and shared experience and expertise. Chief amongst these have been my series editors, Sally Mackey and Dee Heddon, whose belief in the project and close reading of the first draft manuscript has been exemplary. I have benefited hugely from the contributions made by David Shearing, both as a friend and sounding board, and as Post Doc on the associated project Performing Mountains, leading its practiceled research component (Black Rock). Countless chapter drafts have been looked at in two research groups (Place and Performance Training ) in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, at the University of Leeds, and I am particularly grateful to Maria Kapsali, Alice O’Grady, Joslin McKinney, Scott Palmer and Nic Salazar-Sutil for their critique and suggestions. Beyond PCI, friends and colleagues Simon Murray, Mark Evans, Campbell Edinborough, Carl Lavery, Richard Gough, Heike Roms, Mike Pearson, Sreenath Nair, Arya Madhavan, Ashley Thorpe, William Bainbridge, Emily Goetsch, Christos Kakalis, Carole Kirk, Adrian Curtin, Claire Hind, Alan McNee, Zac Robinson, Veronica Della Dora, AnjaKarina Nydal and Victoria Hunter have been incredibly helpful on areas of particular specialism. I have had the very great pleasure of working with practitioners throughout this project, who have been remarkably generous with their

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

time in interview and in their sharing of practice research insights: Louise Ann Wilson, Elinor Cook, Kate Lawrence, Simone Kenyon, Claire Carter, David Greig, Gregg Whelan, Angus Farquhar and Leeds Climbing Wall designer, Don Robinson. Poet and climber, Helen Mort, must be singled out for her help with the Handrails and for introducing me to Henry Iddon from the Kendal Mountain Festival. Along with Steve Scott and Paul Scully, Henry has offered immeasurable support to bring me into the climbing and mountaineering community and in suggesting the input of Johnny Dawes. In addition to my deep gratitude to Johnny, thanks are also due to Natalie Berry, Stephen Venables, Doug Scott, Mick Ward, Geoff Cox, Niall Fink and William Patterson. Thanks to all copyright holders for their permission to use the images. The project would not have been possible without the support of an AHRC Fellowship and additional funding from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Ceri, and my two sons, Harri and George, who—as it will become clear—are fundamental to the creation of this book. Burley in Wharfedale August 2019

Jonathan Pitches

Contents

Handrail 1 Beginnings: Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle (W1 and 2/214) References

1 6

Part 1: Mountain Studies Meets Performance General Introduction: Understanding the Critical Landscape of Performing Mountains Introduction Mountain Studies and Performance A Short Detour to Yosemite Cultural Overlay or Interplay References

9 9 13 21 26 30

Part 2: Mountains in Ritual, Drama and Site-Related Performance Handrail 2 Little Rituals: Bowfell (W9/214) References

35 39

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CONTENTS

Part 2.1 Mountain Rituals Introduction What Is a Mountain Ritual? Approach Four Examples of Mountain Rituals Conclusion References

41 41 44 46 48 67 72

Handrail 3 Narrative Paths: The Fairfield Horseshoe (W18-25/214) References

75 80 81 81 82

Part 2.2 Mountain Drama Introduction Approaching Mountain Dramaturgy Journey from the West: Mountain Dramas on Five Lines of Longitude Conclusion References

86 120 125

Handrail 4 Site, Light and a Dark Memory Put to Rest: Barrow and Outerside (W41-42/214) References

129 133

Part 2.3 Mountain Site-Related Performance Introduction Rationale Wales and Mountain Site-Related Performance TDR and the Persepolis Arts Festival Site-Related Performance from Wales: Three Case Studies from Snowdonia Conclusion References

135 135 137 139 142 146 168 174

CONTENTS

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Part 3: Performing Mountains Handrail 5 Stepping Up, Training and a New Urgency: Skiddaw and Its Neighbours (W135-140/214) References

181 186

Part 3.1 Mountains in Microcosm: The Artistry of Training in the Studio and on the Wall Introduction Mountains in Performer Training Training in Mountain Contexts ( P’ansori and the Mountain Project) Training with Mountain Forms ( Jingju Training) Training with Mountain Forms (Jacques Lecoq) The Artistry of the Training Wall Landscape Translation Movement Design Embodied Knowledge Transmission Conclusion References

190 194 196 198 199 202 204 206 211

Part 3.2 Skywalk Scenography: Stage-Managing Fear and Delight in Mountain Environments Introduction Skywalks and TripAdvisor When Is a Skywalk Not a Skywalk? A Model of Mountain Design and Exposure Skywalk Scenography The Event-Space of Tianmen Mountain Skywalk Conclusion References

215 215 217 219 222 224 226 231 235

Part 3.3 From Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn: Deep and Dark Play in the Alps Introduction Defining and Reassessing Deep and Dark Play Mont Blanc The Eiger

237 237 240 243 246

187 187 189

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The Matterhorn Conclusion References

249 253 257

Performing Mountains: General Conclusion References

261 269

Handrail 6 Endings: Pillar (W214) References

271 276

Glossary (or Handrail 7) References

277 280

References

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Index

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List of Figures

Handrail 1 Beginnings: Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle (W1 and 2/214) Fig. 1

View from Easy Gully down onto Stickle Tarn, November 2016

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General Introduction: Understanding the Critical Landscape of Performing Mountains Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

The late Tancrède Melet, of the Flying Frenchies troupe performing in Norway Mountain Studies disciplines The Loughshinny Folds in Ireland formed in the Variscan Orogeny Half Dome in Yosemite National Park

10 14 21 22

Handrail 2 Little Rituals: Bowfell (W9/214) Fig. 1

Panoramic view from the summit of Bowfell, January 2017

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Part 2.1 Mountain Rituals Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Cairn building on Neist Head, Isle of Skye, Scotland The dedication of the Great Gable memorial plaque by Rev. J. H. Smith, 8 June 1924

48 54

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Inca figure found on Llullaillaco, Argentina Yamabushi priests survey the landscape from the mountainside

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Handrail 3 Narrative Paths: The Fairfield Horseshoe (W18-25/214) Fig. 1

Fairfield Horseshoe trophy, Rydal Vale 2008

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Part 2.2 Mountain Drama Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Dramatic lines of longitude: through Peru, Scotland and England, Norway, Pakistan, and Tibet, Japan and Australia 85 The ‘petrified trolls’ of Trollvegen 100 Ravana (below) shaking Mount Kailash, with Shiva and Parvati above, from Ellora, cave 29 109

Handrail 4 Site, Light and a Dark Memory Put to Rest: Barrow and Outerside (W41-42/214) Fig. 1

Lakeland Light Festival, May 2017

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Part 2.3 Mountain Site-Related Performance Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

5 6 7 8

The Grand staircase at Persepolis Working portfolio for The Gathering/ Yr Helfa Louise Ann Wilson’s The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, ‘Tramway Incline’ installation, Clogwyn, Hafod y Llan Farm, Snowdon, Wales The herd of Hafod-y-Llan is gathered (research and development, Winter 2012) Moving Rocks, 2015 Clogwyn Du’r Arddu site visit, March 2017 Indian Face, from Black Rock White Peak (Brilliance) from Black Rock

144 149 151 154 158 163 165 166

Handrail 5 Stepping Up, Training and a New Urgency: Skiddaw and Its Neighbours (W135-140/214) Fig. 1

New tools of preparation: a stair climber

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Part 3.1 Mountains in Microcosm: The Artistry of Training in the Studio and on the Wall Fig. 1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2 3 4 5

Shanbang (mountain arms). Examinations at the Indigenous Theatre College in Shanghai, June 2011 Simone Kenyon, Into the Mountain (2017) Details of stones from the original Leeds Climbing Wall The positioning of stones for the Balance Move Maquette of a climbing-wall project, designed by Don Robinson

195 200 201 203 208

Part 3.2 Skywalk Scenography: Stage-Managing Fear and Delight in Mountain Environments Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1 2 3 4 5

Reinhold Messner mountain museum, dolomites Jasper’s skywalk in the Canadian rockies Modelling design and exposure in mountain skywalks Heaven’s gate, Tianmen mountain Tianmen glass skywalk, the walk of faith

216 218 223 226 229

Part 3.3 From Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn: Deep and Dark Play in the Alps Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Mont Blanc: Albert Smith’s party reaching the cabin on the Grands Mulets The Matterhorn

245 252

Handrail 6 Endings: Pillar (W214) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The fence up Pillar The summit cairn on Pillar

274 276

Handrail 1 Beginnings: Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle (W1 and 2/214)

It was never our intention to climb a mountain that day, let alone two. Mid-level water (Easedale and Alcock tarns, for instance) had always offered enough excitement and three hours on foot was an unspoken upper limit. Stickle Tarn, located at the base of Pavey Ark in the English Lake District, was a natural turning point for us. Time for lunch, some mandatory toe-dipping and a gentle return to the valley; no need to go on further. The tarn’s shiny expanse of water reveals itself at the top of the Stickle Ghyll ravine, along with the imposing wall of rock that is the Ark. It ‘bursts upon the eye with dramatic effect’ (Wainwright, 2016, Pavey Ark: 2),1 once the dam constructed on the brim of the corrie is reached. On a hot summer’s day it is a place to rest and to contemplate the return leg. Clutches of hikers all around are taking a breather, peeling off layers, shouldering rucksacks onto the ground and searching their insides for pre-packed delicacies. Other children are leapfrogging the rocks on the shore, forging new routes to the collection of islets at the mouth of the water. We will obviously do the same, following the custom and practice of resting, then returning, at the tarn. Before we get too settled, though, it seems natural to look a little deeper into this formidable landscape—just out of curiosity—to appreciate the scale and drama of the rock face and to track the

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_1

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movements of those who have chosen not to rest. Where are they going? To the untrained map reader, there are three paths leading away from the tarn and up to the summit of Pavey Ark: one hooks up steeply to the East; one hugs the tarn on the left-hand side and seems to peter out halfway up the vertical face of the Ark; the third snakes around and behind the daunting grey barricade of the crag, and is marked tautologically, ‘Path’; below are the words ‘Easy Gully’. With such a benign and accommodating pair of indicators, route three looks to be the obvious choice; if we were going to go on any further, that is. The photo record of that day (16 August 2006) does little to chronicle the vital decision we made at that junction. Images taken by a passer-by of our group by the shore are followed immediately by shots of the same tarn, now tiny, framed through the cracks of Pavey Ark’s summit; alongside is an image of one of us touching its stony folds, the Great Langdale valley and the lake of Windermere stretching out in the distance. From tarn to top in seven jpegs. But the abruptness of the picture archive disguises the lasting implications of the decision made not to turn back at this tarn. It was an unknown crux point beyond which my relationship with mountains would never be the same. Climbing Pavey Ark, following the crowds up Easy Gully, and then onto Harrison Stickle, a second summit southwest of the first, committed me and the rest of my group to thousands of miles of walking and over a hundred thousand feet of ascent. It led to day trips, week-long jollies and fourteen-day marathons of holiday hill climbing. It steered me to sign up for map reading and wild camping courses, to purchase clothing, guide books, flasks, cameras, software, maps and landscape paintings, good and bad. It resulted in well over a decade of travelling into and around the many different parts of the English Lake District, logging the details of each walk completed. Declaring ‘let’s go on’ and navigating to the summit of Pavey Ark was the ultimate in performative utterances (Austin, 1962, pp.6–7).2 At the time there were several unknowns, one or two of them quite fundamental. We had in fact completed our first two ‘Wainwrights’ that day but had no knowledge of the guidebook writer

HANDRAIL 1

BEGINNINGS: PAVEY ARK …

and visual artist, Alfred Wainwright, who had constructed a subjective wish list of peaks in the 1950s and sixties, across seven very well-known Walking Guides. The practice of ‘Wainwright bagging’ or simply ‘Wainwrighting’ was still to be discovered. We were ignorant of the many thousands of people who had spent months and years climbing or trekking up all 214 of these fells and of the many websites established simply to chronicle and record progress towards this goal.3 Perhaps happily, we weren’t able to contemplate the challenge of climbing all of these fells as a walking collective, naïve to the additional commitment of ascending each of the peaks in a group of four, touching each of the summit cairns in harmony. We could never have appreciated how we would change as individuals or as a quartet over the years, or what traces might be left of that change in our own embodied landscapes, altogether more fragile and transitory than the rocks around us. On a more mundane level, we were bereft of map reading skills and liable to make countless misjudgements. Later we discovered that our ascent route was not up Easy Gully on that day, but via North Rake, a track we found ourselves on by following others who, we assumed, knew where they were going. Ten years later, re-walking the route to Pavey Ark as part of my research for this book, I did ascend using Easy Gully (a steep and almost impassable ravine) and was glad I hadn’t found it in 2006, taking the OS name at face value. That walk, performed in winter not summer and enjoyed alone, revealed to me another side of the mountain. Stickle Tarn was a solitary spot, one from which to move on fast, without delay; Pavey Ark no fit place for sauntering with sandwiches (Fig. 1). There are, in short, elements of mountains that cannot be captured, justified or defined in objective and quantitative terms. As travel writer Simon Ingram has urged, ‘Mountains were never meant to be specific; they’re chaotic and all about feeling and aesthetics’ (Ingram, 2015, p.12). This chaos is not just a function of one’s own ignorance or lack of experience but a fundamental characteristic of the environment. To get closer to the unstable relationship Ingram suggests—between aesthetics, feelings and mountainscapes—different ways of knowing are necessary.

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Fig. 1 View from Easy Gully down onto Stickle Tarn, November 2016 (Photo Jonathan Pitches)

The anthropologist Tim Ingold has spent years researching and defining some of these alternative models of thinking and knowing, trying to rebalance ‘the bias of head over heels’, as he sees it (Ingold, 2011, p.45). In Being Alive his purpose is to set an agenda for future, more grounded research, which sets walking intelligence in dialogue with other more conventional processes and articulations of cognition. Walking, he states is a form of ‘circumambulatory knowing’ (2011, p.46), troubling a Cartesian divide by focusing expressly on movement, transport and passage as forms of thinking. The shorter pieces of writing which punctuate this book are an attempt to respond to that call for more grounded research as well as laying bare my positionality in creative terms. They are written in a different voice to the rest of the materials and seek to capture something more instinctive, experiential and personal about mountains and our relationship to them. It is hoped, however, that they constitute more than simple autobiography, sketching instead an alternative narrative of performing landscapes and mountains by offering a ‘handrail’ (as orienteers term it): a linear aid such as a river, wall or fence, which in poor visibility can help you relocate (Tippett, 2001, p.113).

HANDRAIL 1

BEGINNINGS: PAVEY ARK …

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The function of handrails according to mountain leader, Andy Luke, is that, when disorientated, ‘you can walk along, be certain of your location, and know that they are taking you towards your attack point or target’.4 That ‘target’ in this book is a new understanding of the meeting points between mountain studies and performance. This will involve close scrutiny of mountains as sites for ritual and performance, of mountains as key players in dramatic literature, and as ‘performers’ themselves. Trying to unpick the ‘dramatic effect’ (Wainwright, 2016, Pavey Ark: 2) of Stickle Tarn’s location in the amphitheatre of Pavey Ark, is as important an ambition as the more conventional analysis of dramatic writing; topographical drama must, I argue, take its place alongside the written form. In navigating towards this target, then, there are several offpiste excursions (Handrails 1–6), which collectively complement and amplify the larger sections of the book from a circumambulatory perspective. In addition to this piece, Beginnings, they are: Little Rituals; Narrative Paths; Site and Light; Stepping up; and Endings, followed by a functional glossary. Each of these handrails is explored by grounding them in one or more of the Lake District peaks prized by Wainwright (identified here as W1–W214).5 Each is informed by twelve-years attempting to climb all 214 of them, and each has been triggered by our impromptu sortie up North Rake. Or was it Easy Gully?

Notes 1. Wainwright’s books do not have concurrent page numbers. Each section dedicated to one fell has discrete page numbers, thus the need to cite the peak, e.g. Pavey Ark, as well as the page reference. 2. In ‘How to do things with words’, J. L. Austin introduces the term thus: ‘The name is derived, of course, from “perform”, the usual verb with the noun “action”: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action - it is not normally thought of as just saying something’ (Austin, 1962, pp.6–7). 3. My preferred site is hill-bagging.co.uk. With thanks to Simon Edwardes as the webmaster for this free, online database of British and Irish mountains.

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4. http://www.mountainsafety.co.uk/Nav-Handrails.aspx. The military vernacular is notable here, an early indication in this book of the historic relationship between mountains, the army and warfare more generally (cf. Matloff 2017). Thanks to Sally Mackey and Dee Heddon for seeding this motif in my thinking. 5. This is following the classification codes of the Database of British and Irish Hills: http://www.hills-database.co.uk/database_notes.html#defs.

References Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingram, S. (2015) Between the Sunset and the Sea. London: William Collins. Matloff, J. (2017) The War Is in the Mountains: Violence in the World’s High Places. London: Duckworth. Tippett, J. (2001) Navigation for Walkers. Leicester: Cordee. Wainwright, A. (2016) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (Walkers Edition): The Central Fells. Book Three. London: Frances Lincoln.

Part 1: Mountain Studies Meets Performance

Part 1 offers a general introduction to the theoretical territory surrounding Performing Mountains. In it, I lay out the disciplinary framework of Mountain Studies using published specialisms identified in the global network of the Mountain Research Initiative. I draw on the relatively new sub-discipline of cultural geomorphology to illustrate the shaping hand of culture in relation to landscapes before arguing that cultural expression in the form of artistic production is unaccountably under-researched. The fertility of art dedicated to mountains—in film, literature, fine art, dance and photography—is briefly surveyed alongside the international growth in mountain festivals as one outlet for such work. Thus, Mountain Studies’ constituent disciplines are placed alongside examples of Mountain Arts in order to consider more specifically the live arts of theatre and performance as significant, and under-appreciated, contributors to both fields. A short history of climbing in Yosemite is offered as an exemplar of the interdisciplinary sensibility needed to examine performance in mountains, illustrating the extent to which the activity of climbing in such spectacular and epic environments tends to manifest itself, or splinter into, artistic expression of some kind or another. That said, a case for the importance of the small scale, the quotidian and the mundane is also made in this Part and an acknowledgement that in order to cover such differences in scale, a particular kind of liminality is needed—the position of the ‘aspirant mountaineer’.

General Introduction: Understanding the Critical Landscape of Performing Mountains

Introduction A skydiving clown plummets from a peak in Norway; two speed-climbers race up an artificial rock face in tight spotlights in Tokyo; a brass band gathers in Snowdonia at the top of a mountain valley; a Victorian showman recounts his ascent of Mont Blanc using dioramas; on an unnamed mountain ridge a boy is thrown off too sick to continue, the same boy is led down from the peak in safety; Chinese skywalkers distribute their terror-stricken selfies; headtorch lights streak a trio of peaks in the English Lake District and a Keralan traditional performer lifts a mountain onto his chest.1 The field of performing mountains is as stylistically diverse as it is ubiquitous, as long-lived as it is contemporary (Fig. 1). This book seeks to capture, organise and understand this diversity, treating mountains as a performing landscape. It lays out the critical territory necessary for such an understanding before exploring examples from across the world. It reveals mountains as inspiring sources for theatrical creativity and as fertile territory for theatrical analysis. Just as mountain environments are places of manifest richness, intensifying natural resources and serving as magnets for minerals and precious metals, so too are the artistic forms which emerge from them. Mountains are places ‘with great cultural importance’ (Price, 2015a, p.10) Director of the Centre for Mountain Studies in Perth, Martin Price

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Fig. 1 The late Tancrède Melet, of the Flying Frenchies troupe performing in Norway (Photo courtesy of Sebastien Montaz-Rosset. https://www.reelhouse. org/seb.montaz/back-to-the-fjords/_/images/546b33e21ac5100a000000d8)

suggests, identifying the many religions and cultural traditions which respect mountains as sacred and undefilable. Whilst cultural diversity echoes biodiversity in mountain contexts (Price, 2015a, p.74), research in this sub-sector of Mountain Studies has focused mainly on mountain communities’ cultural expression through spoken language, folk tradition or religion and curiously not on the art produced by, for or about those communities. This is all the more inexplicable given the cultural turn in geography (Horton and Kraftl, 2014, pp.13–14) and more recently, cultural geomorphology—the latter broadly defined as ‘cultural reactions to and perceptions of landscape […] especially in terms of improving environmental management’ (Goudie and Viles, 2010, p.99). Whilst there is clear acknowledgement by cultural geomorphologists that this environmental management needs to be cognizant of and receptive to ‘the cultural dimension’ (Goudie and Viles, 2010, p.100), that dimension is currently starved of any artistic element, an oversight this book attempts to address, focusing on the art of performance specifically. The term cultural geomorphology was first coined in a landmark essay in 2006, by geographer Ken Gregory. He defines culture as: ‘the pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour embracing language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques and works of art’ (Gregory, 2006, p.186). His main focus in this essay is on the phenomenon of river flow and his point is that human intervention into

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landscapes is filtered, or in his terms overlaid, by cultural specificities (Gregory, 2006, p.186). In order to get to those specifics, he poses a number of enlightening questions and prompts: Are rivers revered? Associated with religion, mythology, customs, beliefs? How are rivers portrayed in literature, visual arts, the media? [What is the] Language of Rivers [?]. (Gregory, 2006, p.186)

I argue in this book that the ‘study of the Earth’s surface and the [cultural] processes that shape it’ (Goudie and Viles, 2010, p.4) is just as important for research into mountains as it is for rivers. Mountains are ‘sentinels of change’, according to a recent strategic research report (Braun, 2016). They offer us a window on to how the world is transforming as it warms up. Even though they cross borders (sometimes defining them), and are of incomprehensible size and stature,2 mountains are nevertheless ‘tightly linked to their surrounding regions’ (Braun, 2016, p.11). Whilst they might appear to be impervious to human agency and intervention they are, in fact, constantly being shaped by human hands, sometimes benignly and sometimes with permanent malignance. Culture and specifically the production of cultural objects—‘tools, techniques and works of art’ (Gregory, 2006, p.186)—play an integral part in this process. If it is, as geographers Goudie and Viles’s maintain, ‘crucial’ (Goudie and Viles, 2010, p.100) to understand the role culture plays in the bigger picture of environmental impact and climate change, it follows that the various expressions of a culture—its works of art—need also to be understood in this wider ecology of thinking and practice. Generating a deeper and more coherent understanding of the Mountain Arts is a key part of this book’s agenda, concentrating on the disciplines of theatre and performance, broadly defined. Drawing on the live act of performance and on the many ways critics have sought to theorise it, offers an important new lexicon to unravel prominent aspects of mountain culture and activity, those which are inherently experiential, scenographic and dramaturgical. In Performing Mountains, I demonstrate how the languages of performance can help articulate the visceral, visual and vertiginous experiences of mountains so often noted by landscape commentators in rather empty metaphorical terms. What does naming a mountain like Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro a ‘dramatic landform’ (Goudie and Viles, 2010, p.100), actually mean, for

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example? How is drama expressed through the landscape? On what terms can the North Face of the Eiger, be described as a ‘natural stage’ (Harrer, 2005, p.24)? And how might it be understood more precisely as a place both for acting and spectatorship? In taking this approach, I am rooting mountain cultural analysis in a discipline that is curiously unmined in Mountain Studies. I argue that performance-based analysis, including practice research, offers a new perspective to complement the rich layers of literature, music, film, fine art and media, which have already drawn on mountains to enrich and challenge audiences’ thinking and appreciation. Indeed, performance analysis and practice demonstrably extend and enhance those existing layers, whilst providing distinct opportunities for inventiveness, insight and criticality. Mountain diversity, then, is not just a matter of environmental study and concern. Understanding how mountains have been exploited as sites for artistic expression may be seen as one component in the fight to protect and conserve the natural world and to understand better the dynamics of what is commonly referred to as the anthropocene, after Paul Crutzen—the ‘human dominated, geological epoch’ (Crutzen, 2002, p.23). Whilst the anthropocene is defined by the beginning of the industrial revolution and the rise in carbon levels that followed the invention of the steam engine, it would be a mistake to divorce such global and historic influences from the individual activities that drive such developments; as Gregory suggests above, these activities include the work of writers, artists and media producers. Albert Smith, the Victorian showman who created ‘Mont Blanc Mania’ (McNee, 2015) with his spectacular series of lectures between 1852 and 1858, could not have envisaged the impact his shows would have on footfall in the Alps and in Chamonix specifically. In just three years there was an eightfold increase in attempts on Mont Blanc after Smith’s ascent in 1851, and this was but a fraction of those drawn to the area without aspirations to risk their lives on the highest mountain in Europe, after the Caucasus peaks. As Alan McNee points out, this rise in visits to the region was part of a complex ecology of factors, including developments in the travel infrastructure, the birth of package tourism under Thomas Cook, the historic ‘cult of the sublime and the influence of Romantic literature’ and the growing prosperity of the lower middle classes (McNee, 2015, p.167). With an estimated 800,000 people seeing

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his show in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, Smith’s contribution to this change in visitor behaviour is unmistakable.3 Performance matters in the ecology of mountains. The example of Smith’s impact on the ecosystem of the Alps, discussed more fully in Part 3.3, is a good indicator of the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the field of Mountain Studies: art history, economics, geopolitics, leisure and tourism and the conventions of Victorian theatre are all at play here. With this complexity come obvious challenges. What disciplines are included in the relatively nascent field of Mountain Studies? Are cultural and performance studies part of this field or do they merely intersect with it? What are the layers of theoretical thinking that underpin Mountain Studies and how are they best organised? In short, what are the meeting points between Mountain Studies and Performance?

Mountain Studies and Performance The formal study of mountains began in the early nineteenth century, led by figures such as Alexander von Humboldt and Albrecht Penk (Smethurst, 2000). This early work established a trend of ecological and geological research which according to David Smethurst has dominated the methodological landscape right up to the twenty-first century (2000). Whilst there had been some studies focused on the dynamic relationship between humans and mountains, in his words: ‘the vast majority of mountain studies rely on modeling and systems theory, which treat mountains and the people living there as static elements in what amounts to a scientific equation’ (Smethurst, 2000, p.37). The burgeoning of Mountain Studies programmes and research centres since 2000 has in part addressed Smethurst’s concern of disciplinary and methodological bias and his call for a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of mountains. These are located all over the world and in the midst of diverse mountain environments: University of Alberta in Canada, The University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, the Appalachian Institute for Mountain Studies in the US, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal and the international network, the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), run from Bern in Switzerland. The interdisciplinary foci of these centres and the research programmes which they promote offer a contemporary snapshot of the

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global landscape of Mountain Studies and reveal the value placed on culture within it. Using the MRI international database of expertise identifiers as a key reference point,4 the following division of disciplinary strata can be constructed (Fig. 2). My arrangement here, from broad base to narrow summit, reflects the underlying scientific mission of Mountain Studies and the overwhelming emphasis for current mountain research on mountain sustainability, on the impact of climate change on mountain peoples and on the biodiversity of mountain regions.5 Mountain ranges are centres of intense activity for glaciers, the sources of enormous river flows and the producers of global weather patterns and these are all undergoing rapid change as the planet warms. The gathering and interpreting of data, for instance on the snow cap shrinking on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania or on the receding Morteratsch glacier in the Swiss Alps6 is of demonstrable and pressing urgency. With its foundation in geology this model echoes Smethurst’s

History and Culture Sport, Leisure and Tourism Studies

Technology Economy, Politics, Law and Resource use Sociology and anthropology

Health

Ecology, biodiversity and sustainability studies Physical geography and other earth sciences: hydrology and glaciology, climatology Geology including orogeny or mountain formation

Fig. 2

Mountain Studies disciplines

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assessment of Mountain Studies’ disciplinary origins (and biases) suggesting that the science of mountain formation—or orogeny—is the bedrock of mountain research. As we ascend, though, we move into the more dynamic territory he considered lacking in mountain research prior to 2000: human health, behaviour, intervention and technology-use become more significant with sport and leisure and, finally, historical and cultural representation topping the peak. In short, this modelling moves from the physical geography of mountain processes to the human geography and anthropology of mountain behaviour, and finally, via the use and development of technology, to the remediation of mountains through cultural production. It is this, rather isolated, summit of activity—the uppermost layer of this peak, where perhaps we might find a symbolic cairn—which concerns me in this book. The layers below, however, are never far from the discussion and undergird the examples of mountain performance in this book in multiple ways. I say ‘isolated’ as the precarious place of cultural practices—balanced gingerly at the top—is not a misleading representation. Though it is part of the guiding principles of the global network MRI, for instance, to recognise that ‘Mountain researchers are, like the mountains themselves, scientifically, culturally and generationally diverse’ and to acknowledge ‘the importance of different kinds of knowledge gained through different modes of experience’,7 the extent to which artistic knowledge and cultural production forms part of that thinking is limited. Just 4% of over 2500 researchers listed in the MRI identify ‘Art/Folklore/Symbols and Language’ as an interest or specialism and the vast majority of these are from social science and science backgrounds.8 Alberta University is another world-leading mountain research centre and, in 2017, led the field in popularising Mountain Studies via its interdisciplinary online course (or MOOC), Mountains 101, bringing together tens of thousands of students from all over the world. But even this enlightened approach found only one week in twelve to examine the cultural manifestations of what was called ‘Mountain Imagination’, that is mountains’, ‘reception in oral traditions, art, literature, architecture, and other cultural forms’.9 Hard science is undoubtedly the loudest voice in Mountain Studies despite the cultural turn having spread across the social sciences and in the face of recent calls (in 2018) by Mountain Research and Development for culture-based assessments of mountain impacts.10 This book is designed to do two related things in terms of this debate—to help

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substantiate what is only at present a tentative cultural turn in Mountain Studies and to construct the first comprehensive view of theatre and performance-based mountain culture. The relative precarity of culture in its many manifestations in Mountain Studies is also at odds with its rise in popularity in other areas and with the extraordinarily varied gallery of Mountain Arts which complement this study’s focus on performance. The various mediations of mountains in fine art, literature, poetry, music, film and photography are now big business. The film Everest (2015) took $26.5 M in 36 countries in its first weekend, despite it being a gruesome examination of a multiple tragedy and Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void (first published in 1988), also a highly successful film, is now a GCSE set text for 16-year olds studying English Literature in the UK, as well as an adapted playscript by Edinburgh-based playwright David Grieg.11 The richness of mountain film, literature and creative writing is celebrated each year across the networks of mountain festivals (within the UK and Ireland: Dundee, Kendal, Arran, Harris, Keswick, Fort William, Llanberis, Killarney) and internationally (Banff, Canada; Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France; Trento, Italy; Changbai, China; Ulju, Korea; Moscow, Russia; Kathmandu, Nepal; Wanaka, New Zealand) and in highly competitive awards ceremonies such as the Boardman-Tasker Literature award, now part of the Kendal Mountain Festival.12 Music festivals also gravitate towards mountain environments with annual events held all over the world: in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia; in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, USA; in the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria; in the Cambrian mountains in Wales and in the foothills of the Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh, North-Eastern India. Many of these contemporary festivals host a wide range of music but also include genres inspired by the mountains themselves, including Bluegrass, for example, with its roots in the culture of the Appalachian mountains (Rosenberg, 2005). Fine Art dedicated to mountains has a very long history and its more recent extension into Environmental or Land Art in the last forty years, has enjoyed similar growth led by artists such as Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Drury in the UK and Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson and James Turrell in the US, each in their own way exploring directly the environment of hills and mountains in selected works.13 Photography competitions promoted by the many popular and specialist hiking and climbing magazines, bring the amateur photographer into the realm of mountain artistry joining evermore ambitious photo shoots staged in mountains by

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professionals: Swiss, Robert Bösch, for example, in the Alps, most notably on the 150th anniversary of Edward Whymper’s first ascent of the Matterhorn14 ; or Carmen Norman, with her iconic image of the illumination of the spine of Catbells in the English Lake District, staged to raise funds for Nepalese earthquake victims.15 The inspiration mountains provide for artists of all media is unmistakable but as far as the mountain festival circuit is concerned, at least, there is a hierarchy at work in the Mountain Arts, which is reflected most clearly in their approach to programming. Whilst there is evidence that things are changing, in for instance the increasingly experimental arts programme of the Kendal Mountain Festival,16 culture that is recorded and easily shared is nevertheless more likely to appear and reappear in multiple outlets. It is a moot point whether that honour is bestowed on the many forms of mountain writing which appear in these events or on the evermore ubiquitous celebrations of film dedicated to wild and high places.17 At the other end of the scale, where transience defines the artform and transportability is complex, the live and performing arts are naturally at home. Within that category, as a paradigm of ephemerality, we might place site-specific performance—work which can only be experienced within the context of a particular and carefully researched site. Louise Ann Wilson’s work offers one example, whose immediacy and specificity has been highly valued by critics, compared to more site-generic and transferrable work. Wilson provides a benchmark of quality in this form, according to the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, as her work is ‘genuinely rooted in its location […] turning the landscape and the topography into real players’.18 The capacity for performance to translate topography into a ‘real player’ and the means by which such a feat may or may not be achieved are key themes of this book and are debated specifically in Parts 2.2 and 2.3. Located in an interestingly liminal place between the stable and the ephemeral is the practice of land or environmental art, which often plays with its own instability, infusing fixed and solid materials such as rock and wood with a spirit of impermanence, at the beck and call of environmental conditions. Goldsworthy’s experiments in Cumbria, England, in the 1970s and 1980s are an obvious historic example19 but the thrill and threat of impermanence is continued in recent times in works such as ‘Snow Drawing at Rabbit’s Ears Pass’ (2012) by Sonja Hinrichsen in the Colorado mountains.20 Hinrichsen creates enormous canvases in the landscape using the imprint of snowshoes, only to see her art covered in

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minutes when fresh snow falls. More conventional in medium (as oil canvases and photographs) but similarly focused on change in high places are the artworks of American artist Diane Burko, who, working closely with glaciologists, documents the rapidity of glacier recession.21 Dance has made a very strong contribution to the artistic interpretation of rural environments, including mountain landscapes.22 This work stretches from specific uses of aerial practice in forms of ‘vertical dance’ performance23 to landscape research through movement. In addition to her own work, dance practitioner Kate Lawrence, identifies an international network of companies using vertical dance including Compagnie Retouramont, Il Posto and Gravity and Levity (Lawrence, 2010). Although not all of this practice uses walls of rock as a studio floor, rock climbing and vertical dance share technologies and techniques, in the ropes and harnesses used and, more philosophically, in what Lawrence calls ‘the act of going over the edge [which] might at once signify danger, a spatial disturbance, technical expertise and a social connection’ (Lawrence, 2010, p.51). From the perspective of landscape research, movement specialist and teacher Sandra Reeve has developed a practice of ‘ecological movement’, demanding a heightened sense of environmental awareness and context through her workshops in a variety of settings. These include mountainous areas such as the Bricklieve mountains in County Sligo, the location of several Neolithic burial sites.24 Whilst sharply different in approach both forms of movement practice are designed to elicit new understandings of their sites and ultimately to induct spectators and participants into those new knowledges, a theme which is taken up in Part 2.3. As scholar-choreographer Victoria Hunter puts it, work like this ‘explores, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments’ (Hunter, 2015, p.2). It is perhaps a truism but nevertheless still necessary to state that the Mountain Arts I have summarised above, discussed along disciplinary boundaries such as Dance, Fine Art, Photography and Music, are by no means constrained or defined by these disciplines. With its emphasis on the ‘eventness’, or heightened sense of occasion, brought about by natural processes, Goldsworthy and Hinrichsen’s art is inherently performative and is as much aligned with the live and performing arts as it is with Fine Art practices. The use of music, New Media (and film) is often integrated

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with live performance and this is as true of work based on or in mountains: Maria Fusco’s Master Rock (2015) set in a power station in the bowels of Ben Cruachan in Scotland is one example—a fusion of site-specific performance, live radio broadcast, documentary and art book. The works which follow, in Parts 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 are often hybrid in form as well— from Curious Directive’s cryogenics montage, Your Last Breath, to the multimedia immersive technology of David Shearing’s Black Rock. But I have nevertheless organised them into larger categories, rough labels, for clarity’s sake—Mountain Rituals, Dramas and Site-Related Performance. These categories facilitate a cross-cultural and pan-historical discussion and support my proposal that there are some important shared territories within them—the defining characteristics of a mountain ritual, for instance, and the emergence of an identifiable mountain dramaturgy. More complex is the framing of Mountain Studies implied in my model above, one which moves from its basis in the natural sciences, through the social sciences and ‘up’ to the Arts. The nature–culture or science–art axes upon which this model of disciplinary layering is based are clearly constructs, ones which according to Michael Hulme have been ‘engrained […] in much Western thought’ despite being extensively challenged in recent decades (Hulme, 2015, p.176). For Hulme, discussing the idea of climate, there are ‘deep material and symbolic interactions’ which make the physical world and the imaginative world inseparable (Hulme, 2015, p.175). Movements in Environmental Humanities, Evolutionary Psychology (Nettle, 2009), and in Cultural Transmission (Schönpflug, 2009) have helped collapse the nature–culture binary as has the aforementioned cultural turn in social sciences more generally (Nayak and Jeffrey, 2011). This book furthers that questioning of boundaries, seeking to explore the particular cultural manifestation of theatre and performance as a subset of, and in dialogue with, other Mountain Arts. Though the space for its consideration is limited at the moment, I nevertheless locate this research into artistic mountain culture in the domain of Mountain Studies, even though the main readership is likely to be from performance and Performance Studies. This is not to rebuff the natural friends of this project but instead to challenge Mountain Studies’ aspirational interdisciplinarity, and to encourage its researchers to go beyond finding solely scientific solutions for our pressing environmental concerns. As artist and activist David Buckland has observed in simple terms:

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The problem with climate change is that it covers everything, so if you just look at it from the point of view of science, then you’re missing most of the problem. Essentially, it’s a cultural problem, a sociological problem and an economic problem.25

Like Buckland, I argue here that culture plays a significant part in our understanding of the natural world. I maintain that redirecting attention towards mountain-inspired examples of performance is not an indulgent digression born of a sense of environmental powerlessness. Instead, it offers an important, if underutilised, measure of the ways in which humankind has made sense of mountains and how mountains have shaped that sense-making. This interplay is very much part of a mountain cultural sensibility in which mountains, as cultural geographer Veronica Della Dora puts it are the very ‘meeting points of extremes’ (Della Dora, 2016, p.74). They are best understood not by separating out but rubbing together nature and culture, life and death, height and depth, attraction and repulsion or, in John Ruskin’s famous terms, ‘Gloom and Glory’ (Ruskin, 1856, pp.317, 344).26 This spirit of interplay or productive friction returns us to the geological model of disciplines I constructed above. Whilst layers of sedimentary rock may lay themselves down over millions of years, they very rarely remain untouched by other geological processes—the ‘great force’ of the Earth’s lithosphere which leads to folding, fracturing and faulting, for instance (Fig. 3). Indeed the most significant of all rock deformation, its ‘most dramatic effect’ (Chernicoff and Fox, 2003, p.194) is orogenesis, or mountain building. Some of the most iconic mountain ranges in the world—the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Alps and the Urals—were formed when continental plates collided, forcing the rock upwards in a process called ‘foldand-thrust’ (Chernicoff and Fox, 2003, p.188). This leads to counterintuitive displacements of material—marine fossils being found at the summit of Everest, for instance—and to distinct and perceptible changes in rock formation as one ascends or descends a peak (Turnbull, 2009, pp.11–12). Whilst it may be helpful, then, to imagine a disciplinary mountain made up of neat layers, in practice, as in the geological record, there is much dynamism, crossover and interaction between disciplines in Mountain Studies. Indeed, work in this field provides a paradigm example of the need for agile interdisciplinary thinking and sensitivity as Martin Price

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Fig. 3 The Loughshinny Folds in Ireland formed in the Variscan Orogeny (Photo by Siim Sepp. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/ 38/Loughshinny_folds.jpg)

has observed. ‘Mountains [are] very complex and dynamic systems which defy simple description’, he reasons. They produce, ‘diverse conflicts and opportunities, which the many stakeholders must work together to address’ (Price, 2015b, p.7). As I showed with the example of Albert Smith above, where leisure and tourism studies, art and theatre history, cultural politics and economics all help to explain the impact of his work on the Alps, the study of performance in relation to mountains is impossible without mobilising a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Performing Mountains is replete with examples of this complexity and although I do not highlight the layers identified in Fig. 4 at every turn, the disciplinary model suggested above provides a constant reference point. To exemplify this point about the necessity for multiple perspectives, consider the case of Yosemite, one of the most fertile areas for examining Price’s ‘diverse conflicts and opportunities’ (Price, 2015b, p.7).

A Short Detour to Yosemite Technology, sport and leisure studies, gender politics and the complexities of land use and ownership are all at work in the countercultural context of climbing in the Yosemite National park in the US. Here, rangers

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Fig. 4 Half Dome in Yosemite National Park (Photo by Rainer Hübenthal. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62629)

responsible for managing four million visitors a year in a stretch of valley just fifteen miles long have, in recent years, been policing a series of legislative changes to enforce a sustainable land use policy. These policies restrict the length of stay in the valley to days not weeks,27 a quality of access many climbers see obstructing their deep learning of, and extension to, the many hundreds of routes up some of the most iconic mountains in the world: El Capitan, Clouds Rest and Half Dome, for instance. The behaviours of generations of climbers in this area have been likened to Jack Kerouac’s ‘rucksack revolution’, predicted in his 1959 novel The Dharma Bums, where city life is contrasted with the transcendent possibilities experienced in mountains, including Matterhorn Peak in Yosemite28 : I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads. (Kerouac, 2000, p.83)

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Written over half a century ago the tension between urban claustrophobia and the freedom of the mountains, clearly romanticised and gendered in Kerouac’s vision, has been played out in the multiple generations of climbers who followed: from the explicit performances of masculinity by arch-rivals Royal Robbins and Warren Harding, hailing from the so-called Golden Age of Yosemite (1955–1970); through the period of the Stone Masters (1973–1980) including Beverly Johnson, Jim Bridwell, John Long and Lynn Hill; to the most recent generation inhabiting the Yosemite Valley, known in some circles as the Stone Monkeys (1998–present) featuring Briton, Leo Houlding, and US climbers, Tommy Caldwell, Dean Fidelman, Nicola Martinez, Allisyn Beisner-Martinez, Dean Potter and Alex Honnold.29 Where Kerouac’s vision of the rucksack revolution positions women as passive beneficiaries of an essentially male exodus to the mountains, a situation reflected in the Robbins-Harding period, it was Lynn Hill and Bev Johnson who, in Geographer J. Taylor’s words: ‘effectively destroyed many of the gender boundaries within the sport’ and, ‘killed the conceit that men were innately superior climbers’ (Taylor, 2006, p.211). Hill set herself the mission of challenging long-held perceptions about the limitations of female climbers, putting up first ascents for both men and women including the notorious Nose of El Capitan (1993); this followed Johnson’s first all-female ascent on the peak of El Capitan, twenty years earlier, with partner Sibylle Hechtel. Even so, Taylor points out, such success was based on the absorption of many of the patriarchal values inscribed in the customs and practices of Yosemite climbing, an ‘internalizing’ of the fraternity’s values of competition, ranking and daring, rather than an effective counterpoint to them (Taylor, 2006, p.211). Significantly, Taylor suggests, these values were communicated and transmitted through the climbers’ guidebooks: seemingly neutral documents but ones which ‘function as both geographic texts and technologies to discipline behavior’ (Taylor, 2006, p.212). By the time of the Stone Monkeys’ rise to popularity, the expressions of freedom embodied in Kerouac’s amateur ascent of the Californian Matterhorn had moved on considerably to include free-soloing (climbing without aids) and ‘freebasing’ (climbing only with the aid of a parachute). The technology used to mediate these achievements has also moved on and includes streamed documentaries on providers such as Netflix, selfmade digital outputs on Vimeo and YouTube as well as the production

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of (e)books (Mortimer and Rosen, 2014; Honnold and Roberts, 2015; Fidelman, 2012). In addition to scaling walls, Potter, who died in an accident in the Valley in 2015, extended the practice of ‘slacklining’, the use of an elastic tightrope to train balance, posture and concentration, taking it ‘into an artform’ (Mortimer and Rosen, 2014). Fidelman specialises in photography, mainly but not exclusively documenting female nudes on the granite rock, capturing, in his terms, ‘the essence of the climbing spirit’ in collectors’ calendars and artbooks, available on the Apple distribution platform, iBooks.30 Both Caldwell (Lowell and Mortimer, 2017) and Honnold (Chin and Vasarhelyi, 2018) have been the subjects of highly successful documentaries, expanding audiences beyond the specialist climbing community and in the case of the latter being awarded with an Oscar for the film Free Solo (2018). Veterans Royal Robbins and Warren Harding also produced creative outputs in their lifetimes, including a three-part autobiography, My Life, from Robbins, his death in 2017 curtailing plans for four more. Harding, a maverick figure who followed in the footsteps of the Golden Age of alpine discovery in the nineteenth century—consuming wine and rich food during his ascent of the unexplored walls of Yosemite—produced an altogether more tongue-in-cheek reminiscence of the period when numerous first ascents were being completed in the Valley. Downward Bound, co-written and illustrated by partner Beryl Knauth, adopts a dramatic form with a cast of characters (fictional and real), acts and scenes, stage directions and a carefully chosen setting31 : The book is presented in a play format. I found this an effective way of organizing the material, and it also corresponds to the actual lecture-show situation I have experienced. You may find some odd types in my audience for this particular show, but don’t let that scare you. (Harding and Knauth, 2016, p.7)

Part practical guide, part autobiography, part satire on the absurdity of climbing something for no utilitarian purpose or pragmatic gain, Downward Bound’s lack of seriousness and self-mockery is in stark contrast to the genre of training manuals and guidebooks so commonly produced by the climbing community and exemplified in his rival, Robbin’s literary production.32 Where Robbins’ masculine purism was ‘lionized’ by guide writer Steve Roper in what Taylor calls the ‘politicizing’ of Yosemite’s climbing landscape (Taylor, 2006, p.202), Harding was unashamedly

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exposing the conceits and the powerplays at work, in a mock ranking he called the ‘Downward Bound Zone System’. Those in Zone 1, including Robbins and Roper, ‘come on like some kind of ideological fanatics, treating the (at best) questionable activity known as rock climbing as though it was some profound religious or political entity’ (Harding and Knauth, 2016, p.180). Those in Zone 10, where Harding placed himself, were ‘invariably characterized by shallowness of character general depravity, and self-aggrandizement’ (Harding and Knauth, 2016, p.181). As a brief working example, Yosemite evidences many of the complexities associated with examining mountain cultural production in the wider context of Mountain Studies, helping to highlight some of the enduring concerns of this book: the evolving relationship between climbing and technology, the varied means by which heightened experiences are communicated to audiences, the fertility of mountains as environments for artistic productivity, and their receptiveness to the expression of power relations. Viewed historically the move into the Valley by the first generation of rock and wall climbers was part of a countercultural movement in line with other developments in anti-capitalist resistance begun in the 1960s (Grunenberg and Harris, 2005). This is still partly being felt today, both in urban and rural climbing communities, but the historically subversive practices of climbers in and beyond Yosemite are being tempered by big-money sponsors such as Red Bull and GoPro whose exploitation and commodification of lifestyle sports is now commonly recognised. As Brighenti and Pavoni note: ‘the initial anti-establishment and radical environmental consciousness that drove many of these sports has been diluted’ in recent years (Brighenti and Pavoni, 2018, p.64). Developments in climbing and wearable technology, alongside the expansion of media platforms are interlaced, then, with questions of gender politics, sustainability, the vagaries of late capitalism, of National Park legislation and access rights; and all of these contexts are fluid and mutable. The multiple digital outputs and use of social media in twenty-firstcentury accounts of Yosemite climbing offer an excellent instance of how, as Ivo Jirásek argues, ‘adventure sports express very clearly the characteristic of current postmodern experience’ (Jirásek, 2007, p.139). His point is that the contemporary popularity of freebasing, slacklining or free-soloing points to ‘a crisis of experiencing’ (Jirásek, 2007, p.139) being played out by millennials, caught in a spiral of evermore excessive outdoor activities. Even so, for the vast majority of us the experience of extremity is a mediated one, either through digital or analogue means, and these

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mediations—performances, plays, films, (online) videos, blogs and social media—are key sources of mountain performance in this book. Equally, the experience of high places does not have to be one of extremity at all—a modest, low-key and pedestrian view of mountains can be just as impactive and transformative (even if such activities are unlikely to garner branded sponsorship deals). In Performing Mountains, this viewpoint is in part provided by the Handrails and in part by other examples of the quotidian and the commonplace, in for instance, the domestic rituals performed on mountainsides and summits. The climbing histories of Yosemite also evidence how different forms of Mountain Arts seem to splinter off from the activity of climbing. Harding’s tongue-in-cheek play-cum-training-manual, Honnold’s oscarwinning film, even Potter’s extension of the training regime of slacklining into an artform which, in turn has been mediated for a global audience on the National Geographic television channel,33 all point to a particular urgency of cultural productivity around mountains, an urgency which today expresses itself online and remotely, as much as it does in faceto-face direct spectatorship. I argue here that the intensity and variegated productivity triggered by mountains needs to be better understood if performance and the special understandings it brings are to be properly valued and embedded in Mountain Studies. But whilst these artistic outputs are one important focus, so too is the drama of the landscape itself— Yosemite’s great walls as stimulant to, or agent in, the behaviours of its disciples. Here, the primary sources are the rock, stone, flora and fauna of the mountains; the mist, cloud, sunshine and snow which fall on them; and the tarns, cols, chimneys and plateaus which populate them. These sources are dealt with principally in Part 3 and feature throughout the Handrails.

Cultural Overlay or Interplay Culture, then, is intrinsically part of mountain study, and (I hope now evidently) of Mountain Studies. This recalls my opening to this section and specifically Geographer Ken Gregory’s sensitivity to what he calls the ‘pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour’, including ‘institutions, tools, techniques and works of art’ (Gregory, 2006, p.186). These, he suggests, form part of the ‘particular cultural overlay’ of a given environment and should inform a more holistic approach to landscape research (Gregory, 2006, p.186). But what was missing from Gregory’s data set

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in 2006 and what remains absent now from the cultural consideration of landscapes in Mountain Studies, is the last item in the list: ‘works of art’. I address that absence directly in Performing Mountains. This book is the first to consider in systematic terms what a theatrical canon of mountain artworks might include, the first to consider the scaled performativity of mountain rituals, and the first to evaluate what a performance language of mountains might look and sound like: from ideas of training, scenography, acting and spectatorship. It will use theatre and performance as a means to exhume, explore and expose elements of the world’s mountains that might otherwise lie dormant, performance practice and performance analysis revealing the hard-to-define knowledge born of a particular sitedness or ‘fit’ between landscape, people and art. This ‘fit’, it must be stressed, is rarely a cosy one. Instead, it is ‘many and varied’, as Victoria Hunter suggests, ‘from the congruous to incongruous, respectful and irreverent […], overt and covert’ (Hunter, 2015, p.18). What will become clear from this analysis is the need for a more reciprocal methodology than Gregory’s metaphor ‘overlay’ implies. Indeed, given the ongoing ‘guidance’ of the Handrails, threaded through the book, and the shift from Mountains as objects in Part 2 to Mountains as subjects in Part 3, my approach here is less about overlay and more about interplay, putting to the test the underlying conception of a performing landscape. To approach such a layered critique a particular kind of positionality is necessary, very usefully termed by sociologist Paul Beedie in his essay ‘Legislators and interpreters’ as the ‘aspirant mountaineer’, one which draws strength from its liminality: The frame that an aspirant mountaineer understands to be constitutive of the identity of a mountaineer may contain elements of a mountaineering frame to various degrees. It may also, however, contain elements that might contest and challenge mountaineering traditions. (Beedie, 2007, p.30)

With one foot inside mountain culture and one foot outside, in the languages and practices of theatre and performance, I occupy a productive space to critique the place of theatrical culture in mountaineering, and to contest where appropriate the construction of both traditions. As will become clear, it is this very perspective—expressed as a sometimes knifeedge liminality—that characterises the experience of Performing Mountains and which helps to explain its remarkable currency and longevity.

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Notes 1. Respectively: The Flying Frenchies’ Tancrède Melet in Back to the Fjords (2014); Olympic speed climbing (2020); Louise Ann Wilson’s Yr Helva/The Gathering (2014); Albert Smith’s The Ascent of Mont Blanc (1852); Bertolt Brecht’s He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No (1929– 1923); Tianmen Mountain Skywalk, China (2011); Barrow, Outerside and Long Stile, Lakeland Light Festival (2017); Kutiyattam performance of Kaliasodharanham (2010). 2. For instance: the Andes chain of mountains in South America is 7000 km, crossing 7 countries and the Southern Great Escarpment in Africa is 5000 km, crossing 6 countries. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ the-longest-mountain-chains-in-the-world.html. Accessed 16 April 2019. 3. Figure quoted by Alan McNee in a lecture at Kendal Mountain Festival, 18 November 2016. 4. This diagram is adapted from the full list of expertise identifiers in the MRI database of researchers. The database is here: http://4dweb.proclim.ch/ 4dcgi/mri/en/BuildCheckForm_Expertise. Accessed 6 September 2018. 5. For instance the Centre for Mountains Studies the University of Highlands Islands has the following research themes: Sustainable mountain development and characterising mountains; Biodiversity and protected areas; Global and climate change; Managing Scotland’s uplands; Understanding and managing ecosystem services. https://www.perth.uhi.ac.uk/ subject-areas/centre-for-mountain-studies/research-themes/. Accessed 6 September 2018. 6. See for instance, these images of glacier retreat in just a threeyear period (2015–2018). https://people.ee.ethz.ch/~juliens/sentinel/ glacier-retreat.html. 7. http://mri.scnatweb.ch/en/the-mri/about-mri. 8. The figures as of 6 September 2018 were 105/2550 researchers identifying this category as a specialism with just three architects and myself working from a designated base of arts research. 9. https://www.ualberta.ca/courses/mountains-101. 10. http://www.mrd-journal.org/pdf/MRD_Call_3904_Culture.pdf. Accessed 16 April 2019. Even this call though betrays a positivist bias asking for ‘systematically validated experiences and research insights into development solutions’. See my Introduction to Performance Research: On Mountains (Pitches, 2019). 11. https://fueltheatre.com/projects/touching-the-void. Accessed 5 September 2018. 12. See also the Mountain Film Alliance, who aim is to promote mountain cinematography in 18 countries: https://www.mountainfilmalliance.org. Accessed 5 September 2018.

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13. See for instance Long’s A Line in the Himalayas (1975): http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-line-in-the-himalayas-t12035 and Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–1976): https://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/ articles/2014/february/11/nancy-holt-1938-2014/. Accessed 17 April 2019. 14. http://www.mountainlifemedia.ca/2014/10/150-years-of-matterhornascents-in-1-incredible-photo/. Accessed 5 September 2018. 15. https://www.itv.com/news/border/2016-04-24/lighting-up-catbellsfor-nepal/. Accessed 13 May 2019. 16. http://www.mountainfest.co.uk. Accessed 16 April 2019. 17. In addition to the US and Canada, the Banff international Film festival alone tours to 43 countries: https://www.banffcentre.ca/mountainfestival /worldtour/international. 18. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/sep/20/ walking-theatre-accomplice-en-route. Accessed 5 September 2018. 19. http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/search/?start=0&what=&where= cumbria&when=&search=99. ‘I made a slate arch prior to the ice arch which was quite exciting. I made the arch [ice] over a pile of stones and left it overnight. It was a very tense night, it was in a field full of cows, I was looking out the window every half hour or so to see what the weather was doing in the morning I went out, and it was dripping like mad, and I pulled the stones away and it held. It was very beautiful’ [AG, Triangle, Border Television, 1983]. http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac. uk/image/?id=ag_02391&t=1. Accessed 19 December 2016. 20. http://www.sonja-hinrichsen.com/portfolio-post/snow-drawings-atrabbit-ears-pass-colorado-2012/#1. Accessed 5 September 2018. 21. http://www.dianeburko.com/statement-about-artist. Accessed 5 September 2018. See also artist David Burkman’s Cape Farewell project for climate change-inspired action; https://capefarewell.com. 22. See Hunter’s inclusive definition of site-specific dance performance for a fuller listing of practices (Hunter, 2015, p.14). 23. Lawrence distinguishes between the two in the following terms: ‘The term “vertical” here refers to the orientation of this floor rather than the orientation of the dancer’s body. This definition allows us to distinguish vertical dance practice from “aerial dance” – the terms are often used interchangeably, but the latter is more precisely applied to dance practices that take place in mid-air’ (2010, p.49). 24. http://iahip.org/classifieds/training-ads/embodied-movement-sligo. Accessed 5 September 2018. 25. https://archinect.com/features/article/53290/david-buckland-capefarewell. 26. The series title for her book also conflates this binary: Mountain: Nature and Culture (2015).

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27. ‘There is a 30-night camping limit within Yosemite National Park in a calendar year; however, May 1 to September 15, the camping limit in Yosemite is 14 nights, and only seven of those nights can be in Yosemite Valley or Wawona’. https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/campregs. htm. Accessed 5 September 2018. 28. See, for instance, Mortimer and Rosen’s Valley Uprising documentary (2014). 29. Perhaps not surprisingly, the climbers themselves resist such simple pigeonholing and contest the idea of a Stone Monkey ‘type’: https://www. climbing.com/people/profile-the-yosemite-stone-monkeys/. Accessed 29 April 2019. 30. http://www.stonenudes.com/about.html, http://www.stonenudes.com/ book.html. Accessed 5 September 2018. 31. In some ways Downward Bound is closer to the manuals associated with training in acting, based as it is on the conceit of a fictional dialogue set in an imagined classroom. Those such as Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares (1936), Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933) and Michael Chekhov’s To the Actor, although all these lack the satirical edge of Harding’s text. 32. See for instance Robbin’s Basic Rockcraft and Advanced Rockcraft (Robbins, 1971, 1973). 33. http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/ng-live/chinpotter-bonusnglive?source=searchvideo. Potter died in 2015 in a wingsuit accident in Yosemite.

References Beedie, P. (2007) Legislators and Interpreters: An Examination of Changes in Philosophical Interpretations of “Being a Mountaineer”. In McNamee, M. (ed.) Philosophy, Risk and Adventure Sports. London: Routledge, pp. 25–42. Braun, V. (2016) Mountains for Europe’s Future: A Strategic Research Agenda. Available at http://mri.scnatweb.ch/en/projects/strategic-research-agendamountains-for-europe-s-future. Brighenti, A. M. and Pavoni, A. (2018) Climbing the City. Inhabiting Verticality Outside of Comfort Bubbles. Journal of Urbanism, 11 (1), pp. 63–80 (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2017.1360377. Chernicoff, S. and Fox, H. (2003) Essentials of Geology. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Chin, J. and Vasarhelyi, E.C. (2018) Free Solo. National Geographic. Crutzen, P.J. (2002) Geology of Mankind. Nature, 415 (January), p. 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a.

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della Dora, V. (2016) Mountain: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Fidelman, D. (2012) Stone Nudes: Art in Motion. California: Stonemaster Press. Fusco, M. (2015) Master Rock. London: Artangel and Book Works. Goudie, A. and Viles, H. (2010) Landscapes and Geomorphology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gregory, K.J. (2006) The Human Role in Changing River Channels. Geomorphology, 79 (3–4), pp. 172–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2006. 06.018. Grunenberg, C. and Harris, J. (eds.) (2005) The Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Harding, W. and Knauth, B. (2016) Downward Bound: A Mad! Guide to Rock Climbing. 3rd ed. Yosemite: Joseph Reid Head Publishers. Harrer, H. (2005) White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger. London: HarperPerennial. Honnold, A. and Roberts, D. (2015) Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure. London: Macmillan. Horton, J. and Kraftl, P. (2014) Cultural Geographies: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Hulme, M. (2015) Climate: Living Lexicon of the Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities, 6 (2013), pp. 175–178. Hunter, V. (2015) Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance. Edited by V. Hunter. Abingdon: Routledge. Jirásek, I. (2007) Extreme Sports and the Ontology of Experience. In McNamee, M. (ed.) Philosophy, Risk and Adventure Sports. London: Routledge, pp. 138– 148. Kerouac, J. (2000) Dharma Bums. London: Penguin. Lawrence, K. (2010) Hanging from Knowledge: Vertical Dance as Spatial Fieldwork. Performance Research, 15 (2005), pp. 49–58. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13528165.2010.539879. Lowell, J. and Mortimer, P. (2017) Dawn Wall. Red Bull Media House. McNee, A. (2015) The Cockney Who Sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited. Available at www. victoriansecrets.co.uk. Mortimer, P. and Rosen, N. (2014) Valley Uprising. Sender Films. Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011) Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography. Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. Nettle, D. (2009) Beyond Nature Versus Culture: Cultural Variation as an Evolved Characteristic. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15 (2), pp. 223–240. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01561.x. Pitches, J. (2019) On Mountains: Introduction. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 24 (3), 1–7.

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Price, M.F. (2015a) Mountains: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, M.F. (ed.) (2015b) Scottish Mountains—A View. Journal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, pp. 1–30 (Perth: Royal Scottish Geographical Society). Robbins, R. (1971) Basic Rockcraft. Glendale: La Siesta Press. Robbins, R. (1973) Advanced Rockcraft. Glendale: La Siesta Press. Rosenberg, N.V. (2005) Bluegrass: A History. 20th ed. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Ruskin, J. (1856) Modern Painters, Vol. 4. Project Guttenberg. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31623/31623-h/31623-h.htm. Schönpflug, U. (2009) Cultural Transmission: Psychological, Developmental, Social, and Methodological Aspects. Edited by U. Schönpflug. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smethurst, D. (2000) Mountain Geography. Geographical Review, 90 (1), pp. 35–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/216174. Taylor, J. (2006) Mapping Adventure: A Historical Geography of Yosemite Valley Climbing Landscapes. Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (1), pp. 190–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2004.09.002. Turnbull, R. (2009) Granite and Grit: A Walker’s Guide to the Geology of British Mountains. London: Frances Lincoln.

Part 2: Mountains in Ritual, Drama and Site-Related Performance

This Part of Performing Mountains is dedicated to the question of how rituals, plays and site-related performance have translated the world’s mountains into distinctive, diverse and influential forms of cultural production. The interrogation starts with an overview of the various rituals which are found in mountain environments (2.1). In this chapter I identify some of the defining characteristics of mountain rituals, extending the discussion of liminality beyond my own positionality to examine four exemplar rituals, conceived on varied scales and in expressly different cultural contexts: from the ‘ordinary’ practice of cairn building to the ‘extraordinary’ rites associated with the Shugendo religion. I move then (2.2) to the treatment of mountains by playwrights across the ages, constructing a first canon of mountain dramas. This is done using the conceit of longitudinal mapping to help define a diverse selection of playtexts in unlikely but productive pairings: from Peru in the Eastern Hemisphere to Australia in the West. Finally, (2.3) I will examine the extent to which contemporary performance has sited itself in mountains, using the festival of Persepolis, in Shiraz in Iran (from 1967–1978) as a departing point to trace how recent site-related performance work has interpreted one localised mountainous landscape: Snowdonia. It must be stressed that to move from rituals to playtexts and on to site-related devised work does not imply that those categories are impervious and hermetic. As we shall see in this Part, there is ample cross-over and influence between these three forms of cultural expression; examples

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abound of ritualistic practices and rhythms being appropriated by contemporary practitioners, just as they do for playwrights. Equally, the linear progression from ritual to contemporary performance followed structurally here does not imply a correspondingly linear evolution of these forms—that ritual begat drama begat performance in ever more complex and sophisticated forms of expression. On such unwanted implications, Richard Schechner is instructive: Ritual is one of several activities related to the theatre. The others are play, games, sports, dance, and music. The relation among these […] is not vertical or originary—from any one to any other(s)—but horizontal: what each autonomous genre shares with the others; methods of analysis that can be used intergenerically. (Schechner 1988, p. 6)

Whilst difficult to achieve in the linear form of a book, the same horizontalism informs this whole section and there is no intent to suggest a teleology of dramatic progression from ritual to performance. Ultimately, the ‘intergeneric’ perspective, viewed across the three forms of Mountain culture, will be apparent once Part 2 is concluded.

Reference Schechner, R. (1988) Performance Theory. London: Routledge.

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Little Rituals: Bowfell (W9/214)

Our first ascent of Pavey Ark and its neighbour Harrison Stickle in 2006, turned quickly into an excuse, then a project and finally an obsession. An excuse: to revisit the Lake District annually when other sunnier climes beckoned. A project: to research, locate, navigate and touch the summit of all the peaks on the Wainwright list. An obsession: to complete the project in the ‘right’ way, according to some exacting guiding principles. Firstly, each of the 214 peaks must be climbed by all four of the group, no matter how long it takes to complete the task; secondly, each success must be marked, documented and dated; finally, and most categorically, any summit climbed solo or in a combination of less than four, must be discounted. To describe this long-term quest as a creative project is to dignify our activities far more than they deserve and to rationalise retrospectively decisions made in relative ignorance. But there was something in the nature of our ‘work’ as a group that had a suggestion of the fundamentals of art-making. ‘A work works when it becomes an event of work’, contemporary performance practitioner, Matthew Goulish, suggests, ‘a work works when it becomes human. This becoming occurs when we realise it’ (Goulish, 2000, p.102).

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A year on, there were the beginnings of that realisation. After the unplanned ascent of Pavey Ark, the frame for our work had become much clearer. All seven volumes of Wainwright’s guides had been purchased in anticipation of a two-week Cumbrian immersion, deep into the Great Langdale valley, at Middle Fell farm. These guides charted the geological complexity of the region, from the rounded mountains of the Skiddaw Slates to the dramatic edges of the Borrowdale Volcanics, and with them came a sense of purpose. Now we could plan walks across the Lake District park: from the Central and Southern Fells Guides (Books 3 and 4), which covered the peaks on both sides of the Langdale valley to the North Western Fells (Book 6) clustering around Keswick, to the Eastern Fells (Book 1), stretching north of Grasmere. Accessing the extremities of the Northern Fells (Book 5), the Western Fells (Book 7) and the Far Eastern Fells (Book 2), did not appear feasible from Middle Fell farm but the books were packed nonetheless, just in case. Together, the clutch of walking guides, now stacked up on the windowsill of the farm kitchen in Langdale, represented 14 years of industry by a ‘passionate physiographer’,1 as graphic designer Ken Garland called Wainwright, a neologism we sought first to understand and then to emulate. Our ambition may have been ample but our planning was wanting. In those two weeks, and despite being relatively stranded at the end of a valley, attempts were made to climb peaks in regions covered by four of the Wainwright guides, in four major dales: Wasdale, Langdale, the Thirlmere valley and Borrowdale. Such mountainous cherry-picking—we could call it chine-picking2 —might at the time have been an expression of the freedom to roam but it was to lead to significant challenges later on in the project; mountain leftovers began to pepper our progress as we went on, missed treats that could have been snaffled up at the time. For Goulish an artwork’s boundaries are impossible to control. ‘A work is an object overflowing its frame’, he argues in 39 Microlectures (Goulish, 2000, p.102), illuminating his point with reference to Italian art: ‘we expected a painting but found

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a series of events. […] Where does The conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio stop?’ (Goulish, 2000, p.100). It is a pertinent question addressing the limits of visual aesthetics and the extent to which they are wrapped up in matters experiential and eventful. The celebrated Lakes poet and playwright Norman Nicholson came to the same point from a different direction in his essay ‘Rock Bottom’. Starting with the geology of the region, and drawing an important distinction between those different rock types—the Slates and the Volcanics—Nicholson points to the paucity of a purely visual perspective: It is futile to assess such country in terms of views. The view flattens the scene into a man-made dimension; it measures the landscape from the borders of an imaginary picture-frame; it reduces life to a postcard. It imposes a rigid and an unnatural rule of proportion on our eyes, and makes us reject so much of what our other senses tell us. (Nicholson, 1978, p.33)

For Nicholson those ‘other senses’ included: ‘a pulled muscle in the thighs; a wind making a spread map roll like the sea; herdwicks; the smell of cut bracken; clouds; handkerchiefs’ (Nicholson, 1978, p.34). What were they for us? What were the indefinables of the climb to Bowfell just a few miles walk from the cottage door—the ‘mountain that commands attention whenever it appears in view’ (Wainwright, 2003, Bowfell, p.2)? The rubbing of cheap boots plucked from the ‘Sale’ racks in Ambleside; the smart of rock on toe; impromptu deviations from the path as the call of nature pressed on young bladders; a Tolkienian mist bubbling up from the cauldron of the Three Tarns col; fleeting meet-and-greets with walkers on the way down ‘the Band’3 ; the mix of elation and discomfort reaching a summit populated with others, already camped out and lunching by the cairn. Our senses betrayed a host of unseen characteristics but even if we had tried, contra-Nicholson, to impose a postcard perspective on the view, the frame-breaking panorama of more than 70 peaks from Bowfell’s summit would have defied our best attempts (Fig. 1).4

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Fig. 1 Panoramic view from the summit of Bowfell, January 2017 (Photo Jonathan Pitches)

Amongst these disparate impressions, all the events recalled by a ‘one-sided, personal and entirely superficial memory’ (Nicholson, 1978, p.34), order of a sort began to emerge, brought about by the repetition of a few simple acts. We were performing actions that slowly lithified into habits, then customs and finally became rituals, ones to be observed each time a summit was attempted—a natural order of ascent and descent; the ensemble touching of each cairn; and the ‘ritual of the summit selfie’ (although it was 6 years later before the term was accepted into the OED).5 These became in the specific context of our walking, ‘markers of [our] group identity’, clustered around the potent symbol of the summit cairn (Collins, 2004, p.36). Some may baulk at such slight domesticities being framed as rituals and they are of course far away from some of the greater acts of mountain ritualism—the serial prostration of pilgrims on Mount Kailash in Tibet or the barefoot ascent of Croagh Patrick in Ireland (Bartlett, 1993, p.106), for instance. But they do have something in common with more transformational mountain rites and that is in their construction of ‘specialness’—a special ordering of time, the special value attached to objects, a ‘non ordinary’ or special place in which acts occur and are recorded, and a special attention to rules. These four characteristics form part of what Performance Studies theorist, Richard Schechner, calls the ‘basic values’ of ‘Play, Games, Theater, Sports and Ritual’ (Schechner, 1988, p.6), drawing together some of the key strands of activity covered in this book. Naturally none of this occurred to us as we stood together on the jagged top of Bowfell, the first of many times spent trying to keep one’s balance amidst the topsy-turvy, sandstone skyscrapers of

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its summit. At that moment, specialness was an altogether more felt thing, sensed as a one-off and multisensory rush of impressions at the highest point of the mountain. Special because, as with all things live, the feeling of a first ascent can never be replayed or retrieved, a reality one can only ruefully understand after the event. A loss to reflect on, perhaps, when witnessing other first ascenders making tentative steps onto a singular summit, mixing their elation with the awkwardness of close company on the top.

Notes 1. ‘Passionate physiographer: design and execution of A. Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland fells’, paper given by Ken Garland at British Cartographic Society’s Annual Technical Symposium, University of Reading, 1996. See Hutchby (2012, pp.18–25) for a full reproduction of this talk. 2. Chine means the backbone of an animal or a mountain ridge. 3. The Band is the name for the ascending ridge to the east of the peak which affords a relatively gentle ascent to the Three Tarns. 4. Wainwright lists 76 visible peaks in his 8 summit views. 5. See Pearce and Moscardo (2015, p.60). This article challenges some of the assumptions around selfie taking in the media—that it is environmentally damaging, narcissistic and causes offence—suggesting a number of simple ways to manage tourist behaviour.

References Bartlett, P. (1993) The Undiscovered Country. London: The Ernest Press. Collins, R. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goulish, M. (2000) 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance. London: Routledge. Hutchby, C. (2012) The Wainwright Companion. London: Frances Lincoln. Nicholson, N. (1978) Rock Bottom. In Nicholson, N. (ed.) The Lake District: An Anthology. London: Penguin.

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Pearce, J. and Moscardo, G. (2015) Social Representations of Tourist Selfies: New Challenges for Sustainable Tourism. BEST EN Think Tank XV, pp. 59– 73. Schechner, R. (1988) Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Wainwright, A. (2003) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Southern Fells. Book Four. London: Frances Lincoln.

Part 2.1 Mountain Rituals

Introduction All over the world, high above us, specialised acts are taking place, acts which are embedded in their local environments, rooted in their regional histories and transformative for their participants. These special acts take many forms—one-off pilgrimages, feats of endurance, annual remembrances, personal memorials, animal sacrifices—but they contribute to and are provoked by the characteristic features of mountainscapes: remoteness, danger, prominence, sacredness, local devotion. How might we make sense of the phenomena of mountain rituals? What is their place in mountain culture? As a sub-category of ritual performances, mountain rituals are remarkable for their antiquity, ubiquity and diversity. Rituals have been held in mountain environments for thousands of years, often as manifestations of the religious attitudes communities hold for the mountains themselves. The worship of high peaks is a feature of cultures across the globe from ancient Greece (Olympus in Thessaly) to contemporary Tibet (Mount Kailas), from Gunung Agung in volcanic Bali or Mount Popa in Burma, to T’ai Shan in China venerated for over 4000 years (Price et al., 2013, p.261; Bernbaum, 1997, p.32). These so-called ‘sacred mountains’ (Cooper, 1997) have an intrinsic specialness according to academic Edwin Bernbaum’s analysis with ‘well established networks of myths, beliefs, and

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religious practices such as pilgrimage, meditation and sacrifice’ (Bernbaum, 2006, pp.304–305). They cohabit with two other levels of sacredness, argues Bernbaum: prompted by objects such as temples and shrines or based in the individual, in those seeking renewal and inspiration from their mountain experiences (Bernbaum, 2006, p.305). The ritual significance of mountains can, then, be seen on very different scales—from the individual pursuit of emotional balance and personal well-being (Usher, 2012) to the basis of a whole religion associated with a specific peak or mountain range. This chapter aims to chart these different scales of ritual activity—from what ritual theorist Axel Michaels calls the subjective dimension (impressio) to the public sphere (or societas ) (Michaels, 2012, p. 29)—using a necessarily selective view of mountain rituals as exemplars of this diversity. Despite the scale of ritual practices based in mountains little systematic attention has been paid to this particular environment in Ritual Studies. Pioneer Arnold van Gennep, author of the Rites of Passage (written in 1908), classifies hundreds of rites in his famous study of what he called ‘ritual dynamics’, proposing an overarching model of separation, transition and incorporation, where liminality, or ‘in-betweenness’ is a key characteristic (van Gennep, 1960, pp.10–11). His one reference to mountain rites is in the chapter titled ‘Territorial Passage’ where he cites various ceremonies relating to the crossing of mountain passes in Morocco, Mongolia, Tibet, Assam, the Andes and the Alps (van Gennep, 1960, p.22). Anthropologist Victor Turner devoted his entire career to the study of ritual, appropriating van Gennep’s notion of liminality later in his career to discuss its utility beyond anthropology, including its application to Performance Studies (Turner, 1986). His early work references case studies from African communities in Zambia and Uganda but later he developed his thinking on world religions and Christian pilgrimage (Turner, 1973). Beyond a passing reference to Mount Kailas as a Hindu holy site (Turner, 1973, p.213), there is little in Turner’s writing which suggests the significance of mountainscapes as magnets for ritual practices other than a general suggestion that wild places are ideal environments for liminal activity: Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to

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death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. (Turner, 2007, p.90)

Whilst mountains do not always occupy wild areas, Turner’s observation that the wilderness places its inhabitants between law, custom and convention is particularly appropriate for this discussion. It is a reminder that mountains are often located along the borders of two or even three different countries (a so-called tripoint); summits are national meeting points, in fact, concentrated locations where different histories, cultures and laws rub shoulders.1 Turner’s collaborator in later life was Richard Schechner and the latter’s own work argues for ritual’s place on (or supporting) a continuum of other performance forms: play, games, sports, pop entertainments, performing arts, daily life and identity constructions (Schechner, 2006, p.50). Again, direct references to mountain rituals are few and far between in his writings but Schechner does recognise the place of natural landscapes in rituals and is alert to the effects such landscapes can have on the participant. ‘Because rituals take place in special, often sequestered places’, he suggests in Performance Studies: An Introduction, ‘the very act of entering the “sacred space” has an impact on participants […] When the sacred space is a natural place - a sacred tree, cave, or mountain, for example - one approaches and enters the space with care’ (Schechner, 2006, pp.71–72).2 This notion of the mountainscape as some kind of agent in the impact of a ritual is echoed in even stronger terms by Ronald Grimes, another long-term researcher of rituals in his more recent The Craft of Ritual Studies (2013): In some cultures, spaces not only mean; they also act. Not merely containing or framing actions, a sacred place exerts force, becoming an agent on par with, or even greater than, a ritual leader. The mountains and rivers were here before we mere mortals strolled the face of the earth. Those places - beings, actually - acted, thereby facilitating the emergence of creatures like us. So space is not necessarily passive, the spectator or butt of human design. Sometimes it can be a lead actor to whom (yes, whom) human actions are but a response. (Grimes, 2013, p.258)

Grimes’ language discloses his own interest in theatre and theatricality, one which threads through his book from the core case study (the Santa Fe Fiesta of 2007), viewed at one stage ‘against the background of a colorful view of the Ortiz mountains at sunset’ (Grimes, 2013, p.116),

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through the problematics of documenting live events, to the general use ritual makes of key performance-based phenomena, examined below. The argument that a place such as a mountain can exert a force more powerful than the leader of an act within it—that mountains, in short, can act—is one I interrogate consistently in this book and in this section specifically. References to mountains in the core literature from Ritual Studies are fragmentary, then, short of a few tangential observations. Accounts and documents of mountain ritual practices, on the other hand, are plentiful—Edwin Bernbaum’s Sacred Mountains of the World (1997) alone lists over 60 peaks in six continents as ‘sacred’, many of which have associated ritual activities as part of their continued veneration. By bringing some of the key ideas from ritual theory together with a selection of the most notable examples of ritual activity in mountains, this section will address this quirk in Ritual Studies, using a variety of sources to explore rituals of varying scope and significance—from the personal to the epic. In doing so it seeks to answer some key questions. How are mountain rituals defined? Are there commonalities of purpose and approach across mountain sites and cultures, or does each ritual define itself? What accounts for the ubiquity of ritual practices on mountains? What can Ritual Studies learn from mountain rituals specifically—how for instance are understandings of liminality extended by a scrutiny of rituals in high places? And, in the context of space becoming active in ritual, what evidence is there for mountain environments becoming the lead actor in the performance of mountain rituals, large and small?

What Is a Mountain Ritual? If defining ritual as a concept is as difficult as defining jazz (Grimes, 2013, p.186), then the practice of defining mountain rituals is perhaps even more elusive, given the furious debates about what actually constitutes a mountain itself. As Price et al. point out, ‘a universally accepted definition of what a mountain is will always remain elusive’, even though there are several quantitative measures including elevation, local relief, inclination, geological make-up and climate (Price et al., 2013, pp.2–4). Whilst measures such as these appear to offer some certainty and clarity of nomenclature, even quantitative assessments of a mountain’s status are fraught with instability. Mountains move of course—Nangarparbat in the Himalayas is growing at 8mm per year. But even when the target is much less mutable,

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changes in assessment lead to various classifications and declassifications causing a mountain to be promoted to, or demoted from, defining lists such as the Munros or the Hewitts, lists based on arbitrary cut-off points of height and prominence.3 Mountains can equally be defined in qualitative and culturally responsive terms and these offer much more scope for the analysis of ritual: ‘A landform is considered a mountain when local people rate it as such because it plays an important role in their cultural, spiritual, and working lives’ (Price et al., 2013, p.6). ‘Mountainness’ is, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder, part and parcel of a local perception network, built up over generations. Decades before the cultural turn in Geography begun in the mid-1980s, US geographer Roderick Peattie expressed this idea in telling terms: A mountain is a mountain because of the part it plays in popular imagination. It may be hardly more than a hill; but if it has distinct individuality, or plays a more or less symbolic role to the people, it is likely to be rated a mountain by those who live about its base. (Peattie, 1936, p.2)

Such symbolic potency accounts for much of the activity I will be discussing in this section and helps explain the global spread of mountain rituals in every continent other than Antarctica. Rituals in some way translate the symbolic value of a specific mountain into the symbolic language of the community through the process of enactment —a central tenet of ritual conceptualisation (Grimes, 1978; Myerhoff, 1984). Pitched somewhere between stage acting and every day behaviour and designed to capture the specialness of ritual, ‘enactment’ is Ronald Grimes’ word for the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of ritual activity, the uneasy combination of the habitual and the magical. Whilst there is an element of performance in many of the components of ritual, Grimes argues, ‘it is not regarded by participants as mere fiction or a game - hence the term “enactment”’ (Grimes, 2013, p.196). Rituals do things to their participants and this efficacy is caught up in belief structures, not in the suspension of dis belief still typical of many theatre experiences. Ritual theorist, Barbara Myerhoff identifies a similar relationship between belief and enactment: Ritual is prominent in all areas of uncertainty, anxiety, impotence, and disorder. By its repetitive character it provides a message of pattern and

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predictability. In requiring enactments involving symbols, it bids us participate in its meanings even enacting meanings we cannot conceive or believe […] In ritual, doing is believing. (Myerhoff, 1984, p.151)

Whilst Myerhoff’s lens is not expressly focused on high places, her identification of ritual with states of uncertainty is undeniably helpful in this context; indeed there are few places better for inducing feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and impotence than mountainscapes. Again, these might be on a microscale, the uncertainty of a small group’s attempt on Everest for instance, assuaged by the holding of a puja ceremony; or on the scale of whole communities: the feeding of sacrificial blood and llama fat into the holes and caves of Mount Kaata by the Bolivian Qollahuaya people, for example, binding the ‘various communities of the mountain together into a single cohesive unit’ (Bernbaum, 1997, p.183) and ensuring the mountain continues to support the region. To summarise, mountain rituals are specialised events held in environments identified as mountains by their local audiences, irrespective of the elevation or prominence of the particular peak. They invariably involve a process of symbolisation and enactment and are of sometimes vital importance to their native communities. They are intrinsically caught up in and driven by local belief systems which may or may not be understood by visiting participants, even when those visitors are the focus of the ritual—a visiting European climber to the Himalayas, for example. Mountain rituals bring order (lasting or fleeting) to uncertain situations and they do this by exploiting elements of predictability, repetition and tradition whilst retaining a certain liminality or state of in-betweenness. They are of importance to this study as they use elements of performance and of spectacle to express the often-ineffable power of a mountain, its local potency and symbolism, in the imaginations of people from regions all over the world. Conceptualising and analysing this widespread activity must therefore be a crucial element of the remit of Performing Mountains.

Approach Given the ubiquity of mountain rituals, and the many examples which meet this inclusive working definition, it is clearly impossible to attempt a detailed analysis of the ritual sub-category as a whole. Bernbaum’s

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near-300 page study of sacred mountains is by far the best source for such an overview.4 My intention here is different. In this section I aim to map out with four extended examples the spectrum of ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ noted by Grimes. That will necessitate, as suggested above, the establishment of a continuum of mountain ritual practice: from the individual to the large scale, from rituals which operate at a subjective level of transformation, to those which express the culture of an entire religious tradition, followed by many hundreds of thousands of pilgrims over centuries: Ordinary Personal Mountain Rituals

Extraordinary Rituals in Mountain Religion

To provide a set of common reference points, bringing Mountain and Ritual Studies closer together, I take account of two taxonomies, one from each research field. These are Bernbaum’s ‘Themes’ of mountain sacredness, articulated in his essay Sacred Mountains: Themes and Teachings (2006) and Grimes’ ‘Elements of Ritual’, his vehicle for ‘facilitat[ing] scholarly discussion’ about ritual (Grimes, 2013, p.236). Bernbaum’s themes are generated from ethnographic research undertaken in mountains all over the world. They are an attempt to synthesise ideas about mountains which are, in his words, ‘particularly widespread’ and include concepts of height, centrality, power, identity, ancestry, renewal and transformation (Bernbaum, 2006, p.306). Grimes, similarly, is searching for a set of productive abstractions, ‘a tool for getting the work of analysing ritual started’ (Grimes, 2013, p.236). Whilst he acknowledges that there are plenty of alternatives to his model of analysis, his suggested elements, crucially, are dynamically interactive exhibiting the kind of interplay I articulated in Part 1 as a vital part of understanding mountain performance practices. They are: actions, actors, places, times, objects, languages and groups. (Grimes, 2013, p.235), each of them designed to provoke a set of questions rather than providing definitive boundaries or categorisations.5 Thus one might ask: how is the ritual actor influenced by location or place? Or how are objects in a ritual manipulated by its performers? These questions and conceptualisations are consistently returned to as the chapter proceeds and the four case studies elaborated.

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Four Examples of Mountain Rituals Cairn Building Ordinary Personal Mountain Ritual Cairn Building

Cairns are way-markers or summit indicators, constructed from nearby stones either on an elaborate or modest scale. In geographer Alexandre Gillet’s description, they are: the heaps or mounds of rough stones that are most often found or seen erected in mountainous or desert areas along tiny and evanescent paths, at cross roads, on the edge of passes or on the top of some mountain peaks. (Gillet, 2009, p.285)

However, cairns are not just located in high places; they may also be formed on low-lying ground such as the Whithorn peninsular in Galloway or on Neist Head on the Isle of Skye, both in Scotland in the UK (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Cairn building on Neist Head, Isle of Skye, Scotland (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

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This discussion will focus on the cairn in mountain environments but, elevated or lowly, cairns share several characteristics. They are collective constructions, built by consensus from the natural resources which lie around; they act as sentinels—indeed one of the original meanings of cairn from the German was one who ‘shows the way’ (Gillet, 2009); and they are meeting points between human and landscape, erected in special, sometimes sacred places. Cultural geographer, Avril Maddrell views the process of cairn building in revealing terms: Cairn making is a performative physical process, individual stone placed on individual stone, its overall shape a negotiation between the interaction of people, animals, slope processes, weather and weathering. (Maddrell, 2009, p.684)

Maddrell does not explain her use of the term ‘performative’ but her interest lies in how grief and bereavement are managed and lost ones commemorated through the addition of stones (often marked and decorated) to the Witness Cairn in Galloway.6 The act of cairn making is performative for her, then, in its potentially transformational impact on the individual, one act of placing amongst many thousands of similar acts. ‘Many people were “moved” by the encounter’ with the Witness Cairn, she suggests in her paper, ‘only they know where to’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.687). Gillet goes further, ascribing a special bond between stone and maker: Emotion takes place, it is important to notice, between us and the cairn. This being best articulated (thought and felt) through the stone itself, the stone we first touch, grasp with the hand, take from the ground and add to the cairn. (Gillet, 2009, pp.288–289)

Drawn almost irresistibly to add further to a cairn, Gillet argues, walkers become part of a human–non-human interface when they do so, the cairn not a stable and unmoving entity but a ‘moving figure’ (Gillet, 2009, p.289) mediating between these two realms. Cairns, then, are much more complex than their often-humble features might suggest, more mutable than their ostensibly permanent place on summits and mountain paths signifies. Instilled with the capacity to move, rise up and retreat back, a cairn is the material embodiment of the tension between generative

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and reductive processes, the very foundations of orogeny as discussed in Part 1. A cairn, in more ways than one, is a mountain in microcosm. In addition to their use as signals of direction and safe passage along a path, cairns are often placed on summits or at the highest part of mountain pass. This positioning on the limen or threshold (Turner, 2007, p.89) facilitates their capacity for transformation. For hillbaggers pursuing their tick list of Birketts, Wainwrights or Munros, touching the summit cairn is a performative act of transition, a guarantee that they will never again return to that location or covet that peak, at least within the auspices of the bagging exercise. For the mountaineer reaching the summit of a longplanned first ‘assault’ on, say, Elbrus7 (the highest mountain in Europe), the summit cairn8 is the pivot point for the expedition, a culmination of all that planning and training. Summit cairns are by definition at the apex of a climb and thus provide a physical, and emotional punctuation point for the mountain hiker and climber—all is downhill (if not plain sailing) after reaching it. In physical terms this is often reflected in a surge of renewed energy once the cairn is in view, a minor manifestation of the more serious ‘summit fever’, which can blind an inexperienced climber to the dangers still ahead.9 As markers of a mountain’s high point, cairns undoubtedly add to the sense of achievement of a climb, and this is a factor in the more proprietorial version of summit fever, summit-centrism, where the summit and the act of summiting, marked conveniently by reaching a sometimes-grand pile of stones, are valued above the rest of the experience. This is a criticism often levelled against peak-baggers of all varieties of mountain, large and small: cairns as the object of a rather empty exercise in appropriation or collection, a trigger for ticking off and moving on. Whilst this section of the chapter is dedicated to the personal and small scale, such acts of ownership are also performed on a much bigger scale— for the first ascent of a mountain, for instance, when a cairn or summitmarker point needs to be installed rather than simply touched. In these circumstances the symbolism of the virgin summit-top can attain frenzied proportions, never more so than for the highest mountain in the world. Peter Hansen points out the competing nationalist claims associated with the first ascent of Everest in 1953: The ‘conquest’ of Everest became a symbol of nationalism in Nepal, India, Britain, and New Zealand. Since each of these nation-states claimed the

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ascent as their own, the parades took place not merely in parallel, as suggested in the film [The Conquest of Everest ] but in direct competition with one another. (Hansen, 2000, p.308)

This battle over the rights to claim singular national success in what was the biggest prize in mountaineering at the time was a function of the multinational team assembled to achieve it, symbolised in the image of Tenzing Norgay astride the roof of the world with flags from Britain, Nepal, India and the United Nations tied to his ice axe. The symbolic and political resonances of this image—of conquest, success, heroism, for instance—would not, of course, have been achieved by an image taken anywhere other than on the summit. This symbolic intensity of the summit cairn and the transformative capacity of reaching it, leads to all kinds of personal rituals being performed in the vicinity of the cairn. On high mountains cairns are festooned with ribbons and banners and other personal artefacts. These often serve a commemorative function akin to the Witness Cairn discussed above. Climbers may even erect bespoke shrines or altars with the iconography of their religions.10 The deaths of prominent climbers are also marked by cairns—sometimes on the summits but also in more accessible places; the American, Scott Fischer who died in the mass tragedy of 1996 immortalised in John Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air (Krakauer, 2009), has a large cairn dedicated to his memory, at Everest Base camp, for example.11 Even the successful ascents of more modest mountains, for instance those in the UK achieved by fell-walking rather than mountaineering, provoke minor, domestic rituals located around the cairns: touching, kicking or tapping the cairn with a pole; augmenting the pile of stones with precariously balanced embellishments, adding a few millimetres to the highest point; capturing self-portraits, always with the cairn in view. Although modest and slight in themselves, these acts are part of the symbolising urge of ritual practice. They are, in Grimes’ taxonomy, acts committed by actors using objects to mark a specific place. More specifically as ‘ritual actors’ cairn visitors are in some way attributing ‘agency to non-human ritual actors’ (Grimes, 2011, p.238), inscribing a two-way connection between the cairn and its visitor along the lines Gillet suggests above. Spying its silhouette at-a-distance, the cairn incites a renewed sense of purpose; leaving it offers a secure point of reference. The cairn subtly changes us, just as we change it.

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This sense of agency and of respect for the transformative potential of cairns is manifest most clearly in some of the ritual practices identified so briefly by van Gennep above and by the Japanese scholar Ichiro Hori below. The early twentieth-century anthropologist, van Gennep, lists several rituals practiced along mountain passes: These include depositing of various objects (stones, bits of cloth, hair, etc.), offerings, invocations of the spirit of the place and so forth. They are to be found, for instance, in Morocco (kerkour), Mongolia, Tibet (obo), Assam, the Andes, and the Alps (in the form of chapels). (van Gennep, 1960, p.22)

Ichiro Hori also identifies the mountain pass as a key location for personalised ritual practices designed to facilitate safe passage. Again these practices are associated with cairn building: In Japan the word for mountain pass is toge, originating from the word tamuke ‘to offer’, because travelers always had to offer something to the God of the pass as a prayer for safe journey. This custom is not unique in Japan but can be seen also in the far eastern countries of Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. There are many instances where large mounds have accumulated from the offering of small stones. The stone mounds of the hilltop, mountaintop, and mountain pass in Korea and Japan, and the obo in Mongolia and Manchuria are typical examples. (Hori, 1966, p.6)

In Northern Africa this ritualised cairn building was imbued with further significance as Ellen J. Amster explains. In a blend of pagan animism and emergent Islam, the sufferer ‘attains relief from illness by rubbing the sick place with an object [or stone], thereby externalizing the sickness and trapping it outside his body’ (Amster, 2013, p.69). Traversers of the Tizi n Miri pass then placed the stone on the cairn or kerkour, leaving behind the illness in the liminal space between mountains. Cairns, then, are not just the site of ritual practice in mountainous areas; in some special circumstances they constitute the practice itself. The ‘construction, preservation and disposition of ritual paraphernalia’, in Grimes’ explanation of ritual objects (Grimes, 2011, p.240), is integral to the act of ritual transformation, touching a rock pile a performative act. Such revelations might just cause one to pause next time before adding to that ordinary heap of stones lining the mountain pass.

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Remembrance Day on Great Gable Ordinary

Extraordinary

Personal Mountain Rituals Cairn Building

Remembrance Day on Great Gable

In Grimes’ series of prompts for defining ritual time, he asks: ‘how are past and future ritually construed?’ (Grimes, 2013, p.239). It is a question of real pertinence for the annual ritual of remembrance which occurs on the summit of Great Gable in Wasdale, in Cumbria, England. First held on 8 June 1924, as part of the unveiling of a brass plaque embedded in the summit cairn and dedicated to the memories of twenty Fell and Rock Climbing Club (FRCC) members who had died in the Great War, the unspectacular but very well-attended ceremony happens each year on or around the 11th November as part of the UK Armistice Day commemorations. Today the ritual simply involves a minute’s silence observed by the many hundreds of people who climb the 899-metre peak to reach the summit before 11.00 a.m., but the inaugural ceremony involved far more conscious ritualising and symbolism, led by the outstanding climber-turned-author of his age, Geoffrey Winthrop Young.12 This subsection will focus almost exclusively on this first ceremony on Great Gable, specifically in terms of its construction of ritualised time and will argue that, along with the annual repetitions of this meeting, it represents a step along the continuum from the ordinary and personal ritualising of cairn building to something ‘in between’ the ordinary and extraordinary. Despite being held in the summer, the inaugural ceremony of the FRCC was subject to the vagaries of weather so typical of the Lake District. Eye-witness photographs of the 1924 gathering depict a misty and chilly day with figures in the distance barely visible and the congregation huddled together as much for warmth as for collective commemoration (Fig. 2). Wade Davis in his exhaustive account of the first attempts on Everest, Into the Silence, records Geoffrey Young’s own ascent on that day, ‘supported by his wife, Len, as he struggled over boulders and wet stones in rain so fierce it swept the cape from his back’ (Davis, 2012, p.3). Young’s struggle was not just because of the weather. It had more to do with the loss of his left leg in 1917 in a battle in Italy; this day marked his

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Fig. 2 The dedication of the Great Gable memorial plaque by Rev. J. H. Smith, 8 June 1924. By kind permission of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club archives (Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District)

first mountain climb since suffering life-changing injuries (Davis, 2012, p.3). Once Young had arrived by the specially constructed cairn, and surrounded by hundreds13 of FRCC members and locals, he delivered the following tribute, recorded word-for-word in the FRCC archives: UPON this mountain summit we are met to-day to dedicate this space of hills to freedom. Upon this rock are set the names of men - our brothers, and our comrades upon these cliffs - who held, with us, that there is no freedom of the soil where the spirit of man is in bondage; and who surrendered their part in the fellowship of hill and wind and sunshine, that the freedom of this land, the freedom of our spirit, should endure. This bronze stands, high upon the crowning glory of our free land, as a sign between us and them: our covenant that those, to whom in the time to come we too shall be but as these names or as less than these names, still hold their freedom of this splendour of height, still breathe its fearless health, the inspiration of its faultless pleasure; free still, amid

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these untrammelled forces, to perfect their own vision of what is beautiful, interpret for themselves their own discovery of what seems true.14

Thus, Young drew a carefully constructed narrative line from the twenty fallen members of the FRCC who perished in the First World War, to the congregation in front of him, and on to the hikers and climbers who would experience the Cumbrian fells around him ‘in the time to come’. With the end of the Great War just six years in the past, and with his own physical loss painfully on show, his theme was freedom—of the fell, of the land and of the spirit. Great Gable’s appropriation as the stage for post-war assertions of nationalist identity is unmistakable in Winthrop Young’s words, the freedom he cites not without underlying constraints. His message in effect was about the stewardship of future behaviours on the fell—a laying down of the expectations on those to come to find the same ‘faultless pleasure’ and splendour in the landscape as he and his fraternity of rock climbers had done in the past. It was in Jonathan Westaway’s words: an exercise in ‘instructing post-War generations in how to read a landscape’ (Westaway, 2013, p.189). Even so, the liberty Young spoke of was not just rhetorical. He and his fellow FRCC members had made concrete progress literally to free up the land. In a deal ratified the year before, the Club had bought up the surrounding high land above 1500 feet, some 3000 acres, and bequeathed it to the National Trust to preserve it for the nation in perpetuity.15 This act effectively scuppered plans that had been proposed to turn the Sty Head Pass into a road linking the valleys of Borrowdale and Wasdale, a connection which to this day remains unmade. It also effectively heralded the birth of the National Parks movement, a ‘full twentyseven years before its eventual foundation’ (Westaway, 2013, p.168) and seven years before the famous mass trespass of Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1931 expressed its collective frustration with private landownership.16 Eye-witness reports of the 1924 ceremony on Great Gable make interesting reading, referencing the link between the natural topography of the peak and its attendant ‘fitness’ as a memorial site. The bronze monument on the cairn is conflated with ‘one of nature’s great monuments’, Great Gable itself, by the Special Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian.17 On the same page, another reporter describes the location of the memorial as ‘one of the grandest and most appropriate’.18 And the Correspondent of The Observer, also present at the event, opined:

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No fitter, no worthier spot could be found in the country for the monument to those gallant men. Great Gable, though not the highest, is the best-known peak in the English Lake District. It is the one height in this country that looks every inch a mountain.19

This unspoken assumption of what constitutes ‘mountainness’ is in some ways an extension of Young’s subtle control of the future readership of the land. Gable’s natural position at the end of the Wasdale valley, its prominence as a peak viewed from afar, its pyramidal shape and its unforgettable name all point to a particular kind of mountain characteristic which journalists and guide writers habitually celebrate. Alfred Wainwright, for one, is transparent about this in his own writing: ‘The name has status and confers status […] If Great Gable were known only as Wasdale Fell fewer persons would climb it.’ (Wainwright, 2005, Great Gable: p.2) One of the embedded correspondents in 1924 wanted to see still more of these classic signifiers of mountain credibility. Could the Gable congregation not have been more ‘naked’ as befits a remote Cumbrian summit? Could ‘that ceremony held in the clouds’ not have exploited more vociferously the natural drama of the weather: ‘gathering, enfolding, dissolving: pierced momentarily by a gleam of sun; thickening again, and at times turning to Phantoms folk a dozen feet away’?20 But the symbolic charge of the event and its demonstrable commitment to a longterm vision of freedom of, and in, the fells remained the overwhelming received message. Young and his colleagues in the FRCC, specifically its president, Arthur Wakefield, and the Reverend J. H. Smith who led prayers after Young’s tribute, had managed to turn highly resistant attitudes to mountain-based memorialisation (Westaway, 2013) into a feeling, in the words of one of the correspondents, that ‘the whole mountain is the imperishable cenotaph’.21 That turn-around must in some ways be attributed to the transformational currency of ritual, the choreography of its symbols and, to return to Grimes, the delicately constructed sense of past, present and future, embedded in Young’s elegiac tribute. His choice of words divulges Young’s deep connection to the mountains and suggests something about his understanding of the power of symbols based in the surrounding high

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landscape, and its potency for the particular audience gathered in the June mist. He moves between past victims’ ultimate sacrifice to the future of the nation’s children on the fellside, the rock of Great Gable standing as ‘a witness, perishable also in the onset of time, that this realm of mountain earth is in their honour free’. Thus, freedom attained by victory over Germany in 1914 is seamlessly aligned in his narrative with the freedom of spirit inculcated by the fells, which in turn is made concrete, or perhaps more appropriately lithified by the bequest of the surrounding land to the National Trust—a seemingly simple but potent ritual recipe. That link between past and future, between fells and freedom, so carefully threaded through by Young remains evident in some of the twentyfirst-century accounts of armistice day on Great Gable. These are now widely available on internet climbing forums such as UKCC and on YouTube. One account from ‘SM’ in 2012, resonates with the legacy of Young: Over the years, I have attended many public acts of remembrance including formal church services. But this low-key event - no striking clock, no booming canon, no lamenting pipes or ringing bugle - was, I felt, uniquely dignified and moving. Also, up there high among the Cumbrian mountains on a solemn occasion, there was a palpable sense of fraternity and community: after all, everyone there shared a love of the fells and had been willing to walk two or more hours to attend the ceremony.22

Echoing Young’s focus on ‘brothers’ and the predominantly masculine characterisation of the mountain identified in the first Gable commemoration, this short reflection points up the relationship between location, ritual enactment and history. Observed each year since 1924, it still generates large audiences (500 or so in 2011) and builds a particular, if fleeting, sense of community, one which galvanises around national, predominantly male, histories of conquest and loss. In interrogating the make-up of ritual groups, Grimes asks ‘which values are reinforced by this ritual’ (Grimes, 2013, p.241)? From this latter-day example it is clear they are in many ways similar to Young’s original intention: solemn and understated remembrance infused with a celebration of a particular kind of nostalgic freedom on the hills.

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Inca Capacocha Sacrifices Ordinary

Extraordinary

Personal Mountain Rituals Cairn Building

Remembrance Day on Great Gable

Rituals in Mountain Religion Inca Capacocha Sacrifices

One of Edwin Bernbaum’s ten overlapping themes of mountain sacredness is ‘Ancestors and the Dead’, in relation to which he cites Shingon Buddhism in Japan and Maori mountain mythology in New Zealand as examples of mountains being commonly conceived as ‘abodes of the dead’ (Bernbaum, 2006, p.306). The Great Gable annual armistice ceremony discussed above, others like it in the region (on Castle Crag in Borrowdale for instance) and much further afield (for example atop Mount McKay in Ontario, Canada) suggest that there is an enduring and cross-cultural tendency to mark the death of past generations in mountain environments. In this subsection I will continue to focus on the theme of death but here the connections between mortality and mountains are altogether more immediate. Bernbaum does not include ‘sacrifice’ in his top ten themes but there are several examples of sacrificial rites on peaks across the world, ones sited in various contexts and designed with diverse ends in mind. These range from the killing of chickens to ease passage to Mount Kitanglad, in the Philippines,23 to the slaughter of a cow in the Sacrifice to the Mountain ceremony in Maoxian, Sichuan Province, China (Yu, 2004). In this subsection I will examine the notorious historic custom of human sacrifice in the Andes in South America, alongside a consideration of the elaborate ritual ceremonies which accompanied this practice. Mountain worship in the words of A. Bastien is a ‘keystone of Andean Culture’ (Reinhard, 1985, p.315), evident across many countries in South America including Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. This worship comes in many forms and is still evident in many indigenous cultural activities today. These include water cults, fertility and ancestral rites and ceremonies for livestock protection (Reinhard, 1985), acts which provoke numerous festivities and ritual events across this very large region of South America. The use of human sacrifice was, in relation to these wider activities, a rare event and is according to accounts no longer being practised, although the last report of such a rite, in 1958, is surprisingly recent (Reinhard, 1985, p.312).24 Here I will focus on the highly ritualised human sacrifices of the capacocha conducted during

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the era of the Incas (1438–1532) before the Spanish invaded the region and eliminated the entire Inca civilisation, using the sulphur of the neighbouring high volcanoes as fuel for their guns (Bernbaum, 2006, pp.171– 172).25 These sacrifices, whilst extreme and untypical, were nevertheless a feature of mountain culture in this period, drawing on many of the ritual functions listed above. They were meticulously orchestrated events, conceived over many years, using multiple devices, objects and symbols as part of their dark theatricality. The details of the capacocha ceremonies have been rigorously researched and documented by high-altitude archaeologists and whilst they remain traumatic and hard to comprehend, I have included them in this tight survey to represent the fullest spread of ritual activity—from the incidental to the fundamental. Mountain rituals cannot solely be organised in terms of a domestic-epic scale, of course—there are other components to take into account in relation to the landscape of ‘extremes’, I sketched in Part 1. The ritual ceremonies of capacocha 26 —meaning royal fertility offering (Reinhard and Ceruti, 2010, p.6)—were held across an extensive range of Inca territory from Southern Peru, to North-Western Argentina to Northern Chile. At least 27 sacrificial sites have been discovered between 1898 and 1999 with many of the finds yielding remarkably well-preserved remains of the victims (Besom, 2009, pp.10–11). The extreme mountainous conditions responsible for the protection of these cadavers for hundreds of years did nothing to prolong the victims’ lives at the time; mountain harshness and extremity were in fact key factors in defining the ritual space. Indeed, the elaborate steps taken by the Incas to construct, at dizzying altitudes, the staged conditions for the sacrifice are a clear indication of the mountain’s cultural significance and perceived efficacy. One of the most striking characteristics of the capacocha is the extent to which the ritual of immolation formed part of several other festive rites lasting over several months, with the entire period of ‘sacrifice’ lasting for years for the victim. Thomas Besom offers a reconstruction in his preface to Of Summits and Sacrifice (2009): She had been born in a village near Lake Titi Qaqa. When she was only ten, a representative of the state called the apu panaka, who was visiting her native community, had seen her and been impressed by her beauty and grace. He had picked her to become an aqlla, a ‘chosen woman.’ Though considered a great honor to be so named, she had been sad when she was separated from her parents, whom she had not seen since, and taken

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to a provincial aqlla wasi (house of the chosen women). There she had lived for four years, being raised by the mama-kuna, the sacred ‘mothers.’ (Besom, 2009, pp.1–2)27

In a gruesome bureaucracy to modern eyes, the now fourteen-year-old was first designated as a sacrificial subject in waiting, then allocated to a region far away from her homeland and within that region, to a specific feature in the landscape—in this instance to a high peak, Llullaillaco, 900 kilometres from Lake Titicaca. At the same time a collection of specific objects was identified, with which she would be buried. These objects formed part of the offering to the mountain and included, in Besom’s inventory: ‘ceramic vessels, a wooden spoon, two wooden cups, six cloth bags, several elaborate textiles, and three female statuettes’ (Besom, 2009, p.2).28 The statuettes were made from gold, silver and spondylus (spiny oyster shell) respectively and ‘all were dressed in miniature clothing and feather headdresses’ (Besom, 2009, p.2) (Fig. 3). Having been selected and allocated to a peak, the fourteen-year-old then hiked the 900 kilometres over forty days to attend a huge festive gathering in her honour, accompanied by an entourage of some significant size—an imperial official, three priests, a band of Llama herds. This event, held at an important Incan centre in Catarpe, lasted several days and provided the penultimate resting point before another ten-day hike to the base of the mountain. Finally, accompanied by a retinue of up to fifteen people, the young girl began her slow climb up the mountain of Llullaillaco, taking three or four more days to reach the summit. The characteristics of this ascent, performed over five hundred years ago, are pointedly redolent of modern mountaineering techniques. The Incas had prepared a ‘base camp’ or tambo from which to begin the trek to the summit, the remains of which are still very much in evidence on the mountainside today; large numbers of the ritual-cum-expedition spent time there acclimatising to the altitude (over 5000 metres up) and/or waiting for good weather to allow the climb to go ahead (Reinhard and Ceruti, 2010, p.95). A series of interim dwellings was erected along the trail to the summit to allow for the party to stagger the route before the summit was reached (anything up to a week into the climb). The early pioneers attempting the handful of 8000 meter peaks, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, planned their climbs in just the same way with Base Camp serving Camp I, Camp II and so on; the first successful ascent on Everest had nine such camps (Venables, 2013). ‘It

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Fig. 3 Inca figure found on Llullaillaco, Argentina (Photo by Randal Sheppard [https://www.flickr.com/photos/25222005@N08/6965596638. Photo slightly lightened from original])

becomes evident’, as pioneer of high-altitude archaeology Johan Reinhard observes, ‘that the Incas achieved a very high level of mountaineering and logistical skills’ (Reinhard and Ceruti 2010, p.94). The capacocha sacrifices provide one of the most extreme examples of the ritual manipulation of mountains. This elaborate ceremony, drawn out over five years, moved inexorably from the valleys below to the girls’ ultimate demise high up in the Andes. Here their immolation, undertaken by a fasting priest, was marked by solemn songs, music and careful choreography, (circling three times round a stone or other pivot point, thought to have sacred power) before the victim was put to death, often by burying them alive in a carefully created mine shaft, surrounded by the

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offerings noted earlier (Besom, 2009, p.35). The longitudinal ritual was underlined by the Inca’s belief, along with many mountain cultures, that the dead have a unique capacity to influence the life of a community. In this case, in the Inca belief structure, the victims are acting (or are forced to act) to protect the wider society from the very worst a mountain environment can visit upon their surroundings—drought or floods, landslide or avalanche. The capacocha ritual is a disconcertingly literal example of Bernbaum’s theme of mountains as ‘abodes of the dead’ (Bernbaum, 2006, p.306) and answers in the affirmative Grimes’s question relating to ritual objects: ‘Do the dead act?’ (Grimes, 2013, p.240). But although much of the ritualisation evident here does owe itself to traditional beliefs in the need to assuage mountain deities, there was another more political dimension to the drawn-out victimisation of the chosen ones, as Reinhard explains: The long walks toward the bases of sacred mountains and the climbs to their summits could also play roles in these [imperializing] strategies. Inca ritual specialists with their offerings were moving across recently conquered landscapes, and the routes toward and places of worship they selected along the way contributed to the consolidation of Inca domination. (Reinhard and Ceruti, 2010, p.99)

Ritual constructions of the sacred are merged, therefore, with a parallel political project of empire building, large and small. Immolation was used to broker relations with non-Inca communities and young victims were sometimes even offered up by their parents to raise their local status and influence. The painstaking choreography of the capacocha ritual space was not just to do with ‘proper placement, positioning, geographical and cosmological orientations’ (Grimes, 2013, p.239). It was an expression of a brute political reality. Shugendo Ordinary

Extraordinary

Personal Mountain Rituals Cairn Building

Remembrance Day on Great Gable

Rituals in Mountain Religion Inca Capacocha Sacrifices

Shugendo

Whilst the ritual sacrifice of young Andeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was part of a wider project of Inca imperialisation,

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it remained a rare and specialised custom. Doubtless it retains its prominence in accounts of mountain ritual activity more because of its unique blend of mortality and theatricality than for its representativeness. The Japanese religious form of Shugendo, ‘until the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps the most widespread form of religion in Japanese village life’ (Price et al., 2013, p.261) is on a different scale altogether, its practices dating back to the seventh or eighth century and its influence still widespread today, even in the so-called ‘new religions’ of Japan emerging in the mid-twentieth century (Earhart, 1989, p.224). Practised by followers called yamabushi (‘those who lie down in the mountain’),29 the religion flourished in the mediaeval period when priests of the Shugendo religion settled down to convert villagers to worship their local mountain (Bernbaum, 1997, p.61) (Fig. 4). As such there is a complex legacy to Shugendo with practices varying depending on local conditions, although its common features draw on a fusion of the folk religion of Shinto, Buddhism and Taoist magic (Swanson, 1981, p.56). Meaning ‘the way of mastering ascetic powers’ (Bernbaum, 1997, p.60), followers of Shugendo fundamentally believe that the act of climbing is purifying and empowering and can lead to

Fig. 4 Yamabushi priests survey the landscape from the mountainside (https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:立石光正DSCF0451.JPG)

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enlightenment, not in a future heaven but in the here-and-now.30 This act can be on a single summit (such as Mount Fuji) or a series of peaks (along the route from Yoshino to Kumano) and is observed with various complementary austerities along the way: washing in mountain springs, gathering mountain firewood, fasting, scaling precipitous rocks and having one’s sins ‘weighed’ (Swanson, 1981, p.59). Shugendo rituals are organised in stations, more extended and elaborate even than the capacocha sacrifices; pilgrimage is a central motif and an important ritual framework for the religion. One of the tangential activities of yamabushi once included rituals of human sacrifice, known as ishikozume (as well as examples of selfimmolation) and these, like the capacocha, were delivered in highly staged contexts on the mountainside. In H. Byron Earhart’s account of these ritual executions, he elaborates on an unlikely crossover with the ancient Japanese theatre form of Noh, and specifically the play Taniko, which documents the ritual flinging of unfortunates from the mountain ridge: Because it is the rule that sick persons during mountain austerities must be subjected to taniko, the yamabushi - crying all the while - pushed his beloved disciple into a chasm. He buried him by throwing stones and tile [sic] over his body. (Earhart, 1966, p.121)

There will be a section devoted to the Taniko play in the following Part (2.2), but here I would like to concentrate on the less bloody pursuits of the yamabushi and particularly on the highly symbolic extended pilgrimage from Yoshino to Kumano (known as the nyubu), a route followed by yamabushi for hundreds of years. This ritual, documented in exacting detail by Paul Swanson in the 1980s (Swanson, 1981) and more recently the subject of a film (Abela, 2012), draws together several concerns of this section—the detailed process of mountain symbolisation, the embodiment of liminality and the theme of death and its ritualisation, here coupled with rebirth and renewal for the yamabushi ritual actors, in stark contrast to the previous subsection.31 The symbolic meanings associated with the nyubu are so carefully constructed and fixed in historic teachings that they form part of an examination of the senior yamabushi, tasked with leading the novitiates. This opening ritual occurs before pilgrims start on the journey proper and is itself a complex and multidimensional event. Swanson gives us a flavour of the interrogation:

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Question: As a yamabushi, a disciple of the Shogo-in Monzeki,32 you are expected to be aware of the proper significance of shugendo. We will now test you, as is our custom. Answer: I will answer. (Swanson, 1981, p.66)

After a number of historical questions relating to the religion’s founders and to the meanings of yamabushi and Shugendo, the interrogation moves to the symbolism of the costumes worn and the props carried by the pilgrims: ‘What is the meaning of the tokin [skull cap] on your head?’ (To symbolise the unity of the sacred and the profane). ‘What is the meaning of the yuigesa [cloak] on your shoulders?’ (To represent the 6 virtues of charity, precepts, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom). ‘What is the significance of the shakujo [staff] in your hand?’ (It represents the staff of wisdom) (Swanson, 1981, pp.66–67). The accuracy of the pilgrim’s answers confirms whether they are a true yamabushi and able to lead the novitiates. When it comes to the focus of worship for Shugendo itself the senior yamabushi is equally explicit: it is on ‘the mandalas of the Diamond and Womb Realms’, a duality fundamental to Shingon Buddhism and mapped with geo-symbolic neatness onto the landscape—from Mount Sanjogatake in the North (the diamond realm) to Kumano in the South (the womb realm).33 These mandalas overlap precisely over Mount Omine (Bernbaum, 1997, p.71), the ‘headquarters’ of Shugendo and the location of its foundation monastery by the first yamabushi, En-no-Gyoja. The pilgrimage moves south down the Kii peninsular for 60 km stopping at no less than 75 stations, known as nabiki, a term ‘derived from the verb nabiku, “to yield or submit”’ (Swanson, 1981, p.63).34 These nabiki are the locations for a series of notable ascetic practices, which together form the realisation of the symbolic progression from death to rebirth. These include the immersion of all the yamabushi novices in the river Yoshino, passing through funerary gates, blind navigation in pitch black barns, and immersion in purifying smoke. Rebirth is symbolised by climbing through a rock feature known as the Buddha’s Womb35 and ultimately, after another water purifying stage, by re-entry into civilisation. The most iconic of all the Shugendo actions, bringing together in one act this complementary symbolism of death and rebirth, is located at nabiki 68: the practice of ‘throwing away the body’. Swanson offers an experiential account:

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Ropes are tied across both shoulders and a yamabushi holds the pilgrim’s legs while he is slowly lowered over the edge of the cliff. The man thus suspended has to confess his sins and the yamabushi will ask questions such as, ‘Will you respect your parents?’, ‘Do you promise to study hard?’, and ‘Have you confessed all your sins?’ After the dangling man has answered suitably, he is hauled up again. There is one instant when the yamabushi will loosen their hold so for a split second you begin to fall, but you are caught very quickly. That one fraction of a second, however, is quite unforgettable and heart-stopping, a moment of truth. (Swanson, 1981, p.70)

As an exemplar ritual gesture, one of many ‘enactments’ (Grimes, 2013, p.196) performed along the pilgrimage route, this action is emblematic of the particularities of mountain rituals analysed in this section. It consciously references the techniques of rock climbing—specifically the relationship between climber and belayer as well as between climber, rock and rope. But it elevates these techniques onto another level of specialness — one might call it habitual excess. It does this by physicalising the concept of liminality—of in-betweenness—forcing the novice to embody this state as part of the transformational impact of the wider pilgrimage. In that split second of letting go, the momentarily unsupported yamabushi experiences a state somewhere between safety and falling, trust and betrayal, the rule of law and chaos, perhaps even between life and death.36 In a different context, however, for instance in the environment of an indoor climbing wall, that same action of ‘letting go’, just for a second, would be typical of any early belay training, the unexpected jolt part of the initiation of the novice climber into a culture which is comfortable with the unforeseen. ‘Ritual originates in the ritualization characteristic of the daily round’, Grimes asserts, ‘but ritual stands out against the background of ordinariness; it is, we might say, extraordinary ordinariness’ (Grimes, 2013, p.195). In this one action, then, we can see how mountain rituals bring the act of devotion together with the specifics of climbing technique. They exploit a location’s natural topography and features of the rock face, treating them as stimuli to provoke results both climber and pilgrim are equally intent on achieving. As the head yamabushi observed for Paul Swanson: While you are concentrating on getting past these dangerous places […] your mind is clear. You do not think of money, sex, drink, or any other distraction. Perhaps for only a second you think of no-thing. For a moment

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you are in the world of no-thing-ness […]. This is the state of mind you must cultivate. The purpose of shugendo is to realize this state of mind and cultivate it in everyday life. (Swanson, 1981, p.72)

Practicing Shugendo, then, induces a powerful state where there is only the present, a momentariness, or ‘no-thing-ness’, as Swanson calls it. In other contexts, this state might be described as a heightened mindfulness—one often hailed by rock climbers as the ultimate purpose behind their pursuit of danger (see Part 2.3) and which in recent years has been proven to have therapeutic ends (Luttenberger et al., 2015). An unlikely place to achieve a healthy mental balance, hanging from a vertical wall can be good for us.

Conclusion I began this section promising to bring ideas from Ritual Studies together with Mountain Studies and have sought to do this by focusing on key ideas of liminality, spatial agency and symbolisation from the former; and on themes of ancestry, sacredness and renewal from the latter. The key structural conceit has been to arrange my four ritual examples on a continuum from the personal to the epic.37 This approach has allowed me to examine incrementally the shades of extraordinary ordinariness claimed by Ritual Studies critics. It has also meant placing the modest quotidian rituals (of cairn building for instance) on an equal footing with those which have historically been more dominant in the literature on mountain ritual culture (capacocha and Shugendo). The practice of ritualisation in mountains is I contend equally illuminated by the incidental and low key as it is by the spectacular and horrifying. True to the nature of so many rituals, the leitmotifs for these examples have been death, remembrance and commemoration and these themes are reflected in the special care taken by the ritual makers discussed to designate and transform these ritual sites appropriately—from the bronze plaque on the cairn of Great Gable to the sacrificial shaft erected nearly 7000 metres up in the Andes. Some may find that this thematic consistency results in an overly morbid tone to this section but it is important to reflect on the counterpoints to death and dying, the themes of rebirth and renewal, which are also present in these rituals, even those of the capacocha. For the cairn builders the sense of renewal comes from the pivotal

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position of the waymark along their chosen route, as well as in the performative act of cairn construction; for the Armistice Day participants it is embedded in the iconography of the poppy and in the freedom-to-roam legacy bequeathed by the Fell and Rock Climbing Club on the region; in the capacocha sacrifices, a child is martyred for the good of the wider community, in the belief that such an extreme act can protect generations of people from the capricious climatic behaviour of mountains; and for the yamabushi the idea of rebirth is mapped onto the very landscape (the ‘Womb Realm’) and embodied in the act of climbing through the ‘inner womb tunnel’. Ritual’s means of distributing power is also a dominant theme in these mountain examples—as Bernbaum’s thematic analysis based on ‘clusters’ of ideas might have predicted (Bernbaum, 2006, p.307). Bernbaum’s own example from New Zealand expresses the mountain Ngati Tuwharetoa’s power in both religious and political terms and the same blend is in evidence with my chosen examples in this chapter, combined with the power derived from a mountain’s situatedness.38 Power is contested in mountains partly because of their propensity for straddling national borders, making them ripe for performances of nationhood like Winthrop Young’s on Great Gable and Tenzing Norgay’s on Everest. Power too is exercised by ritual leaders on their followers, in ultimate terms for the girls of the capacocha ceremonies, and in restitutive terms for the yamabushi. Power, finally, is constructed by narrators and historians, attributing revered mountain characteristics, to a specific peak for example—its perfect shape or position—and positing them as natural and therefore undisputed attributes. These constructions are an important factor in the evaluation of a mountain’s agency, and of Grimes’ suggestion that landscapes are the ‘lead actor’ (Grimes, 2013, p.258) in certain ritual contexts. Spaces are clearly acting on their participants in the examples in this chapter, but this action (or symbolic power) is caught up in the clusters of other factors surrounding the practice, including the way in which the mountain has been narrated in its cultural context—by storytellers and spokespeople, in literature and in the media. There are, then, distinct thematic commonalities across this cross section of rituals but, it must be stressed, no attempt is being made to suggest that these are definitive or scaleable, working as I have from such a small sample. What can be said is that the range of rituals identified in the foundation research for this section indicates a particular tendency for mountainsides to be ritualised across cultures and countries. The detailed

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analyses here suggest that one of the key reasons for mountains’ ritual suitability is their inherent liminality, a liminality which is often exploited in the ritual acts themselves. Mountains are between earth and sky; for their explorers they help mediate between urban materiality and immersion in nature and the wild. They often divide nations—literally—and are so remote that different kinds of law establish themselves as modes for survival in them. They represent places of great danger but encourage the developments of skills and techniques which mitigate that danger. Their in-betweenness is their attraction and makes them particularly susceptible to ritual augmentation. This fact more than any other helps account for the ubiquity of mountain rituals, I believe. Mountainscapes already do some of the work a ritual is designed to do, their presence is forceful; they ‘separate’ us from known communities and circumstances as we climb them, before ‘reincorporating’ us into those contexts on our return, modestly or massively transformed. van Gennep’s ritual model (van Gennep, 1960, pp.10–11) is, as it were, built into the characteristics of mountain topography, with the summit cairn the pivot point. It is for this reason that mountains are seen as active agents in the enactment of rituals—both by theorists and practitioners. If space ‘acts’ in a ritual, mountain spaces are particularly (if not uniquely) active, replete as they are with the ingredients of influence—potent histories and stories, dynamic atmospheres and moving topographies.

Notes 1. Mount Everest, for instance as the border between China and Nepal; Mount Roraima, the tripoint between Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil or Tumba Peak, straddling Greece, Bulgaria and Macedonia. 2. Schechner may be influenced by Victor Turner in this use of the term ‘special’. See Catherine Bell’s seminal Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice: ‘he [Turner] describes rituals as those special, paradigmatic activities that mediate or orchestrate the necessary and opposing demands of both communitas and the formalised social order’ (Bell, 1992, p.21). 3. See for instance the complex revision history of the Munros from 1891– 2015, available as part of the Database of British and Irish Hills, (http:// www.hills-database.co.uk/downloads.html#munrotab) or the reclassification of Foel Penolau in Snowdonia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukwales-46441129 (Accessed 14 May 2019).

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4. Although Bernbaum’s focus is not expressly on ritual, his interest in sacredness leads him to outline many ritual practices as part of a community’s expression of that sacredness. 5. See Grimes’ five-page diagram of Elements, mapped against Considerations, and Sample Research Questions, for more details (Grimes, 2013, pp.237–241). 6. See this close-up image of the cairn for instance: https://www.flickr.com/ photos/davidmunro/6886880756/ (Accessed 7 September 2018). 7. One of the Seven Summits of the world, each one being the highest in their respective continents. 8. A single lump of rock in this instance, not a pile of stones. 9. ‘Those who allow ambition to eclipse reason and climb beyond the point where they should turn back are said to have succumbed to “summit fever”. On big mountains this can be a killer’ (Ingram, 2015, p.401). 10. See for instance the portable plaque on Elbrus marking 1941–1945: http://www.actionchallenge.com/var/uploads/cache/filemanager/861/ 40cd750bba9870f18aada2478b24840a/elbrus-summit-1.jpg. See also this pair of Irish climbers in front of what appears to be a Patriarchal, two-bar cross, probably erected by local Russian climbers (Elbrus is in the Russian Caucasus): http://iantaylortrekking.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2012/07/Elbrus-2006-089.jpg (Both accessed 7 September 2018). 11. Anna Kaminski a Lonely Planet writer captures the wider picture: ‘At the top of the pass between Dughla and Lobuche I pass a tangle of prayer flags and a veritable graveyard of cairns and memorials. One is dedicated to Scott Fischer, the veteran mountain guide lost in the 1996 Everest disaster, and nearby is a new cairn commemorating Eve Girawong, one of the 18 victims of the avalanche that hit Base Camp during the 2015 earthquake’. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/nepal/ travel-tips-and-articles/returning-to-everest-trekking-to-base-camp-afterthe-2015-earthquake (Accessed 7 September 2018). 12. Young is best known for his early and definitive contribution to the genre of the climbing manual, Mountain Craft (Young, 1920). See Part 3.1 for an elaboration of his ideas. 13. Wade Davis numbers the party at 80 or so (Davis, 2012, p.3), but the pictorial record and the reports from the time in the Manchester Guardian (9 June 1924, p.6) suggest many more, up to 250 people. 14. http://www.frcc.co.uk/archives-2/great-gable/tribute-by-geoffreywinthrop-young/ (Accessed 7 September 2018). 15. See the map of the purchase here: http://www.frcc.co.uk/archives-2/ great-gable/map-of-land-purchase/ (Accessed 17 May 2019). 16. A potted history of the National Parks development can be found on the NP website: http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/students/ whatisanationalpark/history.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

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Manchester Guardian, 9 June 1924, p.6. Manchester Guardian, 9 June 1924, p.6. The Observer, 8 June 1924, p.7. Manchester Guardian, 9 June 1924, p.6. The Observer, 8 June 1924, p.7. http://forums.outdoorsmagic.com/showthread.php/49427-TR-GreatGable-act-of-remembrance#MUCcglLkKIi1myPF.97. http://pcij.org/stories/the-spirits-flora-fauna-thrive-in-mountkitanglad/. In 1985 Reinhard reports (1985, p.313) that the Moya people were still making human sacrifices to mountain gods. Sulphur from Popocatepetl, in Mexico for instance. Also known as capac hucha or qhapaq hucha. Besom’s reconstruction fuses a number of accounts but is broadly based on Johan Reinhard’s archaeological trip to Llullaillaco when three mummies were discovered, a seven-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl and the fourteen to fifteen-year-old girl he describes here (Reinhard, 1999; Reinhard and Ceruti, 2010). See also Reinhard and Ceruti (2010, Appendix B) for a listing of all the objects found next to the three victims on the burial site. Or alternatively, ‘Soldiers of the mountains’ (Swanson, 1981, p.80). Bernbaum links this belief to Shingon Buddhist philosophy (Bernbaum, 1997, p. 71). Although the capacocha victims were thought to exist in perpetuity after their deaths as deities. A head priest. See Gary Snyder’s recollection of the Yoshino-Kumano route for another explanation of this mandala geography: http://www.kyotojournal.org/ the-journal/spirit/the-womb-diamond-trail/. It is also possible to navigate the route from South to North. Located at nabiki 67, the Buddha’s Womb involves negotiating ‘a narrow tunnel, ten meters long, through the rocks called tainai kuguri (“through the inner womb”)’. (Swanson, 1981, p.72). There are ancient stories of this ritual ending in the death of the victim, and thus forming part of the practice of Ishikozume. I am grateful to David Shearing for helping me model this framework in relation to the range of rituals sourced in the research for this section. ‘In the 19th century, Europeans in New Zealand were starting to buy up parcels of land on Tongariro, the sacred mountain of the Ngati Tuwharetoa. This threatened the mana or power of the chief and the tribe, which depended on maintaining the integrity of the volcano. In order to keep Tongariro whole, a European advisor counseled the Paramount Chief, Horonuku Te Heuheu Tukino IV, to give the mountain to the Crown

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as a park for the benefit of everyone. He did so in 1887, and Tongariro National Park became the first national park in New Zealand. It later became a World Heritage site.’ (Bernbaum, 2006, p.305).

References Abela, J.-M. (2012) Shugendo Now. Festival Media. Amster, E.J. (2013) Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956. Texas: University of Texas Press. Bell, C. (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernbaum, E. (1997) Sacred Mountains of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bernbaum, E. (2006) Sacred Mountains : Themes and Teachings. Mountain Research and Development, 26 (4), pp. 304–309. Available at: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1659/0276-4741%282006%2926% 5B304%3ASMTAT%5D2.0.CO%3B2. Besom, T. (2009) Of Summits and Sacrifice: An Ethnohistoric Study of Inka Religious Practices. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cooper, A. (1997) Sacred Mountains: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meanings. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Davis, W. (2012) Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. London: Vintage Books. Earhart, H.B. (1966) Ishikozume Ritual Execution in Japanese Religion Especially in Shugend¯ o. Numen, 13, pp. 116–127. Available at: http://www.jstor. org/stable/3269418. Earhart, H.B. (1989) Mount Fuji and Shugendo. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 16 (2/3), pp. 205–226 (Nanzan University). Available at: http:// www.jstor.org/stable/30234008. Gillet, A. (2009) One Stone After the Other: Poetical Considerations on Stony Ground. In: Smith, M. et al. (eds.) Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 283–297. Grimes, R.L. (1978) The Rituals of Walking and Flying: Public Participatory Events at Actor’s Lab. The Drama Review: TDR, 22 (4), pp. 77–82. Grimes, R.L. (2011) Ritual. Material Religion, 7 (1), pp. 76–83. https://doi. org/10.2752/175183411x12968355482097. Grimes, R.L. (2013) The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, P. (2000) Confetti of Empire: The Conquest of Everest in Nepal, India, Britain, and New Zealand. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 42 (2), pp. 307–332 (University of Leeds). Hori, I. (1966) Mountains and Their Importance for the Idea of the Other World in Japanese Folk Religion. History of Religions, 6 (1), pp. 1–23.

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Ingram, S. (2015) Between the Sunset and the Sea. London: William Collins. Krakauer, J. (2009) Into Thin Air. London: Macmillan. Luttenberger, K. et al. (2015) Indoor Rock Climbing (Bouldering) as a New Treatment for Depression: Study Design of a Waitlist-Controlled Randomized Group Pilot Study and the First Results. BMC Psychiatry, 15 (1), pp. 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-015-0585-8. Maddrell, A. (2009) A Place for Grief and Belief: The Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland. Social & Cultural Geography, 10 (6), pp. 675– 693. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360903068126. Michaels, A. (2012) Performative Tears: Emotions in Rituals and Ritualized Emotions. In: Michaels, A. and Wulf, C. (eds.) Emotions in Rituals and Performances. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 29–40. Myerhoff, B.G. (1984) A Death in Due Time: Construction of Self and Culture in Ritual Drama. In MaCaloon, J.J. (ed.) Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Towards a Theory of Cultural Performance. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, pp. 149–178. Peattie, R. (1936) Mountain Geography: A Critique and Field Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Price, M.F. et al. (eds.) (2013) Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reinhard, J. (1985) Sacred Mountains : An Ethno-Archaeological Study of High Andean Ruins. International Mountain Society, 5 (4), pp. 299–317. Reinhard, J. (1999) Inca Sacrifice Frozen in Time. National Geographic, 196 (5), pp. 36–55. Reinhard, J. and Ceruti, M.C. (2010) Inca Rituals and Sacred Mountains: A Study of the World’s Highest Archaeological Sites. Los Angeles: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663908097082. Schechner, R. (2006) Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Swanson, P. (1981) Shugendo and the Yoshino-Kumano Pilgrimage: An Example of Mountain Pilgrimage. Monumenta Nipponica, 36 (1), pp. 55–84. Turner, V. (1973) The Center out There : Pilgrim’s Goal. History of Religions, 12 (3), pp. 191–230. Turner, V. (1986) The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Turner, V. (2007) Liminality and Communitas. In Bial, H. (ed.) The Performance Studies Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Usher, G. (2012) Places of Enchantment: Meeting God in Landscapes. London: SPCK Publishing. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/PlacesEnchantment-Meeting-God-landscapes/dp/0281067929. van Gennep, A. (1960) Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Venables, S. (2013) Everest: Summit of Achievement. London: Bloomsbury. Wainwright, A. (2005) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Western Fells. London: Frances Lincoln.

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Westaway, J. (2013) Mountains of Memory, Landscapes of Loss: Scafell Pike and Great Gable as War Memorials, 1919–24. Landscapes 14 (2), pp. 174–193. https://doi.org/10.1179/1466203513z.00000000019. Young, G.W. (1920) Mountain Craft. London: Methuen. Yu, S. (2004) Sacrifice to the Mountain: A Ritual Performance of the Qiang Minority People in China. The Drama Review: TDR, 48 (4), pp. 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1162/1054204042442035.

Handrail 3 Narrative Paths: The Fairfield Horseshoe (W18-25/214)

For a whole week we observed the snow rapidly receding on the flanks of Helvellyn, starting as a delectable icing top, moving through patches of white piping mid-week and shrinking to a naked and exposed summit cake on Friday. It was the third year of our project and a hint of seriousness was creeping into our planning. A significant birthday prompted us to avoid the bottleneck of school holidays and to enjoy the fells in relative isolation; we found ourselves truanting in Patterdale in an unseasonably hot May. With the diminishing snow our ambitions grew. Why complete a single peak when you can link several mountains together in a ridge route and tick off as many as eight, all in a row? Mountains are linked together in lots of different ways: in listings constructed cross-continentally (the Seven Summits), in collections based on height (the fourteen ‘8000ers’), or in the nomenclature of mountain ranges (Himalayas, Andes, The Great Dividing Range). In Britain and Ireland alone, there are over thirty classification groups for hills and mountains based on objective criteria—prominence, height, separation from other peaks—or in Wainwright’s case on a subjective and personal assessment of mountain-worthiness.

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These classifications range from the acronymic (Humps, HUndred Metre Prominence) and the autobiographical (Munros, Corbetts, Grahams, Hewitts, Nuttalls, Donald Deweys), to the ironic (Alan Dawson’s listing of Marilyns, to complement the better-known Munro[e]s). Collectively they have spawned a gently competitive culture of completion1 ; entry to the ‘Marilyn Hall of Fame’ is not a celebrity look-alike event but a badge of honour for people bagging 600 or more of the 1556 hills lucky enough to have a drop of 150 metres on all sides.2 These listings inevitably encourage strategies for completion (something which was emergent for our group, at best). And never far from strategy is its creative partner: storytelling. Where is it most fitting to begin? How do you narrate the journey from auspicious start to monumental end? And what is the best peak to mark the finish? These are in essence dramaturgical decisions, an attempt to establish ‘connective networks’ in Pearson and Shanks’ inclusive definition of the term (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.89) calling on what Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt suggest is a ‘responsiveness [and] an awareness of the connections between things’ (Turner and Behrndt, 2016, p.41). But unlike the theatre dramaturg, mountain dramaturgs do battle with a whole set of additional circumstances—mist, wind, hail in summer, illness, injury, dissent amongst the ranks, uncompromising attacks of ennui, stiffness and Wainwright-weariness. Or, simply better things to do. A sense of the bigger story accompanies great mountaineering accomplishments as well as smaller feats. Alan Hinkes, the only British Climber to have completed the 8000ers,3 called his 18-year undertaking ‘an Odyssey’, though it was not his intention at first to climb all fourteen (Hinkes, 2013, p.15), whilst Wainwright baggers debate online which peak it is best to finish on. The southern fell, Great End, is a popular nod to the drama of completion, as is the last peak on which Wainwright himself ended his originating quest: Starling Dodd. Though ‘unobtrusive and unassuming’ in his assessment, the fell is nevertheless characterised in near-tragic terms in Wainwright’s Personal Notes at the end of Book 7:

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If Starling Dodd had been the last walk of all for me, and this the last book, I should now be desolate indeed, like a lover who had lost his loved one, and the future would have the bleakness of death. (Wainwright, 2005)

Still years away from any strategically constructed ending, but emboldened by the warm conditions, we were interested in exploring a more immediate set of connections between peaks: not an epic odyssey but a day-long hike around the glacial feature of the Fairfield horseshoe, one of several high-rise walkways curving around natural dale-ends in the Lake District.4 Before now we had only considered Wainwright peaks as discrete entities, notching off a summit a day on the bedpost of our bagging list ever since our first unplanned ascent in 2006. The Fairfield horseshoe dramatically changed that attitude of self-enforced moderation, promising eight peaks in one day, the order of which we chanted as a mantra for motivation: Low Pike, High Pike, Dove Crag, Hart Crag, Fairfield, Great Rigg, Heron Pike, Nab Scar. The day promised twelve and a half miles of unceasing mountaintops, arranged along an upside-down U, with the valley of Rydale carved between its spurs. Viewed as natural mountain dramaturgy, the Fairfield horseshoe has a defined story to tell. With its highest peak sitting at the top of the valley, ‘the summit of Fairfield’ is, in guide writer Mark Richards’ words, ‘without question the scenic crescendo of the walk’ (Richards, 2008, p.223). All progress is pretty nearly downhill after reaching this exposed plateau, more moonlike than earthly and spotted with cairns too numerous to act as guides. The journey up leads from the ‘bustle’ of Ambleside (car park rage and pavement jams), through the picture postcard bridges of Low and High Sweden and on to the ridge proper. Navigation is made simple by a slowly deteriorating dry stone wall which acts as a handrail all the way to Hart Crag. In its drawn-out devastation, that wall echoed the mood in our group that day. Over three miles in and nearly as many hours passed and not even the first peak in the bag—is Low Pike really the best

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name for it? We were unused to longer walks and the ridge view opposite—on the returning line of the U—looked unattainable, a perspective underlined by the need to change maps half way round. The Ordnance Survey in its wisdom did not respect the perfection of the Horseshoe’s rising action, summit crescendo, direction ‘reversal’ at Fairfield and descent-cum-dénouement down to Nab Scar, awkwardly splitting the signature walk across two maps (OL5 and OL7). (Even if we do make it down that second spur it will surely be in the dark). A personal narrative moved in time with the larger geographical storyline, one cheaply summed up by the bright green badges we had bought as trophies in case of success. If we could get round this horseshoe and in the process more than double our list of peaks for the week in just one day, then what other ridge routes might be possible? How might we work in the future to construct canny connection points across the National Park and forge our own collective dramaturgy of the region?5 And what, then, would be the upper limit of our wandering—the horizon of our ambitions—in a day, a week, a fortnight? What might be achieved in a dozen years? At the denouement of the day, and with plenty of hours sunshine left in fact, we stumbled into the Badger Bar in Rydal, dehydrated, sun burnt and footsore, young and old united in thirst. A window onto a ‘storied world’ had been opened, a world ‘where people do not acquire their knowledge ready-made, but rather grow into it ’ (Ingold, 2011, p.162). It is a process ‘rather like that of following trails through a landscape’, Tim Ingold suggests, ‘each story will take you so far, until you come across another that will take you further’ (Ingold, 2011, p.162). This narrativised conception of understanding, one dependent on the passage through a landscape, was still only dawning on us at this premature stage in our development as peak baggers. But the future had been set out with this walk, a future which ironically was less about celebrating the value of single peaks and more about the movement between them (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 Fairfield Horseshoe trophy, Rydal Vale 2008 (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

Notes 1. The full list is: Marilyns, Humps, Tumps, Simms, Munros and Tops, Corbetts and Tops, Grahams and Tops, Donalds and Tops, Furths, Murdos, Hewitts, Nuttalls, Buxton & Lewis, Bridges, Deweys, Donald Deweys, Highland Fives, Wainwrights, Birketts, Synges, Fellrangers, County Tops, SIBs, Dillons, Arderins, Vandeleur-Lynams, Myrddyn Deweys, Carns and Binnions. See the Database of British and Irish hills for details: http:// www.hills-database.co.uk/downloads.html. 2. http://www.hill-bagging.co.uk/Marilyns.php?ct=EWS. 3. There is some dispute over this claim, as Hinkes summited Cho Oyu in a whiteout and used altimeter measurements to determine his position (Hinkes, 2013, p.55). See http://www.mounteverest.net/story/ AlanHinkesKangchenjunga-13or14May132005.shtml.

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4. Others include the Kentmere Horseshoe, the Coledale Horseshoe and the Langdale Horseshoe. See Bob Allen and Peter Linney’s Walking the Ridges of Lakeland (Allen and Linney, 1995) and Walking More Ridges of Lakeland (Allen and Linney, 1996) for a comprehensive listing of all the ridge routes identified by Alfred Wainwright in his books. 5. Peter Linney has described his own process of plotting the ridge routes of Lakeland: ‘my excitement reached boiling point for I saw in front of me a network of routes up, down and across Lakeland which quite took my breath away; I saw ideas for ridge walks which had never before occurred to me’ (Allen and Linney, 1995, p.7).

References Allen, B. and Linney, P. (1995) Walking the Ridges of Lakeland. London: Penguin. Allen, B. and Linney, P. (1996) Walking More Ridges of Lakeland. London: Penguin. Hinkes, A. (2013) 8000 Meters: Climbing the World’s Highest Mountains. Milnthorpe: Cicerone. Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Richards, M. (2008) Great Mountain Days in the Lake District: 50 Classic Routes Exploring the Fells. Milnthorpe: Cicerone. Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2016) Dramaturgy and Performance. Rev. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wainwright, A. (2005) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Western Fells. London: Frances Lincoln.

Part 2.2 Mountain Drama

Introduction Rendering a mountain in dramatic form is not without its problems. Even the most non-representational styles of theatre have still to grapple with the unique questions mountains pose as sites for dramatic inspiration— questions of scale, perspective, materiality and atmosphere. As we have seen in Part 2.1, rituals can draw on mountainous environments directly to encompass (and in some cases invoke) a process of enacted transformation. Site-related mountain performances do something similar, working with the natural affordances of the landscape as creative material (as we shall see in Part 2.3). Mountain dramatists have a very different task. They must find the means of topographical translation, to magic the grand scale of mountainscapes into the relative minuteness of a theatre building. Who are these practitioners of mountain drama? How do they achieve their acts of prestidigitation? And what, more generally, are the defining characteristics of a mountain dramaturgy, the connective tissues of mountain drama? Despite the obvious challenges, writers of mountain drama have not been reluctant to draw on mountains for inspiration and this chapter is dedicated to examining several notable examples in pursuit of answers to these questions. Mountain dramas are understood here as play texts which have mountains as key players in the work. To echo Katherine Brisbane describing Patrick White’s Night on Bald Mountain (1964), these are plays where mountains are ‘as animate as the people who inhabit them’ (White, 1985, p.10). Inevitably, this is a judgement call and there are © The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_6

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several ways to interpret the significance of the mountain in each play. I have been inclusive in my treatment of what constitutes mountain ‘substance’, informed by the need to represent the widest range of styles and geographical locations in my selection, to capture a historical perspective going back to Classical Sanskrit Drama, and to follow some leads established in the previous section (for instance, the Noh play, Taniko and the role of the mountain priest, or yamabushi).

Approaching Mountain Dramaturgy Whilst this section is concerned with the treatment of mountains in plays, what follows is not conventional ‘play analysis’. Focusing on the specifics of a mountain dramaturgy allows for a more holistic approach and one which might suggest some potential generalisations across texts. As Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt point out, ‘dramaturgical analysis regards the performance as a complex web of elements, and aims to identify the ways in which they connect (or fail to connect)’ (Turner and Behrndt, 2016, p.37). These points of connection inevitably help illuminate issues of content, identifying ‘ideological, compositional, philosophical and socio-political’ (Turner and Behrndt, 2016, p.37) ideas within the plays. But stepping back to observe the play as a whole and positioning language as just one element in this complex can also help engage what eco-critic Elinor Fuchs calls a ‘critical imagination’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.5). Fuchs’ Some Questions to Ask a Play (originally conducted with MFA Dramaturgy students) proposes a particularly apposite metaphor for Performing Mountains: A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. (Fuchs 2004, p.6)

Fuchs suggests we should conceive of a play inhabiting another world, ‘where no other geography is available’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.6) helping to avoid tendentious readings based on preconceptions from our own world. This ‘playworld’ has its own spatial topography, made visible as we squint to focus on the different features of the surface. ‘Are we on an island? In a cave? In a desert or a jungle? On a country road?’, Fuchs asks. ‘Do you see a landscape of valleys and mountains? Sea and land?’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.6). Equally pertinently, the playworld has its own climate, seasons and time

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and these will undergo change during the play. Once this initial scrutiny of the play’s landscape has been conducted, one can move to the social world of the play, to the dynamics of its imagery and to a consideration of one’s own positionality. Finally, to stress the constructedness of the playworld and to emphasise further the connectedness of dramaturgical analysis, Fuchs places character in a web of other planetary phenomena: You can arrive at the most interesting version of any question about character by first exploring the features of her theatrical planet. Characters mean only as they inhabit, enact, fulfill, engage a succession of sites, actions, and objects under a specific set of conditions. They are constituents of a complex artistic pattern. Find the pattern first! (Fuchs, 2004, p.9)

Our needs are more specific than Fuchs’ dramaturgy students; the features of our playworld are already isolated to mountains and high places. But Fuchs’ geographical vision of the play text as another world of patterned connections and her interrogative, levelling approach offers an appropriate barometer of the climate of the plays chosen here. I will draw on her questions throughout this Part, adapting them as necessary to account for the specific focus on mountain dramaturgy. To concentrate on the patterning of mountain drama is, then, to get to grips with some of its typical features or contours and doing so will help me to assess whether there are common characteristics or tropes of mountain dramaturgy. My questions for this section reflect this integrative purpose. How are the mountain and its inhabitants represented, in space and time? What is the climate of the play, its mood and tone, and how is this created? Following on from one of the dominant themes of the last chapter, who has power in or over the mountain landscape and who, conversely, is disempowered? Are other landscapes brought into view or referenced? What, in short, is the overall ‘myth’ of the mountain drama, the amalgam of ‘space, time, the natural world and the social world’ (Fuchs 2004, p.8)1 which creates its impact on the reader or spectator. Useful as these areas of questioning will be, they do not distinguish between the play text and the performance text. As this section is dedicated to mountain dramas published as texts, this will not normally prove problematic—the ‘critical imagination’ Fuchs aims to engender in her students is the means by which performance can be constructed from the words on the page. In certain traditions, though—for instance in the Keralan performance form of kutiyattam or in Japanese kyogen—there is such

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a marked difference between the text and the performed interpretation, such space for the performers to dictate the materials of the drama, and embellish the source text, that a further question is necessary: how is the mountain embodied in performance and for what purpose? Mountain dramas are set all over the world; they do not conform to any stylistic or genre-based patterns and conventional attempts at establishing key periods of productivity are fruitless—there is no Silver or Golden age of theatre writing set in the mountains, as far as I can identify. So how might one organise this new canon in a constructive way, to help understand the specifics of mountain dramaturgy and, in Fuchs’ terms, ‘make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.6)? In this chapter I have mapped a selective range of mountain dramas longitudinally, not in the sense of ‘over a long time’ but in the geographical sense, taking the plays’ mountain locations as the starting point and scanning their lines of longitude from the Western hemisphere (specifically Peru, 78° West) to the Far East (Japan and Eastern Australia at 150° East) (Fig. 1). Just as lines of longitude cut selectively down the globe, so this approach leaves out key sites of activity as much as it highlights others. I make no claims to comprehensiveness here, although a listing of all the mountain plays I have found thus far may be located on the Performing Mountains website.2 There are other possible points of reference of course—in the Appalachian mountains in North America, for instance, in Greece, in the Caucasus and in North East China.3 But with Fuchs’ warning of scale in mind, my approach here offers an expression of the global reach of these plays (albeit restricted to those in English or in translation) without losing focus. At the same time, taking a longitudinal approach generates some surprising and thought-provoking connection points. In what follows, for instance, the proto-symbolism of the literary giant, Henrik Ibsen is set alongside the work of little-known contemporary ensemble, Curious Directive; the tight realism of US playwright Patrick Meyers’ K2 is juxtaposed with the imaginative stylisation of the ancient Keralan performance form, kutiyattam. These unlikely but productive pairings help facilitate the task set by Turner and Behrndt—of finding connections and disconnections and identifying patterns. They are conceived in the spirit of one of the earliest definitions of eco-critical practice, by William

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Fig. 1 Dramatic lines of longitude: through Peru, Scotland and England, Norway, Pakistan, and Tibet, Japan and Australia

Rueckert in 1976: that, at its most fundamental level, eco-criticism is ‘experiment[ing] with the conceptual and practical possibilities of an apparent perspective by incongruity [and seeking out whether] that old pair of antagonists, science and poetry, can be persuaded to lie down together and be generative’ (Glofeltly and Fromm, 1996, p.107). I will return to these patterns, positioned as evidence for a particular practice of mountain dramaturgy, in the conclusion. This chapter of Performing Mountains, then, attempts to do two connected things: to construct a first global canon of Mountain Drama, while sketching in brief the geological conditions surrounding the plays’ mountains. Readers might want to return momentarily to the disciplinary framework established in Part 1’s General Introduction, to place this analysis in context; here I am following through the logic of that framework— expressing in practice the dynamic relationship between geology, orogenesis and dramatic work.

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Journey from the West: Mountain Dramas on Five Lines of Longitude Peru (78° West4 ): Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Elinor Cook’s Pilgrims The Andes stretch the entire length of South America, from Venezuela in the north to Chile in the south, ‘like a raised binding stitched along the edge of a blanket’ (Bernbaum, 1997, p.175). In Peru that elevated band of rock bisects the country, providing sharp contrasts between mountainous regions in the West and the Amazon basin in the North East. As we have seen in Part 2.1, Peru and its neighbours became the site for the Inca empire, expanding aggressively in 1438, from its original base in Cuzco to take in land stretching from Colombia to Chile. Indeed, there is evidence that that expansion went up as well as along, with some of the highest peaks peppered with buildings constructed as early as the fifteenth century, as part of the Inca’s veneration of high peaks. For Peter Shaffer the detailed geographical context of the Peruvian Andes is vital to his chronicling of the Spanish conquistadores’ historic demolition of the Inca empire, in search of gold, power and religious dominance. In fact, mountains cleave the dramatic body of the play almost as clearly as they do the country in which he sets his Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964). For Elinor Cook there is only a suggestion that her triangular love story, Pilgrims (2016), based on the long-standing mountaineering partnership of Dan and Will and the interventions of Rachel, is set in Peru; for the vast majority of stage time the mountain which has ensnared the two friends is only obliquely referenced—by its height (18,200 feet) and by the deadly challenge it sets.5 Though separated by over fifty years of British theatre history and stylistically and aesthetically very different, the two plays pursue some important common ground, chiefly to do with the mountain as a battleground of empire. They use epic devices of storytelling in cognate ways as well, and both resist true-to-life attempts to realise the unrealisable: their respective Andean peaks are brought to life by other theatrical means. Peter Shaffer’s play aspires to achieve a sort of ritual gesamtkunstwerk. ‘ My hope’, he says in the Author’s Notes, ‘was always to realise on stage a kind of “total” theatre, involving not only words but rites, masks and magics’ (Shaffer, 1966, p. xviii). These rites are theatricalised in several

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stylised dumb shows which punctuate the drama, evoking the mountainous backdrop and staging the shocked passivity of the Incas in the face of the conquistadores’ violence. Through such theatrical means, Shaffer explores the clash of indigenous Inca religion with the Catholicism of the Spanish invaders, a division expressed in the character list—The Spaniards vs The Indians—as much as it is in the adversarial structure of the play: Act I is titled ‘The Hunt’; Act II, ‘The Kill’. This is the dualistic world of the play as Shaffer constructs it, with each side represented by a self-styled god: Pizzaro (the Spanish General) and Atahuallpa (the Sovereign Inca of Peru), respectively. The Andes offers an environmental and dramaturgical high point to this drama. Moving across the country from West to East, Pizarro’s soldiers are directed by Atahuallpa to cross the mountain range to meet him in his citadel: ‘Tell him [Pizarro] to greet me at Cajamarca, behind the mountains. If he is a god he will find me, if he is no god, he will die’ (Shaffer, 1966, p.15). The journey thus becomes a physical and spiritual test for the Spaniards, one ultimately relating to territory and political power. At the beginning of the play, as bastard son of the Sun God, and recent victor in his own civil war with his brother, Huascar, Atahuallpa has dominion over Earth and Sky for over a thousand miles. This power is symbolised in his association with, and control of, the surrounding mountains. In the spatial dynamics of the play (designed by Michael Annals in the original production in 1964), Atahuallpa is placed at a vantage point on a platform above the main stage framed by an enormous flowering medallion, a symbol of gold when closed and of the light of the Sun’s rays when opened.6 In ‘the Hunt’, this perspective ironically places Atahuallpa (the hunted) as stage manager of proceedings, overseeing the Spaniard’s journey to Cajamarca from on high at the same time as referencing his mythological ancestor, Manqhu Qhapac, the original Inca king. Manqhu Qhapac was said to have emerged from Lake Titicaca, to found the Incan empire. Donning bright reflective shields of silver and positioning himself high on a hill, he ‘appear[ed] so radiant to the natives staring up at the pinnacle in wonder that they agree[d] to become his vassals’ (Besom, 2009, p.113). For Shaffer, Atahuallpa’s control of light is on an even bigger scale, though it is designed to achieve similarly oppressive ends. It takes the form of a highly theatricalised ‘reveal’ of the Andes mountain range, framed to instil terror in the invaders:

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ATAHUALLPA. Let them see my mountains! A crash of primitive instruments. The lights snap out and, lit from the side, the rays of the metal sun throw long shadows across the wooden wall. All the Spaniards fall down. A cold blue light fills the stage. DE SOTO. God in heaven! Enter OLD MARTIN. You call them the Andes. Picture a curtain of stone hung by some giant across your path. Mountains set on mountains: cliffs on cliffs. Hands of rock a hundred yards high, with flashing nails where the snow never moved. (Shaffer, 1966, pp.24–25)

Pizarro’s answer to this show of mountainous might is defiant: ‘Show me the toppest peak-top you can pile […] and I’ll stand tiptoe on it and pull you right out of the sky’ (Shaffer, 1966, p.25). Thus, the central struggle of the play is established. The three ritualised stage pantomimes which follow this moment are used by Shaffer first to evoke the crossing of the Andes, (The Mime of the Great Ascent), then to show the brutal and mechanised killing of the indigenous population (The Mime of the Great Massacre), and finally to document the stripping of Peru’s mineral assets (The Gold Procession and the Rape of the Sun). Dumb show, then, is used as a device to narrate the shift of power from Incan god to Spanish general, although the final moments of the play, again rendered in a dramatic tableau showing Atahuallpa’s execution, hardly present Pizzaro as victor. ‘So Fell Peru’, says Old Martin and ‘so fell you General’ (Shaffer, 1966, p.79). The use of mime and tableau is also Shaffer’s solution to the challenge of mountain representation—in this case, not just of a single peak but of an entire mountain range. The epic crossing of the Andes, is narrated by a storytelling device: ‘As OLD MARTIN describes their ordeal, the men climb the Andes […] a stumbling torturous climb in the clouds’. This is followed, a minute later by the statement: So down we went from ledge to ledge, and out onto a huge plain of eucalyptus trees, all glowing in the failing light. (Shaffer, 1966, pp.25–27)

Up and over the Andean mountains in two pages of direct address. One might criticise him for drawing too readily on epic rather than dramatic modes of communication, for sidestepping the challenges of bringing the Andes onto the stage. But for Shaffer this is the point: the act of climbing does not need to be physically or scenically detailed—it works more

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importantly as a metaphor for the clash of cultures. Thus it can be simply rendered in the form of a mime, augmented by ‘eerie, cold music made from the thin whine of huge saws’ (Shaffer, 1966, p.25), and performed whilst the storyteller recounts the human cost—at one remove and in the past tense. Effectively, the Andes are appropriated by Shaffer as a battleground motif, a vehicle for the test of resolve meted out by Atahuallpa. Once this enormous physical hurdle has been surmounted by the Spanish army, the play plunges downhill, chronicling the seeming inevitability of the Incan empire’s demise and lamenting the Spanish legacy of greed, hunger and the Cross (Shaffer, 1966, p.79). Viewed as such, it is as if the dramaturgy echoes the rhythm of that historical mountain crossing, the great wall of the Andes, punishingly slow to ascend but, once breached, yielding to foreign invasion in a flash. Where Shaffer’s scope is historic and epic, Elinor Cook’s play Pilgrims is intimate and domestic, yet its focus remains on some of the bigger questions associated with mountains and mountaineering: power, heroism and the gendered construction of history. First drafted in 2012, the published version (in Nick Hern) is from 2016, when the play premiered at the High Tide Festival in Aldeburgh in England. It chronicles a relationship between Rachel, a Ph.D. student, and two successful climbers (Dan and Will), who are planning a last great ascent in Peru, after scaling Everest as teenagers. Conceived in fourteen scenes, the action of the play moves from high up the treacherous Peruvian mountain, to the houses of Dan, Will and Rachel, to a hill in Wales, to a previous summit success and back to the Andean mountain. The play is as fluid in its treatment of time as it is of location, jumping forwards and backwards to examine the love triangle from multiple perspectives, progressively exposing the influence of Rachel on the established pair of mountaineer prodigies. As a three-handed construction, Cook makes the most of the opportunity to explore all the permutations of the triangle, engineering the drama as a series of 1 + 1 and 2 + 1 encounters. But this schema is also treated with fluid flexibility to the extent that in the original production, Cook notes ‘any one of them could try and get in there first to seize the scene and to say […] I’m the one in charge’,7 even if the dialogue is just between two characters. As a result, the ‘climate’ of the play is perhaps best described as haunting, not in the obvious sense of it being dark and scary (though those qualities are in evidence) but more because her characters have the freedom to appear unbidden from the shadows, and pass

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comment on the proceedings. Rachel particularly has the agency to intervene in Dan and Will’s partnership and this tone is set in Scene #1: A mountain: The present Dan and Will are sitting side by side. Dan is facing the audience holding a torch. Will is facing away. Rachel is watching them. (Cook, 2016, p.5)

Though Dan and Will are high up on a Peruvian peak, it is Rachel who is in dialogue with Dan, acting as interlocutor, a little more than a voice in the head but palpably less than a partner on the summit: Rachel: Have you started eating the snow yet? Dan: No. Rachel: If you’re really desperate. Dan: I’m not desperate. I’m just waiting. Rachel: For what? Dan: For you. Rachel: But I’m not coming. (Cook, 2016, p.11)

Rachel’s shadowy plasticity is revisited in the final scene (#14), set in the same location, but with an enhanced sense of meta-theatricality. ‘You’re not even on this mountain!’, says an exasperated Will, trying to make sense of why Rachel is giving them both leave to exit. ‘You’re at home!’ (Cook, 2016, p.86). Whilst it is clear from the previous scenes on the mountain that Will is fatally injured, presumed dead, and that Dan will die next to him, 18,200 feet up, as his torch, stove and water run out, Cook is not interested in telling an orthodox narrative of mountain martyrdom. Instead, Pilgrims in her own words is ‘an exploration of history; who writes history, who are the victors and who are the vanquished’.8 It is Rachel’s dramaturgical function, Cook argues, to ‘disrupt’9 the conventional story of conquest and heroism and this is most clearly symbolised in the last tableau: Dan and Will, the stricken climbers, leave the stage and Rachel is left alone, notionally on the mountaintop but by this time in the play the sense of location has more or less been abandoned. She has taken ownership of the backpack from the two men as well—one of just two props in the

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play, the other being a rope. We are thus denied the pathos of the male characters’ frozen death and left instead with Rachel centre stage having ‘assume[d] the role of traveller’10 and reflecting on a spoken image of her alter ego sailing away into the distance, perhaps achieving her aim of moving to Boston. Cook’s creative historiography is given its loudest voice in Rachel’s interactions with Dan and Will off the mountain. Here the idea of a dominant male colonial history of climbing is expressed in personalised terms through the lens of Rachel’s relationship with both men. ‘Don’t you start rewriting everything’, Rachel tells Dan, ‘What do you think history teaches us about whose version is going to last?’ (Cook, 2016, p.42). Later as a frisson of attraction is felt again with Will, Rachel’s character groans ‘It would be nice if it could be my story for a change […] But look! Heroes, everywhere I turn’ (Cook, 2016, p.68). Thinking of Fuchs’ call to view characters as part of ‘a succession of sites, actions, and objects under a specific set of conditions’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.9), it helps to put Rachel’s actions in context with the rest of the play’s scenes. When one does, Cook’s use of the term hero is clearly used with irony. There is little in Pilgrims which celebrates the act of climbing or which idolises the climber. Mountaineering is variously characterised as an expensive folly, escapist, self-serving and egotistical, or as Dan suggests ‘like a sickness’ (Cook, 2016, p.27). By the time we hear Rachel’s outburst on heroic ubiquity, we have seen evidence of all these characteristics and have revisited the futile stage picture of two broken men convincing themselves they will be able to get off the Peruvian mountain. As spectators we don’t see ‘heroes everywhere’ in Pilgrims , but two men working through some debilitating personal obsessions on the side of a merciless mountain. Rachel’s function as a character is in many ways to expose that folly, asking questions of the pursuit from the standpoint of someone beyond the tight-knit community of climbers. She, like Old Martin in Shaffer’s play, has the freedom to roam over the play, to mediate and critique the actions of her fellow characters. Part of that critique is directed at the way in which relationships are conducted between men and women, an imbalance of agency which extends to the point where, in Cook’s own words, ‘so often a romantic relationship feels like a colonisation […] not an emancipation’.11 Whilst her characterisation of Rachel goes much further than offering a simple mouthpiece for these concerns, the themes of Rachel’s proposed Ph.D.— Empire, Englishness, acquisitiveness and travel—hint at the overall ‘myth’

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of the playworld of Pilgrims , as Fuchs would term it. This might sparingly be summed up as aligning some of the historical associations of mountaineering (conquest, colonialism, the single-minded pursuit of glory) with the dynamics of male–female domestic power relations, in the context of what Cook sees as the very male pastime of climbing.12 We see this tension crystallised as Will invites Rachel to seek out his idea of adventure on a hill in Wales (scene #6): Will: I’m going to make you have a brilliant time. Rachel: I don’t think it works like that. Will: Well I’m going to MAKE it work like that. (Cook, 2016, p.36)

Having ushered the two ‘heroes’ off the stage at the end of the play, Rachel’s sole presence on the mountain top must, then, be a step towards rewriting that history. Scotland and England (6°-3° East13 ): 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973) and Norman Nicholson’s Old Man of the Mountains (1945) At least in geological terms, England and Scotland came together with relatively little fuss. After the violence of the first two parts of the ‘Caledonian orogeny’ (Turnbull 2009, p.19), known respectively as the Grampian event (when volcanic islands collided with the continent of Laurentia) and the Scandian event (when Baltica collided with Laurentia), the final phase, which brought England and Wales (then Avalonia) together with Scotland was much less eventful. Indeed, in geological terminology, this slow meeting point between ancient continents is known as a ‘soft docking’ (Torsvik and Rehnström, 2003).14 Nevertheless these tectonic shifts, performed 425 million years ago, produced mountains as high as the Himalayas and underpin the geology of the Lake district in England and the Southern Uplands in Scotland, including the Cheviot hills on the border between both countries. Climbing to the top of the highest peak in the latter range, the eponymous Cheviot itself (815 metres), one can see as far as the Southern Highlands (the peak of Stob Binnean), looking North West; and, turning round, all the way to the Cumbrian peaks of Scafell Pike, Blencathra and Skiddaw in the South. This cross-border vantage point is the one I am adopting in this section, examining John McGrath’s celebrated protest play The Cheviot , the Stag and the Black,

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Black Oil (1973) alongside Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson’s Christian allegory, The Old Man of the Mountains (1945). As a landmark piece of political theatre, co-created over forty years ago by the company 7:84 with John McGrath as writer, a wealth of critical commentary has been generated about Cheviot. I will not attempt to summarise this work here as my focus is on the very specific way mountains play a part in this hybrid, popular theatre piece, a ‘ceilidh play’ drawing on the unifying energy of song and dance to critique the impact of the Highland clearances on Scotland since the eighteenth century. Cynics might point out that the ‘Cheviot’ of McGrath’s title is not a reference to the mountain on the borders but to a breed of sheep,15 implying that I might already be veering away from the guiding criterion of ‘mountains as key players’. But although there is not the specificity of place we have seen with Royal Hunt for instance, (mountains are a more generalised phenomenon in McGrath’s play) there remains an urgency in this play to retell a piece of troubling and violent history, again related to the exploitation and appropriation of high land. Taking a mountain perspective on Cheviot, reveals a very particular dramaturgical thread, one which speaks to the wider concerns of the play through landscape and its mediation in scenography and song. Set designer, and painter, John Byrne’s, ingenious answer to the challenge of mountain representation is revealed in the very first scene. In keeping with its portable aesthetic (Cheviot visited 99 venues on its first tour in 1974 with the set wrapped up in tarpaulin on the roof of the van), the majestic highlands of Scotland were condensed into a format which could be revealed to the audience in seconds. ‘We’ve brought some mountains with us’, says the MC, ‘Can we have the mountains, please lads? Go the Bens’ (McGrath, 1981, p.1). The stage solution was as simple as it was effective: He plays a roll on the drum as the rest of the company lift the book, lay it flat on the actual stage of the hall or some arrangement to lift it higher than the acting platform, behind it. They open the first page, and, as in children’s pop-up books, a row of mountains pops up from in between the pages. (McGrath, 1981, p.1)16

Large for a book (it measured eight feet deep and ten across) but cartoonlike in scale for the landscape it depicted, the pop-up scenography operated on a number of levels. At its most obvious the book enacted the

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turning of the pages of history, allowing the company to make big leaps of politically charged docudrama—from the battle of Culloden in 1746; to the clearance of Strathnaver locals forced to make way for the more profitable Cheviot sheep in 1811; to the Skye crofters’ resistance, in the Battle of the Braes in 1882. Byrne’s set turned over in sync with the chronicling of oppression and resistance which McGrath was dramatising in vernacular, ceilidh form: ‘an assembly of songs, stories, scenes, talk, music and general entertainment’.17 At the same time, these pop-up mountains provided a dramaturgical through-line, the page being revisited throughout the play. In this way, the three kinds of exploitation of the play’s title—sheep farming, deer hunting and oil development—were loosely tied together using the motif of the miniature, cardboard mountains. After the opening, the next time we see the mountain vista is in a section on the steady depopulation of the Highlands, the product of these three policies, delivered in stark statistical terms: M.C. 2: In 1755, the population of the seven crofting counties was more than 20% of the population of Scotland. M.C. 3: In 1801 it was 18%. M.C. 4: In 1851 it was 13%. M.C. 2: In 1901 it was 7%. M.C. 3: In 1951 it was 5%. M.C. 4: And yesterday it was 3%.18

Later, as the critique moves to the rise of murky multinationals and the control of Scottish resources by absent business giants—‘We are the men. Who own your glen. Though you won’t see us there’ (McGrath, 1981, p.57)—the mountain backdrop is garlanded with model oil rigs, presumably drawn roughly to scale. This is accompanied by Texas Jim firing pistols as he proclaims ‘Screw your landscape, screw your bays. I’ll screw you in a hundred ways’ whilst a hoe down, is danced by the company (McGrath, 1981, p.60). The sharply discordant image—oil rigs on mountains—served as a grotesque backdrop to the equally grotesque Texan caricature on stage. But by this time in the play the cardboard aesthetic has shifted meaning from a make-do informality to an all-too-obvious fragility, the mountains a metonym for the Country. From the eighteenth century to the 1970s, from a populous highland community to a fragmented and exploited one, this progression is underscored by an ironic recapitulation of the poet James Copeland’s song,

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These are my Mountains . Copeland’s song is a stirring and nostalgic paean to homecoming: No Land’s ever claimed me, Though far I did Roam, For these are my Mountains, And I’m coming home. (McGrath, 1981, p.2)

At first it is sung by the company and the obliging live audience but later the ballad is passed round to those with an altogether different sense of possession—foreign landowners, Queen Victoria, Texas Jim, even the Cheviot sheep! Each has a claim to the highlands more powerful than the local residents—at least in political and monetary terms. In The Cheviot , then, mountainsides are represented through an engaging blend of song and setting. They are symbols of stark duality: on the one hand they represent (be)longing and stability, a counterpoint to the itinerant and nomadic; on the other they signify the worst in unchecked exploitation, a land-grab mentality fuelled by capitalism. As such Cheviot’s climate is as strident as it is simplified, in keeping with the popular theatre form, its politics in one contemporary assessment, ‘as slanted as a mountain slope and as exhilarating as skiing down it’.19 Were it not for the longitudinal connection, Norman Nicholson’s Cumbrian mystery play, Old Man of the Mountains , is an unlikely bed fellow of The Cheviot . Nicholson was a devout Christian and his first play was a T. S. Eliot-inspired verse drama which transports the biblical tale of Elijah and the Raven to his local context and landscape. Mount Carmel where Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal, becomes Carmel Fell, a play on the tiny Cartmel Fell, just a few miles East from Nicholson’s home town of Millom, in South West Cumbria, England.20 The play was first performed by the Pilgrim Players at London’s Mercury Theatre in 1945. Where Cheviot wears its political purpose on its sleeve, Old Man of the Mountains is thickly allegorical, its three Acts all taking place in a modest Cumbrian cottage in a typical Lakeland dale with a beck running down beside it. Nevertheless, the Christian message of faith and belief in God, even when in despair, is shot through with a prescient commentary on greed and unsustainable practices of land exploitation. Over seventy years on, the vision the Landowner Ahab offers at the play’s beginning seems to be directed at today’s industrial farming practices more than at the post-Second World war generation:

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We must see that the land is made to pay… Dig chemicals in your soil, comb the fields Till the last ear of corn is hooked from the grain; Make your beasts earn their keep, squeeze the last pint Of milk from the cows. (Nicholson, 1946, p.19)

The Biblical drought visited upon the Dale end community which forms the central tension of the play resonates with similar contemporary immediacy, a symbol today of climate changes which were inconceivable in the years immediately after the War. For Nicholson, and his Old Testament source (the drought of Samaria and the prophet Elijah, 1 Kings 18), the lack of rain is God’s punishment, for greed and godlessness, but in the more secular twenty-first century, God’s mouthpiece, Raven’s, words are more suggestive of the planet punishing the Western world for excessive fossil fuel exploitation, industrial pollution and the rise of carbon-induced global warming, the kind of legacy Texas Jim leaves on the landscape in The Cheviot: The Hills which were your altars have become your middens21 The Becks which were your temples have become your sewers. (Nicholson, 1946, p.12)

As a play which places such emphasis on verse and poetry, it is easy to get caught up in an examination of Nicholson’s craft as wordsmith, but without losing this dimension of the drama entirely, it is the bigger dramaturgical picture which must remain the focus for this section along with the key question: who has power in or over the mountain landscape? And who is disempowered? This of course is as pertinent a question for the plays already discussed here, whether it be the historical battle for power in the Andes in Royal Hunt, or the triangular tussle over ownership of the story itself in Pilgrims , played out in the context of the mountain’s own undeniable (and deadly) authority. In Old Man of the Mountains , the struggle for power is more two dimensional: faith and a simplified model of ‘the old agricultural tradition’ embodied in Elijah, versus secularity, and a profit-driven notion of land custodianship, albeit one receptive to ‘new ideas, and the methods of strangers’ (Nicholson, 1946, p.49). Ahab is the figure who represents this side of the argument, located somewhere between venal profiteering and necessary and justifiable modernisation.

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Along with the Raven’s obvious freedom to roam the landscape as a bird, Nicholson associates Elijah with a spiritual omnipotence expressed through the Cumbrian mountains—‘the Spirit of the Lord whirls him from peak to peak’ (Nicholson, 1946, p.47)—and it is the figure of the mountainside which provides the dramaturgical fulcrum of the drama, the location where the community decides its religious and agricultural future: On Carmel Fell. There on the highest shoulder of the dale Hoisted midway between the earth and sea and sky Let the people stand before the Lord and let them choose Whether they’ll keep His way and obey His precepts, Or follow Ahab and guzzle on the bread of the land Like rats gnawing the sacrament. (Nicholson, 1946, p.49)

Here Nicholson appeals to an ancient sense of mountains as a liminal space between earth and sky, one we have already encountered in the section before on rituals and which plays a significant part in the oftcited ‘sacredness’ of mountains, regardless of specific religions (Bernbaum, 1997; Cooper, 1997). Nicholson takes us to this liminal space in the appropriately named Interlude, between Parts II and III, in a stylised other-worldly scene set on the mountain top, dubbed ‘Elijah’s country’ and depicting a landscape clearly more elevated than the 150 m of his local fell.22 In this transitional moment in the play Elijah, highlighted in a spotlight on the summit, stumbles through a prayer to his God, not quite asking for anything, ‘not for rain, not for harvest, nor even for a sign’ (Nicholson 1946, pp.52–53). Instead he simply offers confirmation of his Faith and of his intention to remain His servant. The short scene, does, however conclude with a sign of sorts: thunder, lightning and darkness descend on those gathered on the mountain, conditions typical of the Cumbrian setting, and which prompt several interpretations from the community in the following Part. Did Elijah promise rain? And why has it not come immediately? After this visit up the mountain and the near-direct contact of Elijah with God, the concluding section of the play is a climactic and climatic release. Rain clouds slowly gather, after much soul searching from Elijah, and the storm breaks, proving the doubters wrong. It is a rain steeped in Cumbrian character, ‘Like a grey curtain, Like sacking hanging down’, a rain that anyone who has spent time in Lakeland would recognise, falling

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from clouds ‘like bruises’ (Nicholson, 1946, p.75), and swelling the becks in no time. The end of the drought brings followers back to Elijah and by extension to God but it does not signal the end of Ahab. He undergoes a rather miraculous sea-change, proving to be an understanding landlord and a visionary advocate for dam technology and hydro-electric power, trying to safeguard the sustainable use of water if and when drought returns to the dale. Nicholson’s drama resolves one of the battles—the flock of believers in God’s overarching power is gathered again, after the release of the rain, and shepherded in Elijah’s direction. But the other conflict remains—that between the landowners and the landscape itself, here personified in the character of Beck. Despite Ahab’s supposed epiphany and his new-found concern for water conservation, a subtle sense of doubt is dropped into the waters of the play’s conclusion. The Beck, now bursting with life and with its limbs in Raven’s assessment, ‘lithe again’, is running so fast it cannot take stock, or consider the future: Well? wise? well? What is wise? What is well? We’re blithe and lish and busy now; Busy, busy, busy. Is that well? Is that wise? No time to worry, now, no time to wonder. (Nicholson, 1946, p.84)

It is this watery uncertainty which elevates Nicholson’s drama above the simplicity of a morality play and beyond the sharply defined battle lines of its Old Testament source. In Old Man of the Mountains , the Cumbrian fells provide the backdrop and the dramatic pivot point for a more nuanced examination of the Lake District in transition. Norway (8°-17° East23 ): Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899) and Curious Directive’s Your Last Breath (2012) The highlands in Norway form part of the range known as the Scandinavian Mountains, spreading out into Sweden and Finland. Most impressive and broad in the South, the range follows the coast, slowly losing prominence as you head up the country, past the Hardangervidda national park, the largest mountain plateau in Europe, past the infamous Troll Wall, a

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sheer 1000 meter drop into the Romsdalen valley, through the Arctic circle town of Tromso famed for its Northern Light shows, and on to the region of Finnmark, the northernmost territory of mainland Europe, bordering Finland and Russia. Here, at a latitude of 70°, the indigenous Saami people live, also known as Laplanders, a people renowned for the customary practice of ‘yoiking’. This ancient cultural tradition is a personalised form of musical composition. Offered as a gift from one Saami to another, the yoik is ‘an expression of that person’s personality’ (Hanssen, 2011). For Otto in Curious Directive’s piece, Your Last Breath, the yoik: is not about something, it is that something. It does not begin and it does not end. This yoik is mankind’s relationship with the mountains. (Curious Directive 2012, p.13)

Both plays in this section are concerned with humankind’s ‘relationship with the mountains’, not just in abstract philosophical terms but in direct, experiential ways, a relationship which moves between the mountain-assaviour and the mountain-as-slayer, at times confusing the two. This ambivalence is reflected deep in the country’s mountain culture and folklore and goes back to Norse mythology: it was to the inside of mountains where the dead retreated, not to rest in peace but to continue ‘to feast and fight as they did in life’; Valhalla, Odin’s palace in Heaven, it has been argued comes from the older term meaning: ‘Rock of the Slain’ (Bernbaum, 1997, p.115).24 From tip to toe Norway is covered in mountains and such a connection between ancient mythology and modern Norwegian life is hardly surprising. It is perhaps most clearly manifest in the naming of the highest peaks in the Scandinavian Mountains as Jotunheimen, ‘the land of the Giants’, originally one of the Nine Worlds of pre-Christian Norse mythology (Leeming, 2005), and also in the etymology of the Troll Wall (Trollrygen), first ascended by Norwegians, A Randers Heen and R. Høibakk in 1958 (Salkeld, 1998, p.24). Trolls in Norwegian folklore were grotesque and gullible. They could be easily tricked into staying outside after night and when they did, they faced some petrifying consequences. Such mythology offers an imaginative alternative to the geological explanation of the Troll Wall’s formation, each of the daunting spires which form the ridge not a long-term sign of the Caledonian orogeny25 but the legacy of a troll’s unfortunate ‘stopout’26 (Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2 The ‘petrified trolls’ of Trollvegen (Photo by Jorunn. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trollveggen.jpg)

Such habitual mythologizing of the landscape was an inspiration for the renowned Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Together with fellow Scandinavian August Strindberg,27 Ibsen was perhaps the most prolific of mountain playwrights, producing a trio of plays set in dramatic mountain landscapes. The verse drama Peer Gynt (1867), describes the eponymous hero’s pilgrimage of self-discovery, beginning and ending in the Rondane mountain plateau, North East of Jotunheimen, a journey punctuated by encounters with trolls and a visit to their inner-mountain realm. In the final act, Peer returns after a life away to a secluded mountain hut, where he seeks sanctuary and rebirth with his first love Solveig. Brand (1866) completed the year before, was also written in verse, and, like Peer Gynt , not intended for staging. In Brand, Ibsen made full and explicit use of a symbolism wrought from the topography of the landscape—the extreme contrast between fell and fjord, mountain and valley, which is such a feature of Norway. The valley, for Brand, uncompromising and arrogant as he is, represents a lack of faith; the mountain is the place for spiritual realisation. ‘Forget your village. Leave it in its hollow. The mist has buried it. Forget that you were beasts. Now you are men of the Lord. Climb onward, climb!’ (Ibsen, 1986, p.101), he commands the flock of villagers from the valley. Unconvinced, they abandon him and

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Brand dies in an avalanche in the final moments of the play, a sacrificial victim heavily inscribed with Christian symbolism. At the other end of his career, more than thirty years later, Ibsen returned to the mountainscape and to a barely veiled, searching and critical self-portraiture. When We Dead Awaken was Ibsen’s last play, its dramaturgical shape based once again on the shift from ocean to peak. But where Peer Gynt and Brand utilise a circular device, moving from mountains to valleys and back—what Peer himself calls the ‘Round about’ (Ibsen, 2007, p.118)—When We Dead Awaken traces a linear path, climbing up and up as the play progresses. Conceived in three relatively brief acts, Ibsen shapes the play as a gradual ascent from Act 1, ‘Outside the Spa Hotel at a watering place on the Norwegian coast’; to Act 2, ‘A mountain health resort’; to the final Act set on a ‘wild, broken mountain top, with a sheer precipice behind’ (Ibsen, 1980a). Each setting has its own climate—built up as a combination of the time of day and the weather conditions. In Act 1, at near sea level, we join Professor Rubek, a famous sculptor and Maja, his younger, disenchanted wife on a hot summer morning outside the Spa resort hotel. The stifling weather acts as a backdrop to some honest marital discussions, prompted by the appearance of the gently unhinged Irene, Rubek’s model and muse from years ago. Act 2 is set in the evening on the mountain plateau, just before sunset; Maja is exploring a new-found freedom with the bullish Ulfhejm, a hunter whose prey includes bears, elks, reindeer and women. The setting is based on Ibsen’s own experience of the Hardangervidda national park and the neighbouring Rondane plateau, and the dramatic vista of ‘mountain peaks with bluish snow in their crevices’ (Ibsen, 1980a, p.237) echoes his own assessment of the region where rocky ‘palace is built upon palace’ (Swaney, 1999, p.212).28 Set at the break of dawn, Act 3 follows swiftly on from the previous act. Mist is swirling round the neighbouring peaks in Ibsen’s exacting stage directions, and the now openly predatory Ulfhejm is threatening to tether Maja, just as he does his hunting hounds. As a counterpoint, Rubek and Irene are realising their ambition to spend a ‘summer night on the mountain’ (Ibsen, 1980a, p.257) together, in a long-overdue romantic bivouac. Later in this very short act, the weather deteriorates and a fatal storm brews, at first bringing the mists down around the four central characters and then separating them into survivors and victims, as an avalanche claims the sculptor and his model, sparing Maja and the bear hunter.

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The dramatic interplay of lowland and highland is a central dramaturgical principle for Ibsen, as it had been with Brand. Mountains are the battleground for the trio of relationships examined in the play (RubekMaya, Maya-Ulfhjem, Rubek-Irene). ‘You said you would take me with you to the top of a high mountain, and show me all the glory of the world’, recalls a peeved Maya, only to be rebuffed by her husband: ‘the fact is, little Maya, you were not exactly made to climb mountains’ (Ibsen, 1980a, p.220). It is of course Irene who Rubek associates with the freedom of the mountainside, not Maya, even if his own mercilessly suppressed desires have only been given space to express themselves late in life: Rubek: Summer night on the mountain. With you. Oh Irene, that could have been our life and we have wasted it. Irene: We only find what we have lost when - (Stops abruptly). Rubek: When? Irene: When we dead awaken. (Ibsen, 1980a, p.257)

A lifelong career as a sculptor (a transparent analogue for Ibsen as dramatist) has only served to deaden the artist’s attitude to others and to himself. It is the wide and desolate expanse of the mountainside which unlocks a subterranean passion in Rubek. Likewise, whilst the bear hunter might not be her ideal catch, Maya is nevertheless prompted to sing a simple refrain while in Ulfhjelm’s company on the mountain: ‘I am free. I am free. I am free. No longer imprisoned. I’m free’ (Ibsen, 1980a, p.267), a ditty which is recapitulated, rather like the ‘These are my mountains’ song in Cheviot. Recounted thus, the central motif of Ibsen’s mountain dramaturgy (urban valley life = constraining; rural mountain life = liberating) seems a little simplistic and perhaps even trite and there are those who consider When We Dead Awaken ‘flawed’, its heightened content better suited to verse than prose, and its last act inadequate (Meyer, 1992, pp.826–827). But Ibsen is more subtle in his dramatization of mountains than such criticisms suggest and this again is revealed in the relationship between the shape of the play and its connection to mountain topography. In the final act the quartet of main characters are all near the summit, reaching respective realisations about their lives. With steep drops on either side, they are forced to encounter one another along the only viable route: Maya and Ulfhjelm on the way down, Rubek and Irene climbing ever higher. This in essence is the crux point of the play. Like the crux in a rock climb, denoting the most challenging and dangerous move of the

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ascent, this moment in the play represents, in Ulfhjem’s words, ‘a matter of life and death’ as the storm clouds gather around the couples ‘like a winding sheet’ (Ibsen, 1980a, p.264). His words are chosen carefully as life and death are in a dualistic double bind at this moment in the play, for all concerned. Maya chooses the death of her marriage to find a life of liberty and potential, descending in the arms of her hunter companion (whether there is a longer-term future with Ulfhjelm is left unresolved). Irene and Rubek, still ascending, use this crux point to find life in the jaws of death: Rubek: Let us two dead people live life to the full for one short hour before we go down again into our graves […] Irene: Up into the light, where glory shines. Up to the promised mountain top. (Ibsen, 1980a, p.266)

A moment later the deathly shroud of mountain mist is replaced with the winding sheet of snow and both sculptor and model are buried in the roar of a sudden avalanche. There is more than an echo of Brand in this conclusion29 and there remains a cognate Christian symbolism here, connecting Rubek’s careerdefining sculpture—‘the Day of Resurrection’—with his own rebirth in death. But as he and Irene enter into the fabric of the mountain, swallowed up in a blanket of snow, there is also a hint of the pre-Christian world of Norse mythology that fascinated Ibsen so much. Just as those mythical warriors continued to feast and fight inside the mountains after their worldly deaths, so Rubek and Irene find a fire inside themselves which may just be kept alive deep inside the Hardangervidda mountain plateau. There is anything but a linear path to the mountain top in the 2012 collectively devised play Your Last Breath by Curious Directive, a scienceled theatre collective based in Norwich, England under the Artistic Directorship of Jack Lowe.30 Indeed, the play seems to take its dramaturgical shape from the definition of yoiking offered by the Westernised Saami character, Otto: ‘It’s like a holographic, multi-dimensional map of a feeling’ (Curious Directive, 2012, p.13), he elaborates in the opening montage of the play, establishing the structural conceit of the piece as well as introducing the audience to the particularities of Northern Norway’s cultural landscape. That multi-dimensional map charts four parallel but ultimately interconnected stories from four separate moments in time,

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looking back to actual historical events as well as forward to a possible future: Christopher, producing the first survey of the area of Nordland (in 1876); Anna, an extreme skier who survived a life-threatening accident trapped under mountain ice (in 1999); Otto, local Saami guide, and Freija, tasked with spreading her father’s ashes on a remote mountainside (in 2011); and Nicholas, the grown-up child of Otto and Freija, beneficiary of a new medical treatment of suspended animation based on findings related to Anna’s accident (2034). As a modern devised theatre piece Your Last Breath eschews many of the conventional dramatic techniques of realism ushered in by Ibsen and his compatriots in the late nineteenth century—consistency of character, fixity of location, fourth wall sensibility are not part of the ensemble’s working aesthetic. Instead, there is a fluidity of action and chorus work in the piece, a filmic rhythm which makes even the shortest act in all Ibsenite drama (Act 3 of When We Dead Awaken) seem protracted in comparison. The play is made up of 34 scenes, some as brief as a sentence or two and movement sequences and video backdrops punctuate the flow of the drama. The metaphor of mapping informs the scenographic design and the movement patterns, with lines of longitude (the y-axis) and latitude (the x-axis) made manifest on stage by strings. Conceptually, these strings signify the historic mapping exercise Christopher is doing but they also communicate the problems he and the other characters encounter as they overlap, become tangled, surround and imprison them at different moments in the ongoing montage.31 At one moment this theatrical cat’s cradle is utilised to represent the mountain itself: Christopher pulls up centre point to form a mountain. Both axes create a mountain around centre point. He places the mountain down to the floor, and jumps into upstage-left quadrant, while both axes are raised above his head. X-axis moves downstage with Christopher. He pulls the intersection down to create a valley. He returns it and drops to the floor as X- and Yaxes drop to mid-level. X-axis travels upstage while Y-axis travels stage left. X-axis and Y-axis are lowered to the ground. (Curious Directive, 2012, pp.27–28)

Bewildering to read on the page, the stage representation of Norway’s far north is dependent on the interconnection of the many elements in the company’s mountain dramaturgy: the multi-dimensionality of actor, materials, video, sound, movement, music, space, text and story.

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Although this is clearly a vernacular which Ibsen would not recognise, even if he progressively pushed the stylistic conventions of his own time, the two plays nevertheless interrogate some important common territory: the consideration of mountains as a place for resurrection. Viewing the plays together, this is not simply to be understood as a Christian predilection but more widely, in terms recognisable both to the indigenous people of remote Finnmark, the Saami, and to the scientific community researching the phenomenon of hypothermia. Miraculous rebirth is as much part of Anna’s narrative in Your Last Breath as it is of Irene and Rubek’s. Indeed, the true story upon which the play is based—Anna Bågenholm’s recovery from a prolonged period of cold-induced cardiac arrest—may just as well have been termed ‘when she, dead, awakened’. Bågenholm slipped under water and was entombed by ice in her accident in 1999. Airlifted to a hospital in Tromso, she was ‘in every sense clinically dead’, according to the press records of the event.32 But although oxygen had stopped flowing to her brain, she experienced no cognitive damage as she was in a state of life-protecting lockdown induced by a perilously cold core temperature (just 13.7°). She made a full recovery only to return to the very same hospital years later as a radiologist, having triggered major discoveries in the new field of ‘therapeutic hypothermia’ (not the oxymoron one might think). In the holographic montage of the play, Anna’s resurrection is woven into other motifs of death and rebirth. Freija’s son Nicholas’s existence is also temporarily suspended to save his life as a newborn infant, using technology born of the skiing accident. He then announces to his now dead mother in 2034 the birth of his own child in one of the five scenes titled ‘Grave’—a mechanism to allow his living character from the future to commune with the dead of the past. Even Christopher, who dies a solitary frozen death in the Norwegian Arctic winter of 1876 having tarried too long to complete his survey, considers his living legacy to be the act of putting Nordland on the map, literally: Tell Thomas, though he may feel the lack of a father, he may find that I am known to him better in death than I would have been in life. My child has a path to follow, but let him press his fingerprints over my map and leave his own mark. (Curious Directive 2012, p.49)

These various thematic strings are held together again by ideas drawn from ancient Norwegian cultural tradition—not Norse mythology in this

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case but Saami folklore, passed on by a people who have lived north of the Arctic circle for many thousands of years. Key to this folklore, as Otto repeats through the play’s finale is the ‘Saami world view of “no beginning, no end”’ (Curious Directive 2012, p.51). Both When We Dead Awaken and Your Last Breath dramatise the mountain in that spirit: as a place of temporal refuge, at once deadly and rejuvenating. Pakistan and Tibet (76°-81° East): Patrick Meyers’ K2 (1983) and Kutiyattam Performance Text, Lifting Mount Kailash/Kailasodharanam (Second Century B.C.) Compared to the Scandinavian Mountains, the peaks in Cumbria or the Scottish Highlands, the Himalayas are babies—not of course in relation to their size but in terms of their age. The ‘world’s highest and youngest mountain range’ (Cooper, 1997, p.127) was formed a mere fifty million years ago when the Indian plate collided with Asia, after a long trip north from its starting point as part of the Gondwanaland supercontinent (Price et al., 2013, p.24).33 It took the next fifty or so million years for the range to reach its current height as the India plate was forced under the Eurasian plate and a massive uplift of rock occurred, forming the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The range arcs for 1500 miles (2500 kilometres) from Pakistan and the Kashmir region in the West (where the Karakorum34 are located, including K2), to Bhutan and Myanmar in the East; it separates Nepal and India in the South from Tibet and China in the North. As the world’s youngest range of mountains, it represents a potent model of tectonic activity. With nearly all the other ‘plate-pieces’ of the global jigsaw in place before, it is easy to imagine the Himalayas forming on the Eurasian border, wrinkling up just as a cardboard piece might do in the hands of an eager child, forcing a fit. More than any other area in the world, the mountains of the Himalayas are viewed as sacred, the focus of several competing religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, as well as the smaller religions of Jainism (beginning in India) and Bon (from Tibet). All told, Adrian Cooper suggests, ‘almost one billion people’ revere the mountains in this region (Cooper, 1997, p.127) and the principal peak of them all is not Everest (Nepalese name Chumulunga) but Mount Kailas or Kailash, so sacred that it is never climbed. Viewed as the ‘navel of the earth and the axis of the universe’ (Muthukumaraswamy and Kaushal, 2004, p.144), Kailash forms the centre-point of a thirty mile ritual circumambulation for the Tibetan

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Bon. Climbing to nearly 6000 metres, pilgrims attempt to do the most exacting of round trips (in all, fifty kilometres) in just one day (Price et al., 2013, p.261). Despite the intensity of religious activity, the region has seen unprecedented growth in secular tourism since the first ascents of the major peaks in the area in the 1950s. By the early 1990s queues on Everest were already causing major dismay to the extent that feted alpinist Peter Boardman likened the highest mountain on earth to an ‘amphitheatre of the ego’ (Musa, Higham, and Thompson- Carr, 2015, p.1). By the time of the climbing season in 2012 even this assessment appeared modest with as many as 234 climbers reaching the summit on one day; and in 2019 a photo of a queue snaking up to the Hillary Step made up of hundreds of climbers went viral, resulting in international condemnation and several deaths.35 The concept of sustainable access seems more and more to be a contradiction in terms. The Himalayas are a site where the sacred meets the secular, then, in the starkest terms, and this division is reflected in the choice of the two pieces in this section: the kutiyattam performance text, Lifting Mount Kailash, derived from the second act of the Sanskrit play, The Coronation, originally written in the Second Century B.C.; and US playwright Patrick Meyer’s two-hander, K2, premiering on Broadway in New York in 1983. There is no text to analyse in the ‘total theatre’ (Rubin et al., 2001, p.138) of kutiyattam, literally meaning ‘combined acting’. The classical Sanskrit source for Lifting Mount Kailash by the renowned classical playwright Bhasa ‘wouldn’t help you at all’—in the words of Indian Theatre scholar Sreenath Nair.36 This is because the translation from text to stage in the oldest form of Indian Theatre and arguably the world, is as elastic as one can imagine, judged at least in terms of the principles of the Western drama tradition. Just one act is selected from the play, which might itself take three to eight days to be performed. Of that time, anything up to two hours of improvised performance would be dedicated to the scene Lifting Mount Kailash (or Kailasodharanam), based on the prescribed codification of theatre techniques in the Natyasastra. A performance text is therefore needed to decipher this ancient theatrical mediation of the sacred mountain of Mount Kailash and here I am using a combination of written accounts and visual texts as my primary sources (Madhavan, 2012; Nair, 2015; Nellhaus et al., 2016).37 The Natyasastra, attributed to Bharatamuni and created somewhere between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D., is described as ‘the deep repository

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of Indian performance knowledge’ (Nair, 2015, p.3). It is immensely detailed in its codification of skills and techniques, what Nair calls the ‘explicit’ content of the treatise (Nair, 2015). But on the dramatic treatment of mountains it is uncharacteristically brief. Chapter twenty-six deals with ‘Special Representations’ (citrabhinaya), peculiarities of gesture and word used by the performer to create objects, atmospheres, emotions, animals, numbers, weather and many other things in the mind’s eye of the audience. ‘Gods and Honourable persons should be indicated by obeisance to them’ (Bharata-Muni 1951, XXVI 72–73), we hear, and ‘Mountains’ must be dealt with ‘in connexion with their height’ ((Bharata-Muni 1951, XXVI 74–75). With no more elaboration than that, in the definitive theatre treatise of world history, it is perhaps surprising that a mountain scene is one of the most popular pieces of kutiyattam performance, to this day. Lifting Mount Kailash draws on the epic of the Ramayana (book 7) and specifically on the story of Shiva, Parvati and the twenty-armed Demon King, Ravana. In this myth, Ravana is returning home to Lanka in a flying chariot after a victorious campaign against his stepbrother, Kubera—from whom he has appropriated the chariot. Shiva and Parvati are making love on the mountain top (Kailash) and Ravana’s way past is therefore thwarted. Infuriated, Ravana lifts the mountain up and shakes it to show the two lovers how upset he is, terrifying Parvati in the process. Shiva divines what is happening beneath them and with his toe (or in some versions, thumb) forces the mountain back to earth, crushing Ravana beneath it and releasing in him a terrible cry. After a thousand years, Ravana is forgiven by Shiva and is given a special invincible sword. The story is very popular in Hindu iconography and art and is known as a Ravananugruha—‘kindness to Ravana’, showing the forgiveness of Shiva (Fig. 3). As a storytelling form, all of the characters and the expansive landscape of the region are brought to life by one male actor in Lifting Mount Kailash, working in consort with a number of musicians. The kutiyattam-trained performer uses an elaborate array of codified gestures, as well as more mimetic actions in a physical dramaturgy combining great technical detail with improvisation. That physical dramaturgy comprises the following actions: • The actor looks at the mountain and through a combination of hand gestures, eye and body movements, depicts its height, scale and perspective.

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Fig. 3 Ravana (below) shaking Mount Kailash, with Shiva and Parvati above, from Ellora, cave 29 (Photo by Arian Zwegers. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Ellora,_cave_29,_Ravana_shaking_Mount_Kailasa_(9841650413). jpg)

• Topographical detail is added in the same vein, including features of the valley (rivers,38 trees) and an indication of the surrounding peaks, their height and orientation. • Local fauna is brought to life in his depiction, including forest animals; an elephant eats and becomes drowsy, a snake attempts to bite its leg, a lion has a fight with the elephant. • Ravana’s chariot is blocked by the mountain. The actor, as Ravana, punches the mountain, loosens the soil at its base and then lifts it onto his chest, tossing it up and down like a play thing. • In between this mountain juggling act, Ravana plays dice. • The actor, now embodying Shiva and Parvati enacts their flirtation on the mountain summit; they argue over another woman (Ganga) and Parvati mounts her chariot to leave. • The mountain shakes from below and Parvati feels the tremors, her clothing becoming dishevelled.

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• The actor as Shiva presses the mountain back onto Ravana; the actor, then as Ravana, cries out with his hands on the floor, trapped. • Shiva descends and Ravana stands in obeisance to him; he is gifted a sword by Shiva. • Shiva disappears and Ravana returns to the position of pensive thought, with which the piece began. Viewed from a certain perspective, the mountain dramaturgy here is built up as a montage, with the actor-as-storyteller moving fluidly between the three main characters and shifting locations from summit to valley and back again. In doing so, he marks the central dynamic tensions evident in the iconography above—high and low, Gods and demon, mountain stabiliser and mountain disrupter. The act of the mountain shaking is told from three perspectives and there is a filmic sense of establishment shot followed by detailed close-up. But montage as a term is too caught up in Western film theory to be of real use in this context (Eisenstein, 2010). A more effective image of the approach to mountain representation in this example is to be drawn from Sreenath Nair’s analysis, one sensitive to the specific cultural context of the work. Nair makes the same structural observation about multiple perspectives but considers the relationship between them in different terms: There are multiple layers of mimetic clusters in this scene: A) the actor establishing the size of the mountain, which is the background cluster; B) the enactment of animals, birds and trees; and C) the enactment of lifting the mountain. (Nair 2015, p.146, my emphasis)

These ‘clusters’, he argues, ‘together form a single enormous cluster that is the mighty mountain Kailash’ (Nair, 2015, p.146). The result is not so much a depiction but a ‘hypothesis’, binding the audience together with the performers in the mutual appreciation of the sacred mountain, through a shared rasa experience (Nair, 2015, p.147). A complex term influencing Western Performance Studies (Schechner, 2006) as well as being intrinsic to Indian Performance Studies, here it is sufficient to understand rasa as Erin B. Mee defines it: ‘the spectator converging emotionally with the performer in a shared embodiment of that emotion’ (Mee, 2015, p.159). For all its mythic grandeur and the incredibility of its subject matter, Lifting Mount Kailash has the potential, then, to move

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the audience as much as the mountain, taking us in our imaginations to a summit which can never be reached on foot. Where explicit craft, imagination and stylisation combine in kutiyattam, a (perhaps foolhardy) level of realism characterises the approach taken by Patrick Meyers in his treatment of the most dangerous mountain in the world, K2: Place: A ledge, eight feet wide and four feet deep, located on a six hundred foot ice wall at 27,000 feet on K2, the world’s second highest mountain. (Meyers, 1983, p.3)

On that ledge Meyers places the characters of Taylor (a judge, who is unhappily single) and Harold (a physicist, in a stable marriage), both representatives of wealthy American professionals able to seek out Himalayan experiences in their spare time. They are waking up to the sunrise after a forced bivouac in the death zone caused by an injury to Harold’s leg. Thinking beyond character and considering some of the ‘features’ of this particular ‘theatrical planet’, (Fuchs, 2004, p.9), takes one to the detailed costume and property ‘plots’ listed at the end of the play. These, tellingly, read more like expedition inventories than stage management documents. Taylor, in blue, needs quilted pants with zip-up in-seams, matching parka, black suede gloves, blue mittens, super gaiters, white ‘Kolfach [sic]’39 climbing boots and crampons; Harold has the same long list of kit (though in a rust colour) and sports a similar pair of specialised climbing boots (Meyers, 1983, pp.40–41). The props list is even more technically prescriptive and reflects the playwright’s aspirations to recreate the conditions of mountaineering for his actors in exacting terms. Carabiners, ice screws, oxygen bottles, ice axes and climbing harnesses are all stipulated, even a tube of sunscreen—not presumably to protect the actors from the glaring lights of the stage but to maintain a curious authenticity (Meyers, 1983, pp.42–44). This precision in costume and props design betrays Meyers’ ultimate aim in this piece: to explore a mountain verisimilitude not just in scenographic terms but in the very movement of his actors, to have his cast perform the act of vertical ascent and descent in actuality, using what amounts to a climbing wall-cumtheatre-set doubling as the rugged face of K2. Reflecting on past designs for his play work in 1983, Meyer’s author’s note explains this thinking:

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What all four productions have had to face, with an equal degree of energy and commitment, is the climbing reality of the play. The actors must learn climbing technique. They must learn to use climbing gear and ropes. And Taylor must climb a 90 degree face. It is this physical commitment to a very athletic and frightening reality that makes K2 an extremely demanding work. (Meyers, 1983, p.5)

Brought up in the tradition of American psychological realism, where the importance of background research and scenic fidelity paramount, perhaps explains why Meyers feels these conditions are a ‘must’ and non-negotiable. Both he and the director of the first production, Terry Schreiber, undertook extensive research into the Himalayan region, and into mountaineering practices and kit, spending time interviewing highaltitude alpinists (Baskin, 1987).40 Their immersion in these sources is reflected in the belief that the actors should not only put on the trappings of the K2 explorer mountaineer but experience some of the same gravitational forces and exposure. A plainer contrast with the imaginative stylisation of the kutiyattam piece could not be imagined. This commitment to the actuality of climbing drives the decisions of the play, with the only real ‘action’ associated with four separate climbs performed by Taylor as the non-injured party. The conceit for these climbs or ‘pitches’ is the need to search for a lost rope to allow both climbers a fighting chance to descend from the ledge. But in reality they constitute the dramaturgical spine of the piece, at first marking despair as the rope is discovered to be trapped; then hope as it is levered off by both characters (only to initiate a massive avalanche); then terror as Taylor slips and hangs Toni Kurtz-like41 from the line, scouring the face for ice screws; and finally separation as Harold is left to die on the ledge, whilst Taylor descends to safety.42 Whilst these marker-points clearly demand some realistic climbing skills from the actor playing Taylor as well as belaying assistance from Harold, it is really only the last climb which finds the right balance between climbing-wall spectacle and dramatic poetry. They may be physically demanding and theatrically challenging to achieve, but the other climbing displays only manage to elicit rather banal storytelling attempts from Harold. Taylor asks to be diverted as he ascends to look for the rope, on the first pitch: ‘you entertain me […] let’s have some interesting trivia’ (Meyers, 1983, p.14) and the audience are treated to exactly that: ‘Once upon a time there was a cyclops with a glass eye named Rex’

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(Meyers, 1983, p.14), Harold offers lamely. In the last monologue of the play, however, Harold tells a far more compelling story. It is delivered as a lyrical suicide note to his wife and child in the near future but is punctuated by tugs on the rope in the present, tugs which signal Taylor’s slow divorce from his climbing partner as he makes his way down. In this final tale, a snow-blind glacier fox waits ‘at the base of the purple Japanese mountains’ (Meyers, 1983, p.38) patiently anticipating the waters of the sea to wash round it. It is, like Harold, slowly yielding to the forces of nature, having been left alone to forage for itself. The dignified and calm death of the animal is of course paralleled with Harold’s imminent demise and in these last minutes, the character of the climber is lent a gravitas which is out of kilter from his previous often crass contributions. Crucial to the success of this moment, though, is his partner’s absence—Taylor is down below, offstage, out of sight and living in our imaginations, only indexically present by the tremors he sends up the line. In this moment the barely concealed machismo of the ‘must climb’ ethos which has until then been very much the ‘climate’ of the play, gives way to a suggestive, implied theatricality. ‘Extremely demanding’ and realistic climbing is not in fact a must-have activity in this particular mountain drama but a preamble to something more allusive and moving, a truism the ancient practice of kutiyattam understands only too well. Japan and Australia (131°-152° East43 ): Kyogen Performance Text, Owls (Late Edo Period44 ), Noh Text Taniko (Fourteenth Century) and Patrick White’s Night on Bald Mountain (1964) Australia parted company with India 120 million years ago when the supercontinent of Gondwana split up (Short and Woodroffe, 2009, p.9); we have seen above how this separation ultimately produced the Himalayas once the Indian plate arrived at its docking place in the Northern hemisphere. Australia headed north-east, rifting from New Zealand 20 million years later before sprouting its famous mountain range, known as the Great Divide along its East coast between 80 and 65 million years ago, triggered not by any continental collision but by processes known as subduction and uplift.45 The Great Dividing Range does exactly what its name suggests, isolating the Eastern coastal regions, which now house the vast majority of Australia’s main cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra), from the inland basin on the other side of the range.

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It stretches for 3000 kilometres from the Cape of York peninsular in Northern Queensland to the state of Victoria in the south. Bald Mountain, the peak of choice for Patrick White’s harsh examination of humanity, Night on Bald Mountain, is situated close to the end of the range, as one travels south, beyond Sydney’s urban coastal plain in a region where, in J. R. Dyce’s estimation, ‘the elemental concerns of tragedy’, are played out ‘among the mountain canyons of this ancient land’ (Dyce, 1974, p.105). Japan’s birth as a set of landmasses or islands was much more recent. Australia has rocks more ancient than any other country, betraying its Precambrian history and producing forms of stunning uniqueness such as the iconic Uluru, or Ayers rock (Bernbaum, 1997, p.190). Japan by contrast came into being as a unique entity ‘just’ 15 million years ago, when it severed connections with the Eurasian plate and the Sea of Japan rushed in to fill the gap (Barnes, 2003).46 It is one of the most mountainous countries of the world and, like India and China from where it absorbed Taoist and Buddhist influences, the Japanese consider numerous peaks to be sacred— as many as 354 according to one estimate (Bernbaum, 1997, p.56). Following H. Byron Earhart’s analysis, Taoism encouraged the Japanese to consider ‘a naturalistic life in the mountains’ and to explore a harmony with nature while Buddhism established mountains as ‘the ideal “practice site” for ascetic and devotional exercises’ (Earhart, 1980, p.108). In Part 2.1 we looked in detail at the ritual practices that emerged from these joint influences. In this last section on mountain plays, dedicated to the most Eastern line of longitude, I will spend time analysing a Japanese kyogen playwright’s response to the cult of the yamabushi in tandem with the approach taken in the more elevated form of Noh. Finally, I will turn to the literary contribution Australia’s Patrick White has made to mountain drama. Kyogen plays have a close association with the better-known Japanese theatre form of Noh: the two forms evolved at roughly the same time (from the fourteenth century onwards), are performed on the same stage, and observe similar costume and movement conventions. Kyogen is to Noh what the satyr play is to Greek Tragedy, a much shorter, irreverent form, offering light relief and satirical commentary. Given the emphasis on stoic asceticism in the Shugendo religion—recall the priests’ practice of bathing in ice-cold mountain streams and hanging off cliff edges from Part 2.1—it is difficult to imagine why the yamabushi might be of interest to a comic writer. But in fact, plays featuring yamabushi priests form

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a whole sub-genre of kyogen, an indication of the standing of the yamabushi in Japanese culture and of the extent to which even mountain religions and their key practitioners can be treated with humour and lightness in this style of performance. Owls has all the trademark characteristics of this category of kyogen performance texts, its main character (the Shite) is a mountain priest, the location is deep in yamabushi territory, and the subject matter is the transformative power of magic—in this piece ‘a case of owl possession’ (Morley, 1993, p.130) to be diagnosed, then treated, by the priest. Transformation is a central concern, drawing on ideas from Buddhism, and is simultaneously celebrated and ridiculed in the kyogen form. Understanding this seeming paradox is ‘essential for the appreciation of mountain priest plays’ (Morley, 1993, p.16), kyogen scholar and translator of Owls , Cathryn Morley, argues, a key to unlocking the particular mountain dramaturgy represented in this form. The plot of the ten-minute play is typically unelaborate. Taro’s Older Brother has been worried about him ever since he returned from the mountains; he has been acting strangely and appears possessed. A powerful mountain priest is called upon to heal Taro. The priest examines the younger boy, offers an incantation to cure him but only succeeds in making things worse and putting him through more pain. The priest then steps up his attempts to magic a cure, clear now that the boy has been taken over by the spirit of an owl in revenge for the boy’s damaging of a nest. But rather than bringing relief to the boy he inadvertently infects his older brother who hoots in pain almost as loudly as Taro. In a last-gasp effort to make amends, the priest infects himself and the play ends with the three characters flapping and hooting about the stage until they exit. Where the climate of Noh is sombre, dark and reflective, the kyogen piece is reminiscent of western vaudeville or of the European popular theatre form, commedia dell’arte. The contrast of atmosphere and dramatic treatment might best be illustrated by recalling the classic Noh text Taniko, which also dramatises the work of the yamabushi and inspired Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No (Brecht, 1977). Like Owls , Taniko (or the ‘Valley Hurling’) is interested in the exploits of a young boy who has picked up a sickness in the mountains and, as with the kyogen play, this boy is accompanied by a mountain ‘master’ who is consulted about his health. Taniko, however, ends not with stage antics and irreverent hooting but with the most extreme of ascetic acts. The Leader recounts:

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Though I say it with dread, there has been from ancient times a Great Custom that those who fail should be cast down. All the pilgrims are asking that he should be thrown into the valley. (Waley 1921, p.194)

Recognising this ‘mighty custom’, one already encountered as ishikozume in Part 2.1, the boy stoically accepts his fate and is thrown from the mountain ridge to the valley below. In a final stanza which is drawn on very closely by Brecht in his Marxist reworking, the Chorus sums up: Then the pilgrims sighing For the sad ways of the world And the bitter ordinances of it, Make ready for the hurling. Foot to foot They stood together Heaving blindly, None guiltier than his neighbour. And clods of earth after And flat stones they flung. (Waley, 1921, p.195)

Happily, though, magic intervenes in this play too, for when the pilgrims of Shugendo reach the summit they pray to the founder of their religion En no Gy¯oja, who musters a spirit to resurrect the boy and to lay him in the arms of the priest (Waley, 1921, p.195). The belief the local audience has for the divine intervention of En in the Noh play comes from the same spiritual conviction which accepts the magical powers of the yamabushi in the kyogen piece but the tone in which it is expressed is of course completely different. As plays which can be performed alongside one another on the same stage, Japanese audiences move from one climate of mountain drama to the next in the same day: from the slowness of Noh, to the slapstick of kyogen, from the reverential to the ridiculing. Indeed, this shift of tone happens within the kyogen piece itself, albeit with an ironic edge. Having seen his error in turning the older brother into an owl, the Priest ‘tries to sneak away’ up the Noh stage’s hashigikari, or bridge (Morley, 1993, p.131). But his conscience is pricked by the strigine cries of his comrades and he returns to try another incantation, putting on a ‘Noh style, dynamic mode’ of performance to accompany the prayer:

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Oh persistent owl! Flapping about possessing people here and there. If I offer a prayer How can you fail to disappear? (Morley, 1993, p.131)

As Earhart notes many Japanese ‘don’t think that the mountain is sacred - [it] is sacred’ (Earhart, 1980, p.110, emphasis in original), but this does not preclude a healthy ironising of that belief and a self-mockery embedded in the ways magical transformation and spiritual intervention is presented in kyogen. Viewed alongside the Noh piece, these plays collectively represent a vibrant case study of how ‘naturalistic life in the mountains’ (Earhart, 1980, p.108) is mediated in two classical Japanese dramatic forms. Those mountains may be the site where extreme pursuits are sometimes practised but the theatre space and specifically the Noh stage, is where that practice is scrutinised, aestheticised and ironised. There is no magic spirit or divine intervention to save the luckless Stella in Patrick White’s bleak Chekhovian study, Night on Bald Mountain (1964), first performed in Adelaide in the same year. The sickness she experiences on the mountainside is categorically different from the boys in Taniko and Owls ; it is an internalised sickness, typical of White’s dramatic obsession with Freudian guilt and repressed desire. As such, it is Stella herself who hurls her body into the valley from the top of Bald Mountain at the end of the play. An act of desolation in keeping with the ‘huge and lonely’ (White, 1985, p.348) landscape, she is racked with guilt and confused feelings for her father, prompting critics to consider it a dramatic exploration of the Electra complex (White, 1985, pp.357– 358). White christened his play the first Australian tragedy and the extent to which this is true can be measured by his dramaturgical treatment of the mountain, the ‘strongest presence in the play’, according to the Australian theatre critic Ben Packer.47 Indeed, Bald Mountain offers a fitting example of the connected critique Elinor Fuchs calls a play’s ‘myth’, in this final part of the Mountain drama section. ‘Putting together space, time, the natural world and the social world, elements that change and those that don’t, you are discovering the “myth”’ (Fuchs, 2004, p.8), she argues and in White’s play these components are deftly interwoven. In terms of space and time, White’s tragedy conforms to a strict, even neo-classical, dramatic unity. Composed in three acts, the drama takes twenty-four hours to run its course, from dawn to misty dawn. It has echoes of the late nineteenth century experiments in naturalistic

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tragedy, Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) (Strindberg, 1976) and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) (Ibsen, 1980b), for instance, where the domestic and claustrophobic house plays a constant, if intensifying, part in the fates of the eponymous female suicides, over the course of a day or two. But White does not call his play Stella Summerhayes, even though her fate is similar; it is the mountain which is the main character in his thinking, located beyond the reaches of Sydney, though the city’s lights remain just in view, ‘cheap […] glitter’ as far as the goatherd Miss Quodling is concerned (White, 1985, p.348). The oppressive house in Bald Mountain belongs to Professor Sword and his alcoholic wife, Miriam. It is perched high on the summit of the mountain and its bedrooms on the upper floor (one each for Sword, his wife and Stella), ‘share[…] a common view of the mountain landscape’ (White, 1985, p.285). This well-proportioned house is set in relief with Quodling’s ‘shack’ next-door, a space crafted from the materials of the mountain itself, in ‘untreated slab’ (White, 1985, p.269), and the location which bookends the play. Here, in demonstrably different conditions to the Professor, Quodling is raising a flock of goats, animals which pointedly enjoy the freedom of the mountains from the backyard gate. These two spaces, and the people who frequent them, represent what May-Brit Akerholt defines as the ‘all important paradox of White’s dramatic world: the pull between life and death, between destructive and constructive forces’ (Akerholt, 1988, p.126). The Swords live a life of comfortable aridity, the isolation of their location an expression of their failed marriage; Quodling by contrast enjoys an expansive contentment in the cramped and humble shelter of her shack: Mornun….I love it even when it skins yer! Oh yes it can hurt. When the ice cracks underfoot … and the scrub tears the scabs of yer knuckles[…] It’s to remind you that life begins at dawn. Bald Mountain! (White, 1985, p.272)

If Bald Mountain was conceived as a kyogen play, Quodling would be the Shite role, an antipodean yamabushi retreating to the mountains to live an ascetic life of simplicity and renewal. The natural and social world of the play operate in similar counterpoint. The landscape of Bald Mountain, one of many peaks going by that name in Australia, is evoked in several ways in the play. Scenographically, light and colour are used to create ‘a suggestion of vastness – rock colours

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at the ground, thinning out into greys and blues’ (White, 1985, p.269). Mist is utilised to signal early morning on the summit and smoke to suggest the high-altitude shack. Physically, the actors are seen to climb up to the Sword’s house (in Act 1 scene 2), following an Australian bush track and panting, ‘as though the climb has been a stiff one’ (White, 1985, p.281). Prompted by the exhilaration of the climb Stella observes with tragic prescience: I could climb and climb until I was swallowed up, in some… oh, something… the Sun, perhaps… Or dropped…. (White, 1985, p.282)

Later, performing as a Greek-style chorus, the two hikers who have witnessed her suicide describe her act of self-immolation in almost identical terms: ‘There she stood…against the light […] She seemed to topple out of the sun. Now she’s lying at the foot of the cliff’ (White, 1985, p.353). The social world is intimately caught up with these various attempts to translate the natural features of the mountainscape into dramatic form. The summit is both an ivory tower for the arrogant and repressed middleclass professor, (a destructive force in his wife and Stella’s lives) and a place of simplicity and cultivation for the working-class goatherd, even though both have fled the city to escape its influence. Stella too, nurse to the character of Miriam, has moved from a suburb in Melbourne to administer care for her alcoholic employer, with no previous experience of ‘high-living’. A simple tension between city-life and mountain-life underpins the drama, then, two cultures which remain separated even after the death of Stella. The professor and his wife, self-confessed ‘destroyers’, retreat to their house ‘like automata’, with an empty vow to try again (White 1985, pp.344–355). Not even the antiquity of the mountain, made up as we know of some of the oldest rocks in the world, nor its natural fauna, are seen to prevail. ‘There’ll be nothing on Bald Mountain … but goats’ (White, 1985, p.355) says Quodling, only to see her prize doe Delores go the same way as Stella over the edge. Mountains too may be ‘ground into […] dust’ (White, 1985, p.355) in the future, she conjectures, in an oblique reference to the atomic age, which just twenty years before had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hundreds of millions of years of geological activity which produced the Great Dividing Range in her solemn and concluding assessment may amount to nought.

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The myth of Bald Mountain, then, goes beyond the individual tragedy of Stella, and the death of an adventurous goat, beyond the critique of empty and egotistical academia, beyond even the clash of rural and urban life. It extends instead to the cosmic forces of creation and destruction.

Conclusion As a means to introduce the diversity of the field, this longitudinal slicing up of the world of mountain drama has several perceivable advantages. Given the international spread of possible examples, it has produced an appropriately ambitious and geographically inclusive sample of the many sites which have been exploited as dramatic material, touching on some of the geological and (pre)historical conditions associated with these sites. In doing so it builds on the Mountain Studies framework established in Part 1 and the examination of mountain rituals in Part 2.1. It has stimulated a mix of play texts and performance texts avoiding value judgements as to the status of either. It has necessitated a critical imagining of the plays in performance without the need for extensive production history. Most importantly, in the arbitrariness of the cut, it has triggered some unforeseen comparisons and generative encounters, promoting a healthy disregard for period, genre and authorial context as organising principles and focusing instead on the connections and disconnections, congruities and incongruities, which inevitably emerge when two or three dramas are placed alongside one another. In this, the connective tissues of a mountain dramaturgy have begun to be dissected and exposed. There is, however, one pitfall associated with this longitudinal approach—the omission of plays with no coordinates. What about the dramas which do not specify any identifiable mountain location, not even in the vaguest or allusive of ways, as for Cook’s Pilgrims or Curious Directive’s Your Last Breath? What about the mountain plays which have other contextual specificities beyond location—of theme or of political persuasion, for example? What about the dramatists who invent their own mountains? This hidden canon would include plays such as W. H. Auden’s Ascent of F6 (Auden and Isherwood, 1936), whose fictional mountain is located in an appropriately named dramatic construct called Sudoland; Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (Beckett, 1961) where Winnie and Willie live in archetypal mountains of tiny height but massive personal significance; Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language (Pinter, 1988) in which the

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absence of a definite location in the play is part of the unsettling atmosphere of obfuscation created by a faceless but eminently recognisable military; and Fujita Asaya’s modern take on the kyogen form, Hole (1965) (Asaya, 2007) in which a greedy landlord eager for easy coal money is duped by three miners drilling for nothing but the fun of it. The lack of a specific mountain location in these plays is of course no failure on the writer’s part—indeed it is often an explicit part of a playwright’s intention to generalise the political point or to represent the mountain in more archetypal terms. But having established a dramaturgical constraint for this section one must honour it and these plays and others like them sadly fall outside the limitation of longitude. With this limitation acknowledged, I would like to return to the question of whether, from this broad passage of plays from Western Peru to Eastern Australia, some collective identifiers of a mountain dramaturgy are evident and to summarise what those connection points might be. First, there is a tendency for mountain dramatists to shape their plays in response to the topographical details of their chosen site—the climb and descent of the Andes for instance in Shaffer’s Royal Hunt or the awkward squeeze of mixed-up lovers on the ridge in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Second, there is the perceived danger of a mountain literalism—an anti-naturalistic bent to much of the work here which is not just about the pragmatics of representation and the limitations of budget; Patrick Meyer’s ultimate move away from a restrictive realism in the last scene of K2 is a case in point. Third, there is a shared sense in these plays of mountains as sites which harbour spirits, magic makers, Gods and demons and a common belief that miraculous things can happen in them. Fourth, there is an ambivalence to the mountain as it is dramatised which resonates with the earlier discussion of mountain rituals and their inherent liminality. The mountain in these dramas is conceived as a place of nurture and destruction, of power and impotence, of sacredness and secularity; and it can move from one pole to the other with the frightening rapidity of a storm blowing over a summit. Fifth, and despite this ambivalence, there remains a capacity for critique—serious as in Cook’s examination of male heroism or light-hearted, as in the kyogen plays’ mocking of priestly power—one which is exercised throughout this sample of mountain dramas. Finally, and relatedly, there is a deep and sometimes prophetic concern for the mountain’s health and well-being, expressed in the poetic voice of a Cumbrian Beck, by Norman Nicholson, or in the

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shocking cardboard horizon of oil rigs in 7:84’s Cheviot. These connections point consistently to the mountain as a key player in the drama, so much more than a two-dimensional backdrop, or scenographic plaything. This I believe, is the most conspicuous trope of mountain dramaturgy. Mountains have impact in these plays, they move things and people, ideas and beliefs, irrespective of their place on the arbitrary lines of an atlas.

Notes 1. See the analysis of Bald Mountain at the end of this section for an elaboration of this idea. 2. http://performing-mountains.leeds.ac.uk. Any additions are gratefully received. 3. See for instance Sand Mountain (Linney, 1985) set in the Appalachians; The Bacchae (Euripides, 2006) where Mount Cithaeron south of Thebes provides sanctuary for Dionysus and his Maenads; The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht, 1984), especially scene three and scene four, in the Northern Mountains; and the model jingju opera, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Peking Opera Group of Shanghai, 1970). 4. Taken from the location of Cajamarca (78° West), referenced in Royal Hunt of the Sun. 5. There is a scene towards the end of the play, where Rachel and Dan poignantly consider alternative futures which, given the erratic time structure of the piece, are also alternative pasts: ‘[Will] got on the plane to Peru by himself, and I didn’t even care’, (Cook, 2016, p.81) says Dan, even though we have witnessed the two of them on the mountain from the very first scene. 6. For the original drawing of this design solution see: https://collections. vam.ac.uk/item/O165179/the-royal-hunt-of-the-plan-annals-michael/. 7. Interview between the author and Elinor Cook, 30 June 2017. 8. Interview with Elinor Cook on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/179021034. 9. Interview with Elinor Cook on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/179021034. 10. Interview between the author and Elinor Cook, 30 June 2017. 11. Interview with Elinor Cook on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/179021034. 12. Interview with Elinor Cook on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/179021034. 13. The Isle of Skye referenced in Cheviot is on the longitude line of 6° East and Cumbria (Cartmel Fell) referenced in Old Man of the Mountains is on the longitude line of 3° East. 14. For a simple summary of the three periods of the Cambrian orogeny see: http://www.snh.gov.uk/about-scotlands-nature/rocks-soils-andlandforms/rocks-and-minerals/geological-foundation-together/collisionwith-england/.

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15. The Cheviot sheep did, however, originate in the Cheviot hills and for many years have been associated with mountains: ‘Recognised as a hardy sheep as early as 1372, Cheviots did well in those bleak, windswept conditions, with their strong constitution, easy lambing, well developed mothering instinct, and fast maturity. The Cheviot ewe can be found grazing up to 3,000 feet and is expected to live off the hill throughout the year’. The Cheviot Society: http://www.cheviotsheep.org/about/breed. html (Accessed 30 June 2017). There are clear associations between this hardy livestock and the highlanders, described at one stage in the play as ‘a sturdy breed and accustomed to the hazards of life in the wild’ (McGrath, 1981, p.28). 16. A 3D rendering of the original set is available here: https://www.nls.uk/ collections/theatre/cheviot-3d/open-1. 17. http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/books/the-cheviot-the-stag-andthe-black-black-oil-iid-11837/do-9781408163085-div-0000000. 18. There is inevitable dispute about the details of the Clearances and these figures even in 1973 would be subject to contestation and debate—part of course of McGrath’s purpose as a political playmaker. For a detailed description of the complexities of this period in Scottish historiography see (Cameron, 2015). 19. Nancy Banks Smith in The Guardian, 7 June 1974, p.10. 20. Nicholson may also have been influenced by the alternative name for Cartmel Fell, ‘Raven’s Barrow’—a 150 m peak which features in the Outlying Fells of Lakeland, the book Alfred Wainwright assembled to gather the lesser peaks of the entire region in one place. It was published after the seven volume guide was completed (Wainwright, 2007, p.42). 21. Middens is an interesting word for Nicholson to use—it is an archaic term meaning a slag heap or ‘pile of refuse’ (Collins) and in archaeological terms it references the detritus associated with human settlement. 22. Ahab confirms that the peak is 3000 feet in Part III (Nicholson, 1946, p.59), making it one of only four peaks in the Lake District with such an elevation—Scafell Pike, Scafell, Helvellyn and Skiddaw. 23. Hardangervidda, the mountain plateau in When We Dead Awaken is on the longitude line of 6° East and Narvik referenced in Your Last Breath is on the longitude line of 17° East. Norway extends even further to 30° East. 24. Bernbaum references E. O. G. Turville-Petre’s Myth and the Religion of the North as evidence of this derivation (p.55). 25. The Scandinavian mountains have their geological roots in the same tectonic collision which led to the mountains in Scotland, England and Wales (Ramberg, 2008). 26. See for instance John Middendorf: http://www.bigwalls.net/climb/Troll. html.

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27. In To Damascus I and III, for instance, where the mountains represent a spiritual pilgrimage for the character of the Stranger. 28. The attribution is used in a range of travel guides including Lonely Planet : Norway. 29. ‘BRAND: (Shrinks before the onrushing avalanche). Answer me, God, in the moment of death! If not by Will, how can Man be redeemed? The avalanche buries him, filling the whole valley’ (Ibsen, 1986, p.112). 30. For details of the company’s history and membership, see: http://www. curiousdirective.com. 31. For images of the production, see: http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/ archive2015/your-last-breath/#tab-1-4. 32. See The Guardian’s retrospective from 10th December 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/dec/10/life-deaththerapeutic-hypothermia-anna-bagenholm. 33. This date is disputed and it has been suggested by MIT researchers that the collision was 10 million years later: http://news.mit.edu/2013/ india-joined-with-asia-10-million-years-later-than-previously-thought0206 (Accessed 21 July 2017). 34. The Karakorum strictly speaking comprise another range of mountains separate from the Himalayas but the latter term is often used to include both ranges. 35. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48401491. 36. Email conversation 8 June 2017. 37. In the most recent edition of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (Third Edition) an accompanying website has a case study by Phillip Zarilli on kutiyattam (http://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/ 9780415837965/casestudies.php). Here, Zarrilli recommends consulting the YouTube archives of kutiyattam, cross-referenced to Kailasodharanam (Nellhaus et al., 2016, p.142). Among many other sources, these yield an excellent 8-part video of Kalamandalam Sivan Namboodiri performing the scene in all its remarkable detail. See https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=N3Z9F8eC31A (Part 1) and navigate to the next 7 parts in turn. The actual lifting of the mountain is in Part 4. 38. Cf. Arya Madhavan on the use of eyes in Lifting Mount Kailash: ‘The river, for example, is enacted, in a technical sense, by moving the eyeballs first vertically to suggest a small spring of water that eventually becomes bigger by accumulating more and more water, turning into a river. The eye movements are different as the river gets bigger and the stream gets stronger’ (Madhavan, 2012, p.560). 39. This presumably should read Koflach, a reference to the Austrian specialist boot company founded in 1917 (https://www.koflach.com/en/ parsepage.php?tpl=tpl_page&sqlpam1=259).

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40. This 1987 TV seminar reveals that Meyers was inspired by Woodrow Wilson Sayre’s For and Against Everest and Schreiber read K2 Savage Mountain (Houston and Bates, 1954; Sayre, 1964). 41. Toni Kurtz famously died hanging on the end of rope, just feet away from safety on the North Face of the Eiger in 1936. See the chapter on Deep and Dark Play in Part 3.3. 42. Pitch 1: p.15 (tries rope); Pitch 2: p.24 (connects tubing to rope, then tug, then avalanche); Pitch 3: pp.33–34 (looking for screws then falls); Pitch 4: pp.37–39 (Taylor descends). All references are to Meyers (1983). 43. Based on the coordinates of Mount Omine in Japan and Bald Mountain in Australia. 44. The text is from a collection of kyogen plays entitled the Kumogata Bon from the early nineteenth century. 45. A layperson’s account of the Great Dividing Range’s formation history is here: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/origins-australias-mountainsfinally-explained/. The altogether more detailed scientific account is published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Müller et al., 2016). 46. Barnes offers the following caveat: ‘The oldest rocks in Japan are lowto medium-pressure metamorphics and can be traced to the Precambrian. But these rocks were not then part of a recognizable “Japan”; instead they probably belonged to one of the several supercontinents before the formation of Rodinia’ (Barnes, 2003, p.15). 47. http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/386376,theatre-reviewnight-on-bald-mountain-malthouse-theatre.aspx.

References Akerholt, M.-B. (1988) Australian Playwrights: Patrick White. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Asaya, F. (2007) Ana (Hole): A Modern Kyögen Play by Fujita Asaya. Asian Theatre Journal, 24 (1), pp. 105–123. Auden, W. H. and Isherwood, C. (1936) The Ascent of F6. London: Faber and Faber. Barnes, G.L. (2003) Origins of the Japanese Islands: The New “Big Picture”. Japan Review, 15, pp. 3–50. Baskin, J. (1987) The Director and the Playwright. Unites States of America: CUNY TV. Beckett, S. (1961) Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press. Bernbaum, E. (1997) Sacred Mountains of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Besom, T. (2009) Of Summits and Sacrifice: An Ethnohistoric Study of Inka Religious Practices. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Bharata-Muni (1951) The Natyasastra: A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Brecht, B. (1977) The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstücke. London: Bloomsbury. Brecht, B. (1984) The Caucasian Chalk Circle. London: Methuen Drama. Cameron, E.A. (2015) The Highland Clearances: History, Literature and Politics. Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History, 15 (May), pp. 1–17. Cook, E. (2016) Pilgrims. London: Nick Hern. Cooper, A. (1997) Sacred Mountains: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meanings. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Curious Directive (2012) Your Last Breath. London: Methuen Drama. Dyce, J.R. (1974) Patrick White as Playwright. St Lucia: Queensland University Press. Earhart, H.B. (1980) Sacred Mountains in Japan: Shugendo as “Mountain Religion”. In Tobias, M. C. and Drasdo, H. (eds.) The Mountain Spirit. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Eisenstein, S. (2010) Towards a Theory of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works, Vol. 2. London: I.B. Tauris. Euripides (2006) The Bacchae and Other Plays. London: Penguin. Fuchs, E. (2004) EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play. Theater, 34 (2), pp. 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-34-2-5. Glofeltly, C. and Fromm, H. (eds.) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. London: University of Georgia Press. Hanssen, I. (2011) A Song of Identity: Yoik as Example of the Importance of Symbolic Cultural Expression in Intercultural Communication/Health Care. Journal of Intercultural Communication (27). Available at: http://www. immi.se/intercultural/. Houston, C.S. and Bates, R.H. (1954) K2 Savage Mountain: The Third American Karakoram Expedition. London: McGraw-Hill. Ibsen, H. (1980a) Plays Four: The Pillars of Society, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken. London: Eyre Methuen. Ibsen, H. (1980b) Plays Two: A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler. London: Methuen. Ibsen, H. (1986) Plays Five: Brand, Emperor and Galilean. London: Methuen. Ibsen, H. (2007) Peer Gynt. Ibsen.net. Leeming, D. (2005) Norse Mythology. In The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: www.oxford reference.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780195156690.001. 0001/acref-9780195156690-e-1156. Linney, R. (1985) Sand Mountain. New York: Dramatists Play Service.

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Madhavan, A. (2012) Eye-Scape: Aesthetics of “Seeing” in Kudiyattam. Asian Theatre Journal, 29 (2), pp. 550–570. https://doi.org/10.1353/atj.2012. 0045. McGrath, J. (1981) The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. London: Eyre Methuen. Mee, E.B. (2015) Rasa Is/as/and Emotional Contagion. In The Natyasastra and the Body in Performance. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, pp. 157–174. Meyer, M. (1992) Ibsen. London: Cardinal. Meyers, P. (1983) K2. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Morley, C.A. (1993) Transformation, Miracles, and Mischief: The Mountain Priest Plays of Kyogen. New York: Cornell East Asia Series. Müller, R. D. et al. (2016) Formation of Australian Continental Margin Highlands Driven by Plate-Mantle Interaction. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 441, pp. 60–70 (Elsevier B.V.). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016. 02.025. Musa, G., Higham, J. and Thompson- Carr, A. (eds.) (2015) Mountaineering Tourism. Abingdon: Routledge. Muthukumaraswamy, M. D. and Kaushal, M. (eds.) (2004) Folklore, Public Sphere, and Civil Society. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Nair, S. (ed.) (2015) The Natyasastra and the Body in Performance. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Nellhaus, T. et al. (eds.) (2016) Theatre Histories: An Introduction. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Nicholson, N. (1946) The Old Man of the Mountains. London: Faber and Faber. Peking Opera Group of Shanghai (1970) Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Available at http://www.wengewang.org/read.php?tid=35367. Pinter, H. (1988) Mountain Language. London: Faber and Faber. Price, M. F. et al. (eds.) (2013) Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ramberg, I.B. (2008) The Making of a Land: Geology of Norway. Trondheim: Norwegian Geological Association. Rubin, D. et al. (eds.) (2001) The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Asia/Pacific. London: Routledge. Salkeld, A. (1998) World Mountaineering. London: Mitchell Beazley. Sayre, W.W. (1964) For and Against Everest. London: Prentice-Hall. Schechner, R. (2006) Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Shaffer, P. (1966) The Royal Hunt of the Sun. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Short, A. D. and Woodroffe, C.D. (2009) The Coast of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Strindberg, A. (1976) Plays One: The Father, Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata. London: Methuen. Swaney, D. (1999) Lonely Planet: Norway. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Torsvik, T. H. and Rehnström, E.F. (2003) The Tornquist Sea and Baltica—Avalonia Docking. Techtonophysics, 362, pp. 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0040-1951(02)00631-5. Turnbull, R. (2009) Granite and Grit: A Walker’s Guide to the Geology of British Mountains. London: Frances Lincoln. Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2016) Dramaturgy and Performance. Revised ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wainwright, A. (2007) The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. London: Frances Lincoln. Waley, A. (1921) The Noh Plays of Japan. London: George Allen and Unwin. White, P. (1985) Collected Plays, Vol. 1. Sydney: Currency Press.

Handrail 4 Site, Light and a Dark Memory Put to Rest: Barrow and Outerside (W41-42/214)

It’s often said that you should never go back to those perfect holiday spots; what starts as a charming getaway is quickly corrupted by a second visit. But return to Patterdale we did, if only to test that truism, looking to relive the productivity of the Fairfield horseshoe and to revive a campaign of peak bagging which had experienced two lean years. We had climbed just four Wainwrights in 2009 and on that basis it was going to take upwards of 27 years to complete the set. Some serious progress was needed. In the intervening years the studio in Patterdale had mysteriously changed. What had been a bijou spring hideaway was now a cramped summer bolthole. The clever barn conversion, with its inventive space solutions and traditional beams, was now the perfect place to bang your head and trip over one another at breakfast. Even Boredale Hause, the elevated mountain pass behind the studio from which we had surveyed Helvellyn’s melting top two years earlier, had become a functional junction box, routing us through to the Far Eastern Fells, and somehow losing its own personality in the process. We had partly anticipated the threat of Patterdale ennui when we booked and had a split-site holiday planned with the second week based in Braithwaite, a village west of Keswick. Braithwaite is the

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gateway to the North Western Fells and to Coledale, a valley ‘without charm but […] remembered with affection by those who walk around the mountain skyline of its perimeter’ (Wainwright 1984, p.147). A new village, a new view from the window up the curved spine of Barrow, and a nearly new book to work through; we had notched off just one peak—the ever-popular Catbells—from Wainwright’s Volume 6. But despite the fresh start we couldn’t entirely rid ourselves of the atmosphere of the previous week; a languor remained as much in our hearts as in our legs, one which was bound to make itself heard at some stage in the second week, triggered by the conditions, the landscape or by poor navigation. Mountainsides have a habit of provoking disputes1 and that first morning, as we attempted to start our walk up Barrow and onto its neighbour Outerside, the mountain air was characteristically thick with strident voices. ‘I didn’t sign up for this’. ‘No one’s signed up for anything, not in the form…’ ‘Is anyone else you know spending their summer, their summer, in the freezing rain?’ ‘Can’t we all just…’ Conflict had been sparked by a perfect storm of factors: the rainfilled vista ahead, the immediacy of the climb up, two wrong turns at the start. But it was also part of the sticky residue of the previous week and the larger realisation that the more resolved we were to complete the ‘big project’, the more repetitive our days would be. For all its varied landscapes and locations, the rest of our time in the Lake District would have several recurring features: an early rise followed by sky-checking and cloud diagnostics; equipment checklists; the jumpstarting of tired legs; familiar aches migrating from thigh to knee on the way down. These sensations, it was becoming all too clear, were now part of a routine, a set of nagging constants amidst all the geographical mutability. Longer walks always move through several layers of atmosphere, moods which change in relation to the weather, the topography,

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the nature of the conversation, the time of day and the fullness of one’s belly. But starting with hostility at the beginning of a walk was unusual for us and our group split into two to manage the fall-out. Barrow, takes its name from the Anglo Saxon for ‘long ridge’ and the ascent from Braithwaite is meant to be a walk in the park, or in Wainwright’s assessment ‘a favourite Sunday afternoon ramble’ (Wainwright, 2005, Barrow p.5) up the spine of the peak. But it didn’t feel like a congenial jaunt as the four of us set off in two divided camps, eyeing the clouds ahead and willing them not to open up on us quite yet. A little more than half way up the mountain there is a false summit and slight descent before the second push up the ridge. Only 455 metres in total, it was nevertheless easy on that day to convince oneself that the climb was finished after half that height was gained, that the map was wrong and that all our timings were out. How frustrating, then, to see the path wind up again in a mocking repetition of the first trudge, how typical of a day like today. The photos taken on our forty-first Wainwright (on 7 August 2010) reveal little of the tensions experienced on our way up Barrow. Automatically smiley faces take over, the weather looks fine and the ensemble portrait on the summit replaces the division experienced on the way up. Later that day conditions improved so much that we were able to swoop round the back of Outerside in strong sunshine and saunter over our second peak of the day in the manner Wainwright had described for its more diminutive neighbour. The mood lifted and we walked together again, wondering whether we should have done more than just two modest peaks. But the experience on Barrow was a kind of shorthand for the many conflicts we were to experience over the coming years. The peak became a jaundiced reference point in the Northern Western Fells, its jadedness extending to the village below, which we left prematurely, giving up on charmless Coledale and returning home early. These associations of landscape with emotional states endure, sometimes for years. They are part of what site-specific practitioner Mike Pearson calls a landscape’s ‘domain of experience’, after cultural geographer, J. Wylie. These domains are for Pearson: ‘a charged background of affective capacities and tensions acting as

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a catalyst for corporeal practice and performance’ (Pearson, 2010, p.94). Each time we returned to the North Western fells, or simply saw Braithwaite from the Keswick Road on the way to somewhere else, we would remember the Barrow row, using the memory as a catalyst to relive the many other volatile moments in our Wainwright campaign: a trekking pole-javelin launched on Arnison Crag; a slanging match in deafening wind on Red Pike in winter; splintering rage coming down from Hard Knott, after missing the summit in failing light. In doing so, some might say we were doing Barrow (and the residents of Braithwaite) a disservice, adding to the reputation of Coledale as an uninviting ‘long straight trench’ (Wainwright, 1984, p.147). Perhaps it is only when these domains of experience are widened, that you can free a landscape from its embodied associations, only when you revisit a place in different circumstances—to climb the peak again for instance—can you embed a new memory, and recharge the background. Wainwrighting in its purist form does not encourage that kind of reiteration. Once the peak is bagged it can in theory be forgotten—or at least moved to a list of ‘ticks’—with its surroundings shunned too, once a book is complete. But poor planning on our behalf has made the retracing of our steps inevitable and there are many peaks we have been forced to revisit en route to filling the gaps in the Wainwright spreadsheet. My own opportunity to climb Barrow again arose many years later, not in a factional group of four but alongside some eight hundred other walker-performers, as part of the 2017 Lakeland Light Festival. Holding blue acetate in front of my headtorch in a collective projection of Nepalese prayer flags, strips of colour shone down Barrow, Outerside and the non-Wainwright, Stile End, in a shimmering gesture of compassion for those affected by the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The three companions with whom I first encountered Barrow may still yet to be convinced, but in that action, at least for me, the ‘shivering mountain’ (Wainwright 2005, Barrow 2) lost its years-old reputation for darkness and took on a new light (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 Lakeland Light Festival, May 2017 (Photo courtesy of Carmen Norman of Carmen Norman Photography)

Note 1. Arguably the most famous of which was on Everest in 2013 involving the late Ueli Steck: https://www.outsideonline.com/1929126/brawl-everestueli-stecks-story. Thanks to Helen Mort for pointing this out to me.

References Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wainwright, A. (1984) Fellwalking with Wainwright. London: Michael Joseph. Wainwright, A. (2005) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The North Western Fells. London: Frances Lincoln.

Part 2.3 Mountain Site-Related Performance

Introduction The criterion of mountains as ‘key players’ which helped guide the last chapter on Mountain Drama (2.2), is both intensified and localised when theatre moves away from a designated stage space and into the elevated environment of the mountainside itself. Despite the manifold difficulties of researching and staging live performance in what are typically hardto-reach areas, artists have been drawn to mountains as places for performance surprisingly frequently, keen to harness their wide-ranging powers more directly than a written play-text can manage. In the site-related performances discussed in this chapter mountains are more than key players in a cast of other actors, they are the fundamental reference point from conception to execution, at once determining the artistic process of theatre making and providing the content. What is it that characterises such work? What are its histories? And how do contemporary site-related artists set about making work in such conditions? The term ‘site’ in relation to performance has been sharply contested and, as Kathleen Irwin outlines, the phenomenon of the sitespecific in art ‘has fragmented into many new directions’ (Irwin, 2009, p.9) over the past forty years, deviating from its oft-cited historical ancestors: minimalist art and happenings (Kaye, 2000; Turner, 2004). Irwin lists over ten nuanced site-terms including site-determined, siteoriented, site-responsive and audience-specific, stating that ‘in the hyphen space between all these terms […] the site speaks out as the central © The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_8

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creative impulse and organising principle’ (Irwin, 2009, p.10). Fiona Wilkie in her now famous essay: ‘Mapping the Terrain; a Survey of SiteSpecific Performance in Britain’ identifies the same challenge of nomenclature, using data from artists’ questionnaires. ‘How useful is the term “site specific”?’ (Wilkie 2002, p.151) she asks rhetorically in this essay, citing a range of company-specific alternatives: ‘Context-sensitive, Environmental art, Outdoor performance, Interactive, Landscape theatre, Installation, Season-specific, Public Promenade, Contextually reactive, Street theatre, Place-orientated work’ (Wilkie, 2002, p.151). Debating the term in the context of contemporary art from the 1960s onwards Miwon Kwon observes a similar expansion of terminologies from ‘site-determined, site-oriented, site-referenced’, to ‘site-conscious, siteresponsive, [and] site-related’ (Kwon, 2004, p.1). Although Kwon does not explore these terms any further, her list of site-variants includes practices which significantly extend Wilkie’s understanding of site-specific, as ‘a profound engagement with one site [which] is absolutely central to both the creation and execution of the work’ (Wilkie 2002, p.150). In the Special Issue dedicated to place-based theatre practices (About Performance 7 ) Gay McAuley proposes a threefold model designed to represent a range of place-versus-artwork relationships. She identifies ‘work-centred’, ‘community-centred’ and ‘site centred’ practices, with only the latter involving practice which emerges ‘from a particular place’ (McAuley 2007, pp.8–9, my emphasis). Across all three sub-categories performance: tends to be drawn into engagement with the social and political issues that seem inseparable from place: issues concerning ownership and occupation, individual and group identity, power, boundaries, rights of inclusion and exclusion, memory and history. (McAuley, 2007, p.7)

These are now familiar themes and many of them have been discussed in the previous two chapters dedicated to mountain rituals and play texts. But they hold equal weight in the arena of contemporary devised work, as will be seen. Indeed, as the site is so prominent in the examples which follow, questions of ownership, occupation and exclusion are unavoidable. Beyond acknowledging how contested are the territories of site, it is not the aim of this chapter to attempt to resolve these challenges of nomenclature. Here, instead, I concentrate on just one kind of site—the

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mountainside, of course—constructing a new and tightly conceived narrative of mountain-specific performances. I am coining Kwon’s expandable term ‘site-related’ throughout, not to elevate it above the other hyphenated terms mooted above but because it provides an appropriately inclusive framework for the emphasis I am taking on artists whose perception of the site as generative is striking. Each of the main examples here (all produced in the 2010s and within a few miles of one another) represents a particular perspective on the use of the mountain as a site for performance-making and all have been drawn into some kind of profound engagement with a site’s power, boundaries, memory and history. But their attitudes to the site of presentation differ radically: from static mountain crags, to leisure centre foyers, from moveable mountain trails, to a black-box analogue of a slate quarry. My trio of examples comes from just one mountainous region in Wales—Snowdonia—but in all other considerations represents an eclectic mix, sitting astride Wilkie’s oft-quoted continuum from theatre-specific to site-specific work.1

Rationale Given the surprising range of experimental performance which fits the criterion of being mountain site-related, it may seem perverse to focus so tightly on one mountainous region. Is this not undervaluing the scale of experimental performance work which has connected strongly with high places since the 1960s and 1970s? Readers wanting a broader data set can consult the listings of works collated on the Performing Mountains website complementing the mountain drama entries from the previous chapter.2 This chapter consciously takes a very different approach to the international survey conducted in 2.2. Sacrificing breadth and international ambition allows me to examine carefully the details of each selected case study, respecting the locale to which the three works are responding and drawing on empirical data, which were largely unavailable for the last chapter. If as Gay McAuley loosely suggests site-related work ‘engages deeply’ (McAuley, 2007, p.7) with its environment, what might that engagement mean for a practice-led research process? How, too, can it be captured post hoc in an appropriate register of writing which respects the range of evidence—including what was felt at the time? It is fitting then, as site-related performance is my working material, to demarcate the site of this chapter in strict terms, taking in one sharply delineated

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area of site-related practice. As written texts do not exist for this body of work, the primary sources are also different to the last chapter and comprise: face-face interviews with each lead artist, personal recollections of experiencing or helping to make the work (relayed here as eye-witness accounts), process data (prompt copies or working logs, commissioned documentaries, photographs) as well as a range of secondary sources. The performance pieces in question are: 1. The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, created, designed and directed by Louise Ann Wilson—a large scale, ‘site specific walking-performance’3 produced by the National Theatre of Wales and performed in the foothills of Snowdon from 12 to 14 September 2014. 2. Moving Rocks , created by Kate Lawrence and rigged by Simon Edwards—a five-day work-in-progress experiment using Vertical Dance, funded as R&D by WalesLab and performed on the crag known as Tryfan Bach, Little Tryfan, in May 2015. 3. Black Rock, created by David Shearing—a multimedia performance based on the exploration of climber Johnny Dawes’s first ascents on Snowdon’s cliff, Clogwyn Du’r Arddu and in the surrounding quarries, staged in Leeds in November 2017. Whilst small in number, these pieces represent a catholic cross section of site-related work. From Wilson’s five-hour experiential walk complete with local performer-shepherds and a 20 strong brass band, to a fifteenminute laboratory piece with just three performers and a tiny invited audience. From a piece which is rooted, hefted even,4 to the Snowdon mountainside (The Gathering/ Yr Helfa), to one which translated the sensory specifics of Snowdonia’s high crags to a black-box studio in Yorkshire (Black Rock). From work which uses climbing techniques and equipment in vertiginous immediacy (Moving Rocks ) to a performance which transformed the breath-taking physicality of Dawes’ elite climbing to the horizontal plane—treating the mountainside as a rock-walk (Black Rock). Beyond the shared location, the common thread to all these performances is a collective commitment to research-related practice—all the performance makers are practice-led researchers as well as artists—and as such they represent a particular window onto contemporary site-related work, one which views mountain performance practice as knowledge-generating as well as entertaining.

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The site-related focus of this chapter, then, asks some specific questions of a determinedly small sample of mountain performances. What attitudes to mountain sites are revealed in the making processes of these three artists? How are the ‘rights of inclusion and exclusion, memory and history’ (McAuley, 2007, p.7) managed in creative terms? What reference points are there from previous eras of site-related work in the mountains? And, most fundamentally, what is the nature of the dialogue between artist and place, practitioner and mountain, in site-related performance?

Wales and Mountain Site-Related Performance Wales has attracted more than its fair share of site-related work over the years and before we move to analyse the pieces identified above, it is worth asking the question: why? What is it about the Welsh nation’s cultural history and topography which is so attractive to artists making work in and of the country, work which resists institutional, buildingbased performance and which looks out (and up) to the mountain ranges housed within its borders? These are Snowdonia in the North; the Cambrian mountains in mid-Wales; the Black Mountain Range and the Black Mountains, part of the Brecon Beacons National park, in the South— the Brecon Beacons being the highest mountains in the southern United Kingdom. This creative predilection for site-related performance in the region is symbolised in the mission statement of the one of the country’s leading theatre institutions, National Theatre Wales (NTW): The nation of Wales is our stage: From forests to beaches […] to post-industrial towns, village halls to nightclubs […] You’ll find us around the corner, across the mountain and in your digital backyard.5

Since its establishment in 2010, NTW has been staging performance across the country, on ‘trains, military training grounds, beaches and mountains, in warehouses, nightclubs, tents, village halls, schools, aircraft hangars and libraries’,6 resisting, as has the National Theatre of Scotland, the identification of a nation’s theatre with a single location or solitary building.7 The tone of experimental site-related performance is, then, set by this most prominent of theatre organisations in the country, and two

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out of three of our performance pieces analysed here, have a relationship to NTW, either as main producer or by supporting Research and Development—part of NTW’s WalesLab initiative.8 The roots of site-related performance in Wales go back much further than 2010, however. Heike Roms, in her comprehensive mapping of performance art in Wales as part of the AHRC project: ‘Locating the early history of performance art in Wales’,9 dates some of the earliest contemporary experiments in Wales to 1965—with a major ‘Happening’ being constructed in Cardiff in that year and a festival of Fluxus performance held in Aberystwyth three years later, in 1968 (Roms and Edwards, 2011, p.175). This ‘long tradition’ of performance art, ‘twice overlooked’ for aesthetic and regional reasons, according to Roms and Edwards (p.175), comprises a larger group of performance forms than just site-related practice. But, as acknowledged in the introduction to this chapter, the roots of site-specific performance are intrinsically linked with the developments in environmental art and performance, and the evolution of Happenings and the Fluxus movement was pivotal in breaking down the walls both of the art gallery and the theatre. As the coiner of the term ‘happening’, Allan Kaprow, stated in his influential manifesto Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, published in the year following the Cardiff happenings: ‘the performance of a Happening should take place over several widely spaced, and sometimes moving and changing, locales’ (Brayshaw and Witts, 2014, p.278). Fluxus too, although not restricted to work outside the theatre, encouraged its artists-cum-participants to engage directly with the landscape. Significantly overlapping with Happenings, both in terms of its process-based methodology and personnel, Fluxus artists developed performance scores which made the most of the myriad sensual affordances of a rural landscape.10 Along with the centres of Edinburgh and London, Cardiff and Aberystwyth were part of a vibrant performance art movement, as Roms and Edwards have argued (Roms and Edwards, 2012) providing a context for the site-related practices to which this chapter is dedicated. Two significant players in what might be called the second wave of Welsh experimental performance (from 1972 onwards) are Mike Pearson and Richard Gough. Pearson’s centrality to site-specific thinking and practice is based on over forty years of making work—from the early days of RAT Theatre (Ritual and Tribal Theatre, 1971–1972), through the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973–1980), to the founding of Brith Gof (1981–1997). After this, Pearson’s later work, collaborating with designer

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Mike Brookes, often involved collaboration with NTW. Whilst Pearson’s work has been staged in numerous site-related contexts, most pertinent to this chapter is his 2007 excavation of the training facility known as FIBUA SENTA (Fighting in Built Up Areas, Sennybridge Training Area), in MidWales. This site-based research led to a full-scale production of Aeschylus’s Persians in 2010, commissioned by NTW.11 But the approach to the site outlined before the full-scale production is of particular interest here, the way in which, as Pearson puts it: ‘topography drives tactics’ (Pearson, 2010, p.137) as much for the military commander as it does for the artist: What narratives might be invoked [by Sennybridge] […], what haunts the place: those of the original inhabitants, of the processes of dispossession and dereliction […]? (Pearson, 2010, p.138)12

Whilst ‘fighting in built up areas’ suggests an urban context, Sennybridge is in the shadow of Mynydd (Mount) Epynt, a large upland plateau between the Cambrian mountains further north and the Brecon Beacons, in the south. It was selected by the War Office as a place of sparse population; in fact, 219 people occupying 54 homes were displaced without compensation in 1940, the local school Cilieni shut and the valley consigned to a depopulated ‘death’ according to a memorial plaque erected on the plateau in 1996 (Cole, 2010, p.217). Counter-intuitively the site still operates as a hillside for sheep farming, despite the mountain’s use as an impact zone, ‘a no man’s land fired into for sixty years’ (Pearson, 2010, p.139, emphasis in original). Oblivious to the theatre of war around them, hill sheep carry on regardless, as local historian Reverend JonesDavis identified: ‘once a round lands in the target area, the sheep may be seen moving away in an orderly manner, like a well-drilled army’ (Cole, 2010, p.227). The site thus offers a persuasive example of what military historian and journalist, Judith Matloff calls, the ‘interplay of topography and geopolitics’ (Matloff, 2017, p.8) so typical of mountain environments. Like Pearson, Richard Gough’s long-standing contribution to the culture of experimental performance in Wales goes much further than these original forays into site-specific work but there are two components of this story which are relevant to the historical narrative of mountain site-related performance I am constructing here: Gough’s own mountain performative wanderings, his ‘Dragon Processions’,13 and his assessment of the

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wider influential context of the time, pointing us to a rich seam of mountain performance conducted four thousand miles away at the Arts Festival of Persepolis, in Iran, which ran from 1967 to 1978 (Gluck, 2007). The Dragon Processions were a playful series of under-the-radar exercises undertaken by Gough and his collaborator Phillip McKenzie in the early 1980s. Originally planned as a festive, street-based teaser before the performance in the evening, these processions steadily ventured away from the villages and into the mountains, as McKenzie and Gough led their mummers-inspired dragon into increasingly far-flung locations14 : Philip and I became more enraptured by [our] own conceit and mischievous reinvention of national identity. We began to go on remote walks, knowing that only one or two people might witness this monstrous reincarnation but being satisfied by the mountain walk being a performance, whether witnessed or not. (Gough, 2018)

After two years the dragon had had its day and it met its end halfway up the highest peak of the Brecon Beacons, Pen Y. Fan, put to the torch by its owners. But even by the early 1980s some of the characteristics of the contemporary site-related works which form the focus of this chapter are already emergent in this impish piece of promenade performance: the play with perspective and wily exploitation of the natural topography (‘routes that generated profile at dawn or dusk; along ridges and beside lakes’ [Gough, 2018]); the shock of encountering uncannily displaced objects in unexpected places; the extension of the act of walking into the act of performing; the play of local myth and legend, alongside that of national identity.

TDR and the Persepolis Arts Festival Gough names Welfare State International and Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret as early influences but prominent also in this thinking around siterelated work was his reading of TDR journal (The Drama Review), ‘the early productions of Robert Wilson’, and ‘the idea of taking the audience on a journey, literally’ (Christie, Gough and Watt, 2006, p.248). Reviewing TDR’s contents from the period (from the late 1960s to the early 1970s) it is easy to see how this reading might have inspired the site-specific ‘fast’ theatre of Gough’s early career in Wales. The Spring 1968 issue alone has the seminal essay on Environmental Theatre, by

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Richard Schechner, ‘Six Axioms’ (Schechner, 1968); Buckminster-Fuller’s call for the spectator ‘to experience a direct and, as nearly as possible, total involvement, both individually and in relation to the actor’ (BuckminsterFuller and Sadao, 1968, p.117); and Allan Kaprow’s ‘Extensions in Time and Space’, where the pursuit of an ‘absolute flow between event and environment’ is highlighted (Kaprow and Schechner, 1968, p.154). Later issues (December 1973) held reviews of the Persepolis Arts Festival held in Iran (Khaznadar and Deák, 1973; Ryan, 1973) and detailed some of the key productions presented there, by Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski for instance, along with an eye-witness account of Robert Wilson’s Ka Mountain (Trilling, 1973). These were some of the documents feeding Gough and Pearson’s imagination, and they foregrounded work which radically shifted previous notions of what constituted a stage space.15 Whilst it was only to last a dozen years—until the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979—the early Shiraz festivals were replete with performances which exploited the mountainous area surrounding the festival. The ancient ruins of Persepolis, the city palace which was originally carved into Rahmet Mountain (Mountain of Mercy) by Darius the Great, 2500 years earlier, provided an extraordinary platform for contemporary performance makers—a ready-made site-intervention on the largest scale (Fig. 1). Work by festival regular, Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis, gives a flavour of how such a context was exploited in the early festivals. For Polytope de Persépolis: The audience was placed in the ruins of Darius’s Palace and was able to move freely between the six listening stations placed within these ruins […] The one-hour spectacle began in total darkness with a “geological prelude” of excerpts from Xenakis’s first electro-acoustic work, Diamorphoses (1957). Immediately afterwards, on the mountain facing the site, two gigantic bonfires are lit, projector lights sweep the night sky, and two red laser beams scan the ruins. Then, several groups of children appear carrying torches and proceed to climb to the summit, towards the bonfires, outlining in scintillating light the mountain’s crest. (Gluck, 2007, p.22)

As a festival which originally aimed to mix experimental work from Western invitees with a programme of Iranian arts including music, ShirazPersepolis offers one, not unproblematic, historical marker point of the

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Fig. 1 The Grand staircase at Persepolis (Photo by Fulvio Spada. https://www. flickr.com/photos/lfphotos/1250222522)

development of contemporary mountain site-related performance discussed later.16 Key theatre performances, ones often cited as forming part of a canon of avant-garde western theatrical experimentation, included Jerzy Grotowski’s The Constant Prince (in the 1970 festival), Peter Brook’s Orghast (1971) and Robert Wilson’s KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE (1972). John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Tadeusz Kantor also accepted invitations to the festival (Gluck, 2007). Whilst The Constant Prince was an import from Wroclaw in Poland, originally staged at the Rynek-Ratusz space in 1965 (Kumiega, 1985, p.74),17 both Orghast and KA MOUNTAIN were ostensibly pieces made for the unique environment of Persepolis. Certainly, they made the most of the topographical possibilities afforded by the ancient ruins and mountain backdrop. Like Xanakis, Brook used the mountainside and firelight to derive spectacle from his, and poet Ted Hughes’, attempt to find a universal language—the Orghast of the title: fires raged on the mountaintops, creating an eerie sense of mystery, and half the cast climbing the cliffs with fires and moonlight for their guides made the scene spectacular. (Croyden, 1971)

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For Margaret Croyden, a particularly uncritical critic from the New York Times, the ‘mountain of mercy’ was translated into a huge mise-enscene by Brook, one ‘that no theatrical designer in the world could match’ (Croyden, 1971). But although she concluded, in what would later be understood as the parlance of the site-specific practitioner, that what Brook ‘created for Persepolis […] can never be repeated elsewhere’ (Croyden, 1971) the project’s philosophy was essentially universalising, rather than culturally or site-sensitive in the terms established in this chapter. As the director himself explained to Croyden: ‘[we] wanted to find a theatrical language that transcends nationality, and the cultural and social forms that already exist’ (Croyden, 1971), an aim which has met with much postcolonial criticism, most stridently perhaps from Rustom Bharucha (1990, p.80).18 Wilson’s KA MOUNTAIN, now notorious for its monumental scale (168 hours over seven days) was commissioned for the Persepolis festival a year later. It was also staged on the mountain, promising to go ‘further than anything Brook had conceived’ (Trilling, 1973, p.34), even though the festival was nearly bankrupt by the pressures Orghast had placed on the budget the year before (Trilling, 1973, p.42). Wilson’s production was, in Maria Shevtsova’s words: ‘a site specific fantasia’ (Shevtsova, 2007, p.10), staged in seven ‘stations’ on seven hills on the Haft Tan mountain, in a drawn-out blend of mediaeval mystery and contemporary Happening. But although there was, as with Brook’s piece, an ambitious and sweeping vision for how Persepolis might be reframed by Wilson’s live performers (including himself), there was still a clear sense, from the contemporary reviews of the piece, that his driving dramaturgical concerns had been lifted from North America and transported to Persia. The ‘KA’ of the title, Wilson reluctantly admitted to Ossia Trilling was drawn from Native American poetry—a symbol of the rattlesnake—and the Old Man of the Mountain who served as guide to the pilgrims on the mountainside was another Western Christian trope, encountered in a different guise in Norman Nicholson’s play of the same name (examined in Part 2.2). In Trilling’s rather unfavourable assessment: the echoes of American folklore were very strong, but they could hardly be identified by non-Americans, let alone appreciated by them. What did the legend of The Old Man of the Mountain suggest to a non-American? (Trilling, 1973, p.38)

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Even Basil Langton’s smitten account of KA MOUNTAIN, which declares in the introduction: ‘I could […[ feel that I was in the presence of a theatre ritual, and that whatever it was, it was absolutely genuine’ (Langton, 1973, p.51), acknowledges that that ‘feeling’ was limited to a select few, and that ‘a lot of people in Iran, who went to see the work of Robert Wilson, did not experience it’ (Langton, 1973, p.53, emphasis in original).19 Perhaps more damning in ecological terms, is the extent to which Wilson’s theatrical aspirations superseded a duty of care for the mountain itself. Thankfully Brook’s project the year before had bled the patron of the festival, the Empress Farah Diba’s, coffers dry. For had the Persian royal family had the money to spend, Wilson’s plans firstly to paint the entire summit white to signify snow cover on a temperate peak, and secondly to ‘blow the mountaintop sky-high’ (Trilling, 1973, p.38) in a perverse foretelling of modern Mountain Top Removal, may well have been accommodated.20 Site-spectaculars both Orghast and KA MOUNTAIN clearly were but site-sensitive, they were not.

Site-Related Performance from Wales: Three Case Studies from Snowdonia The Haft Tan mountain in what was then Persia seems a world away from the context I have sketched in Wales in the 1960s and 1970s and still further from the three pieces of site-related work selected for deeper analysis in this chapter: The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, by Louise Ann Wilson; Moving Rocks , by Kate Lawrence and Simon Edwards; and Black Rock, created by David Shearing. But such was the reach of the Iranian festival, its influence extended as far as the valleys and mountains of Wales, shaping the site-specific work of Pearson and Gough—that desire to take the audience literally ‘on a journey’—and helping to establish an ethos of international cultural exchange, decades before vehicles such as the European Capital of Culture (founded in 1985) were assembled.21 Central to this transmission of influence was the figure of Geoffrey Axworthy, the director of the Cardiff Sherman Theatre, then part of Cardiff University and the man responsible for bringing Tadeusz Kantor to Wales. Axworthy had seen Kantor’s company, Cricot 2’s, Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes at the Shiraz festival in 1974 (Witts, 2010, p.21), and engineered its one and only visit to Cardiff two years later to bring his production of The Dead Class , between visits to Edinburgh and London (Gough, 2011). He had in fact

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been a regular visitor to the international festival and generously shared his experiences with both Gough and Pearson, as part of his mentoring of the CLT. In Gough’s own words: Geoffrey liked my early site-specific work (directly influenced from reading about Meredith Monk) and took me under his wing - he attended the Shiraz-Persepolis project for five years in a run and he spoke to me for hours about Ka Mountain and Orghast and most especially Kantor.22

Axworthy’s animated despatches of these now seminal pieces of post-war experimental performance set in a rocky outpost of Iran provided stimulus both for Gough and Pearson looking for new ways to engage with the local landscape and reason to venture out of the theatre building. Along with the revelations in the pages of TDR, chronicling new work in the US and Europe, they suggested to these early site-specific experimenters in Wales that there was a precedent, if not yet a movement, for environmentally challenging performance already operating beyond the nation’s borders. They were enough, for Gough, to ‘enflame [his] imagination’23 as an emergent artist in the 1970s, and for Pearson to identify Axworthy’s experimental theatre season forty years later—in one of a number of ‘in situ interviews’ conducted by Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards in Cardiff for their oral history of performance art in Wales (Roms and Edwards, 2011, p.182). Wider organisational developments followed which functioned to support experimental work in the country after the 1970s—Brith Gof, Pearson/Brookes, the Centre for Performance Research, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the Aberystwyth University and the Living Landscapes conference held in Aberystwyth, in 2009,24 to name some of the more direct descendants of the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre. While the figure of Axworthy provides one influential connection point between the experiments in mountain performance in Iran and the development of an ethos of site-related performance in Wales from the 1970s onwards, it is not my intention to suggest any direct lineage going forwards to today—between, say, KA MOUNTAIN and Moving Rocks for example. What this microhistory of Gallo-Persian experimental performance does illustrate, however, is that the imperative to take performance outside of the theatre building, as part of the 1960s cultural revolution, did not restrict itself to the lowlands. Theatre makers in that period were quick to spot the possibilities offered by mountain environments, some

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with sensitivity, tact and delicacy, others with bombastic assertiveness. Moving attention now to the trio of case studies made in the last five years in Snowdonia (2014–2019), it is very much an ethos of site-sensitivity which is in evidence and my attempts to capture these are written accordingly, moving between first-person experiential writing and reflective analysis. The Gathering/Yr Helfa Louise Ann Wilson is no stranger to siting work in mountainous regions. Fissure (2011) was a three-day performative walk in the Yorkshire dales, a work triggered by grief and the early death of her sister; Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/ Fertility and Childlessness (first delivered in 2015 and ongoing), aimed at women who are biologically childless by circumstance, takes its participants on a ‘land mark walk’ deep into the English Lake District near Buttermere; and most recently (2017–) Wilson’s developing practice of ‘Surrogate Walking’ reconstructs walks undertaken by Dorothy Wordsworth in the early 1800s and by present-day Lake District women (Wilson, 2019). This fascination with site grew out of her earlier work a half of wilson + wilson, collaborating with director and theatre maker, Wils Wilson, on pieces such as House (1998), an intimate unfolding of the history of two-terraced houses in Huddersfield, described by critic Lyn Gardner, as ‘more of an archaeological dig or geographical survey’ than a piece of theatre.25 House was pivotal, says Louise Ann Wilson: Everything of course traces back to wilson + wilson and that very first piece with House. I think there the seeds for me were planted: you know, that every site is extraordinary and you just scratch the surface and there are layers and layers of lives, histories, meanings.26

A decade after the piece was performed, Wilson clarified further the significance of the piece in an interview with Scott Palmer: House demonstrated that site-specific performance of a particular poetic and innovative kind has the ability to juxtapose many different references which can bring to the surface deep layers of personal and cultural memory. (Pitches and Popat, 2011, p.70)

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This creative desire to scratch or, as Gardner would have it, dig under the surface of a place describes perfectly Wilson’s approach to perhaps her most ambitious of projects to date—The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, conceived more than fifteen years after House. Wilson spent almost four years preparing the piece, a five-hour experiential walk, starting at Hafod y Llan Farm in North Wales, and moving its way up the flank of Mount Snowdon.27 She worked with nearly fifty collaborators and project staff including writer Gillian Clarke, choreographer Nigel Stewart, video editor Janan Yakula and sound designer John Hardy, recreating 12 months of the life of the farm, its local inhabitants and the movements of its sheep. The eclecticism of her research process is evidenced in the large project files she assembled for the event, out of which jut coloured ‘post-its’ revealing the many sources which informed the piece: Quarry Plan; Lambing Positions; Williams’ Family History [previous farmers at Hafod y Llan]; Cycles [of lambing]; Mountain Rescue Photographs. These micro-case studies are interspersed with printed guides of the local birdlife and flowers, vintage photographs and striking collages designed to help visualise moments from the walk (Fig. 2). Wilson’s swollen portfolios, generously lent to me by the artist herself, are an incarnation of the juxtapositional enquiry she undertakes on all her projects, a testament to the belief she places in the process of performance-led archaeology (Pearson and Shanks, 2001).28 Opening

Fig. 2 Working portfolio for The Gathering/ Yr Helfa (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

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them up, I see fragments of the performance I witnessed in 2014, realising how much material is lost, or more accurately intensified, in the movement from creative research portfolio to live experience (Figs. 3 and 4). It is a sunny September day and I am standing in a field in the foothills of Snowdon at the start of the Watkin path. I would normally be in an environment like this with just three other companions but this time I am with an additional 196 other walkers, all of us making up the numbers to experience The Gathering. We are shepherded into packs of twenty by guides carrying banners. It feels like a Ramblers Association meeting on an unusually large scale: a lot of waiting for something to happen and a buzz of collective anticipation. A young man with boyish gait and costume to match attracts our attention and informs us that the local farmstead is about to collect its herd of mountain sheep from the nearby hills. ‘Gather all the sheep from the mountain’, he trumpets, and we follow our guides out of the field and onto the mountainside. We make our way through the Hafod-y-Llan park, the numbers of walkers slowing progress on this ‘beautiful quiet route’. I look up and see translucent rubber gloves filled with water hung in trees and pass a red-clothed climber, endlessly scaling the same small rock and returning to start again. Behind the climber, in the longview, is a striking red line cut into the side of Snowdon, a fabric wound which follows the line of the old, now disused tramway. Later, we see a figure striding up this pathway, making light of the incline and walking towards a notch in the horizon, a single white blood cell moving up the vein on the cragside. As we leave the forest the vista opens up: silhouettes of shepherds are looking down on the trail of walkers from the valley sides; brass musicians standing on crags and disused chimney stacks are playing a mournful refrain; a derelict farmhouse has been filled with white balls of untreated wool. In contrast to the red-scar walkway, these interventions are gentle not quite unobtrusive but somehow part of the mountain vernacular. In the ruined barn is another woman in white occupying the space, embracing the wool and holding it close to her. Past this installation the ground levels out; we are perhaps two hours into the walk and ready to raid our rucksacks for lunch. Gathered in the cwm, we are a strange hybrid of congregated audience and individual hiker, not quite knowing whether to greet one another as participant or adversary. I feel the residue of other encounters, on other walks, on other mountains, where, in spite of myself,

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Fig. 3 Louise Ann Wilson’s The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, ‘Tramway Incline’ installation, Clogwyn, Hafod y Llan Farm, Snowdon, Wales (Performer: Kate Lawrence, photo by Joel Chester Fildes/National Theatre Wales) my hearty greetings are tinged with a benign antagonism - over space, time and opportunity. After a pause, the 200-strong throng is divided: half continue on the Watkin path, half take the remains of the tramway, at a far less-fearsome incline; the Boy directs us with flags, semaphoring our destiny. My route is to the right, hugging the stream, Afon Cym Llan, and making its way into the natural amphitheatre of Cym Llan itself. I pass by a huge flat rock face, chalked with poetry:

The mountain has secrets, tunnels into the seep and drip of the dark, into the stone womb, under roots of trees, past wheels, pulleys, chains, trucks locked in the pollens of rust. Deep as the Ordovician, old workings, Mine-shafts, mullock heaps, piles of slag abandoned two centuries back, river-stones

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stained with blue with copper, copper-iron’s gold, sulphates from the mountain’s heart.29 I can’t see all of the words on the rock face but I try to make sense of what I can read: an affirmation of the many pasts the mountain has experienced – from deep time to the industrial revolution. Surveying the great half-bowl at the end of the cwm, before the path snakes up more steeply and onto the summit route proper, I can pick out figures dressed in what looks like military dress, standing on its sides. Warm strains of brassy sound come down the valley towards us as we approach, recapitulating themes heard before, but more fully and with a power borne from strength in numbers. The natural stopping point at the end of the valley is gifted with another derelict space, this time much larger and providing a place for the now reunited audience to cluster around its broken walls creating a rectangular auditorium. Despite the mountain location, it is theatre to which we are now treated. Characters are adopted, costumes sported, props wielded, and poetry turned over in the mouths of the performers. This is the play-within-thewalk, delivered to an audience gathered by our guides, by the shepherds and perhaps most forcibly by the topography of the valley. The disparate figures encountered thus far are part of this geographical herding – the boy, the woman in white, the shepherd-silhouettes, the climber, who hangs back in the distance and an old man who is lying asleep or dead on an incongruous metal bed. I drift off imagining how troublesome it must have been to cart up a cumbersome piece of furniture, two-miles from the valley bottom. Perhaps, like those large bags of rock they use to fix-the-fells, they had it airlifted. The ‘play’ of The Gathering/Yr Helfa takes us through 12 months from September to August. We hear of the rhythms of the sheep’s fertility cycle, of their travels up and down the mountain, of their relationship with the farmers’ dogs, of the mountain’s seasonal patterns – wind, thunder, snow, shortening, then lengthening, light. We are also forced to contemplate the sheep’s ultimate fate, indelibly caught up in the ewes’ capacity to produce offspring. Boy:

Old Man:

Ewes with twins - branded blue; those with triplets set apart, marked for extra fodder through the bare months. ‘Empty’ ewes marked black corralled in Cae Dan Wal,

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the field beneath the wall, bearing their nothing like a stone.30 My sensitivity to the arbitrariness of fertility is piqued by the presence of the woman in white, already allied with the sheep from her actions in the installation. She never speaks of her own physical state. Instead she acts as a chorus - mouthpiece of the pregnant ewes – taking us through a spring birth at night, the pain of still-birth and the ever-present danger of foxes (they have hungry mouths to feed as well, of course). August comes round – ‘long shadows in the rising sun’ - and then, it’s all over. The two walking groups cross over and return down the valley, on opposite sides. Three hours in - I’m tired and beginning to think about an end-of-walk beverage. I pick up the pace, leaving my ‘theatre’ seat a second early to get ahead of the crowd funnelling down the mountain. Minutes later we grind to a halt, all two hundred of us backed up on the Watkin path as if it’s the M4 on a Bank Holiday. What to do? Break ranks and find another way down or stay part of the gathering? An urban sensibility descends on me: ‘find that short cut/rat-run/turn-off and scuttle down it’. But before I give in to my worse side, the real performance of the gathering unfolds in front of me: a great river of white, flowing down the mountainside and onto our path, sheep herded so expertly that they rival the most experienced of ensembles. Bleating, thundering hooves, the full herd of Hafod-y-Llan treats us to a spectacle of movement as stunning as the starling murmurations and elk migrations nature documentaries capture so well; this is happening in front of me, though, assaulting all the senses. The sheep are turning the tables, gathering us as we flock down to the farm for the last set of installations in the farmhouses, a simple and humbling change of perspective. The barn-stage performance with human actors is now long gone; the 200-strong flock is the star of the show.

The depths of research Wilson undertook for The Gathering/ Yr Helfa could never be fully acknowledged in a short section like this. But this consciously partial, eye-witness retelling of the walking performance, can go some way to relating my experience of the piece, and it reveals several tropes of mountain site-related performance. Layers of research are built up in this piece: the geology of the region, the history of its industrial exploitation, its farming and musical cultures, its use as a site of recreation for walkers and climbers, its connection to local schools. These act as nodes of enquiry, against which an investigation of ‘fertility and infertility, motherhood and non-motherhood’ is played out.31 These are

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Fig. 4 The herd of Hafod-y-Llan is gathered (research and development, Winter 2012) (Photo by Louise Ann Wilson)

issues which Wilson has gone on to explore in increasingly intimate and bespoke pieces of site-related work, most clearly in Warnscale (Wilson, 2015), created through a series of mapping walks with women who have experienced biological childlessness. The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, though, still has the residue of earlier work from the wilson + wilson era and its landmark production of House. Actors adopting characters are used to provoke associations in the audience; theatrical objects and materials are imported into the space consciously to create productive and stimulating jarring effects—the red scar of material on the old tramway recalling the shock of Gough’s out-ofplace dragon (and visible at similar distances). Indeed, for Wilson, The Gathering constituted ‘in some ways a bit of a pull-back’ given that, in her own words, she ‘is no longer […] really interested in putting actors in costumes’.32 Certainly, the shift from the artifice of the barnstage to the fulsome reality of the sheep herd running down the mountain was palpable, as is evident in my account above.33 This is not to

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suggest that the piece was in some ways disrespectful to the landscape, or imposed upon it; there was a powerful synergy between the shape of the winding valley route and the rhythms of performance, recalling Pearson’s observation that in site-related work, ‘topography drives tactics’ (Pearson, 2010, p.137). Indeed, Snowdon’s mountain topography was the undisputed main player in the dramaturgy of the piece—the cwm, marking the pivot point of the walk, providing the amphitheatre for the ‘play’ and the summit of the rising action: ‘landscape as theatre of constantly changing scenes’ (Wilson, 2019, p.116) as Wilson herself puts it. The product of a forensic research process, making strange the Snowdonia mountainside, The Gathering gently tipped the experience of mountain walking into a realm of performative surprise and reflection, branding images of rural verisimilitude deep into the skin of one’s imagination. Moving Rocks The performer in white, wading up the red river of fabric in The Gathering, was Kate Lawrence, an artist, choreographer and practitioner of the hybrid form of Vertical Dance. Based in North Wales, Lawrence is a scholar too, and has written about site-specific practice for nearly two decades, concluding as early as 2000 in ‘Who Makes Site Specific Dance?’ that the artform ‘is curated and created by a matrix of bodies, including artists, producers, landowners, community participants, funding bodies and businesses’ (Rugg and Sedgwick, 2007, p.10). Vertical Dance is now a global practice with its roots in Butoh’s ‘dance of darkness’ (Dent, 2004), in Trisha Brown’s ‘Equipment Dances’ (Sommer, 1972) and in Anna Halprin’s Mountain Performances carried out on Mount Tamalpais in California (Worth and Poynor, 2004).34 It crosses urban and rural contexts using ropes, harnesses, pulleys and belay devices to exploit the plane of verticality for its choreographic potential. Lawrence has trained for many years with choreographer Wanda Moretti who founded the first Italian Vertical Dance company in 1994. For Moretti: Vertical dance is understood as a body that moves perpendicularly to the wall by establishing a relationship with the space according to a new perspective. The architecture and landscape play a central role, marking and distinguishing each show.35

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In one of the first academic papers on Vertical Dance, Lawrence expands on this definition and characterises in revealing terms what this ‘new perspective’ might involve: Tipping up the ground on which the performer stands by 90 degrees destabilizes these [spatial] relationships, allowing for a new set of spatial coordinates to be laid over those that are familiar. I argue that the dancer’s experience of this physical layering of spatial coordinates is intersected by cultural, historical, social, political and technical knowledges. (Lawrence, 2010, p.49)

Thus, Vertical Dance for Lawrence is more than just an exhilarating and spectacular creative appropriation of advanced belaying techniques. It is a practice-led methodology for landscape research, an investigative approach which reveals the layers of a site in all the complexity we have encountered in Louise Ann Wilson’s work, adding ‘technical knowledges’ to Gay McAuley’s ingredients for ‘deep engagement’. All Vertical Dance is to some extent site-specific, as understanding the fine details of the environment is so essential to the (safely executed) performance of the work. But site is a still more fundamental part of Lawrence’s creative practice, as she explained in an interview conducted in 2017: My work is always created and relocated for its site. On a logistical level, this means making a site visit (or several) to get to know the site and to plan the rigging, audience viewpoints etc. I tend to use existing rigging points, like a trad climber, rather than bringing in a truss (which tends to be a circus/aerial dance rigging approach). What is available riggingwise governs what choreography can be produced. Then there are the aesthetic aspects of a building, of architecture. Different sites suggest different themes, which can be transported elsewhere, but I’m always concerned to find how themes link to the site and the wider environment.36

This passage helps explain what she means by ‘technical knowledges’ in the context of Vertical Dance and brings out the hybridity of her practice in very clear terms. Working with her rigger and sometime co-performer, Simon Edwards, the challenge is to seek out the natural affordances of the environment (the gifts offered up by the vertical performance ‘floor’), reducing the interventions into that surface and, like a ‘trad climber’ aims always to do, keeping the impact on the landscape to a minimum. In this, her work is of especial interest in the context of this chapter, given

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that so much of her output has been based in (and draws on) the environments of Mid- and North Wales: from her angelic descent of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, Descent of the Angel (2009)37 ; through the touching duet, Roped Together (2011), first performed in the atrium of Galeri Caernarfon and restaged as part of the Performing Mountains Symposium in Leeds (in 2018)38 ; to her ongoing investigation into the industrial landscape of quarrying in North Wales, for which one of the outcomes was Moving Rocks (2015). Lawrence describes the context and stimulus for the latter piece: Moving Rocks is still a research project! It’s an ongoing investigation into the industrial landscape of North Wales. It is linked to and was inspired by a collaboration with local folk/indie band 9Bach called Llechi, which means ‘slate’ but also Lle chi – your place. Because the initial collaboration was delayed, I had a much longer gestation period to develop my choreographic ideas. I took a group of dancers up into the Dinorwig quarries and we explored the landscape and traces of quarrying history and also danced on the rock faces (usually used by climbers). Then I gained a[n NTW] WalesLab award to investigate ideas around the subject. We spent a week in the Ogwen Valley dancing on Tryfan Bach. I was particularly inspired by the idea of time, movement and landscape, the slow, imperceptible time of geology, and the speeded-up time of industry, and the movement of the human bodies that undertook the labour of quarrying, as well as their moments of quiet in the landscape.39

The resulting work-in-progress sharing event had three dancers performing directly on the face of Tryfan Bach—a playground for climbing apprentices given its relatively accommodating incline. Each performer, costumed in period clothes, complete with flat cap and waistcoat, hung off the rock on long striking red ropes, connected to a harness with a fixing point at the back. From this position the dancers, jumped, rolled, climbed up the rope and descended at a run, exploring the explosive history of slate mining in the North Wales. Passing climbers unaware of the conceit were treated to a disconcerting view: a miner-climberdancer hybrid, embodying nineteenth-century industrial histories using the climbing technology of today. What must that surreal juxtaposition of time-zones have looked like to the naïve witness? (Fig. 5) The influence of Trisha Brown and by extension Anna Halprin, is embedded in this aesthetic, one redolent of the displaced metal bed in The Gathering/ Yr Helfa. Lawrence explains:

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Fig. 5 Moving Rocks , 2015 (Choreography by Kate Lawrence, dancers Wren Ball, Cat Ryan and Despina Goula, photo by Ray Wood)

That’s where my beginning is in terms of what I see at the root of my practice. I think what’s really significant for me about Trisha Brown was her intention to alter spatial perception.40 She did a workshop with a woman called Anna Halprin in the early 60s, I think, with a bunch of other postmodern dancers and Anna asked them to do functional activities in unusual places, so sweeping in somewhere you wouldn’t normally sweep.41

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One of Brown’s most celebrated Equipment Pieces (a series which ran from 1969 to 1973 exploring the impact of specialised technical equipment on the dancer’s body), was ‘Man Walking down the Side of a Building’ (1969), a piece which set out to make visible ‘abstract forces [such] as gravity and space’ (Thompson, 2004, p.154). With Moving Rocks Lawrence is doing something similar. The forty-five-degree slope of Tryfan Bach, which presents such a challenge to novice climbers is momentarily tamed, shamed even, by the quotidian actions of the harnessed dancers, sitting, walking and standing idly by—the very quintessence of ‘functional activities in unusual places’. But her project extends beyond the defamiliarisation of space and gravity. As she states in her paper ‘Hanging from Knowledge’, Lawrence’s raison d’être is to use her art to reveal elements of the ‘cultural, historical, social, political’ context of the place. In her own thinking and experience the dancer does not move through each of these layers, in an archaeological model, digging down as with Wilson’s research. Instead, for the practitioner herself, they co-exist: The experience of the vertical dancer therefore reveals complex simultaneous contingencies of corporeal, spatial, social, historical, aesthetic and political knowledges […] Vertical dance cannot be defined as either/or. It must always be thought of as a multiplicity; a nodal conference of layered inscriptions. (Lawrence, 2010, p.58)

It is difficult to conceive how this works in practice and indeed whether the same multiplicity of perspective can be experienced by the spectator. Lawrence’s point (and it is a valuable one for this chapter) is that in site-related practice, perhaps more than other performance forms, conventional categorisations—of measurement, interactivity, history, for instance—are problematised. This is due to the ever-present and contingent influence of the site itself. A rocky surface behaves very differently in wet or dry conditions, a rope swings unpredictably in wind. A long-range perspective from a chance spectator may significantly alter the meaning of the piece, compared to those targeted nearby. A site may actively support several histories at once, from the geological processes of deep time which produced the rock face, through its exploitation by human hands, to its reinterpretation as a site of recreation and leisure. Whilst this is partly true of all live performance, the jeopardy inscribed in the very fabric of Vertical Dance heightens this sense of contingency,

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and forms part of the hybridity which defines it as an art form. Watching a trapeze act, our stomachs may tighten but there is little in the circus offering to make us consider the wider sociopolitical framework of the athletes in the ring. In Lawrence’s work, however, risk and context are welded together; they comment on one another. As the three dancers perform bodily explosions on the side of Tryfan Bach, a rope-snap away from hurtling down the crag’s face and into the crowd, it is impossible to divorce this act of ‘daring’ from the real (and unprotected) acts of everyday bravery undertaken by the one-time miners of the region, each day they worked in the slate quarries. As the dancers cartwheel across the face, playing with the movement possibilities roped access gives them (perhaps humbling further the other learners on the rock face), the contrast with the working men whose relationship to the mountain was as far from recreational as one can imagine is striking. This clever manipulation of an audience’s visceral response to jeopardy is, then, a potent weapon in the ongoing challenge of site-related practice—to augment, if not transform, a spectator’s perception of their locale. Crucially, this response is realised by shifting attitudes to what is conceived as spectacle and how it relates to a site. ‘Some works operate at a very spectacular level’, Lawrence concludes: they present technical feats in an extraordinary location, often with lights and projection and fireworks. There is however another way to understand spectacle: the figure of the human body in an extraordinary position – and this comes back to Trisha Brown and her Equipment Piece. The movement was pedestrian, but where it was performed was extraordinary.42

Black Rock The Dinorwig quarry which proved such an inspiration for Moving Rocks played a different, if equally significant role, in generating the content of David Shearing’s Black Rock. There in 1985, in the area known as Vivian quarry, climber Johnny Dawes consolidated his reputation as the foremost rock athlete of his generation, putting up new routes on the quarried slate and naming them, as the first ascensionist, with characteristic zest.43 Dawes of Perception, for instance, is a climb described by the guide book RockFax in uncompromising terms: ‘scary moves to reach the sanctuary of the bolt are followed by desperate moves past it to reach

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some cracks out left that lead to a hideous top out’.44 Climbs like these laid the foundation for Dawes’ most famous ascent the following year on the historic Snowdon crag, Clogwyn Du’r Arddu. At the time, in 1986, Indian Face was the hardest climb ever to have been completed, graded at E9 6C. It was such an event that it was covered by national media and the picture of Dawes on the rockface, used by the Guardian in its full-page spread, still graces the wall in the local café in Llanberis, Pete’s Eats.45 In that article (25 October 1986) journalists David Rose and Roger Alston recorded the climber’s own perception of the act of climbing at such an elite level: Dawes himself feels that, in spite of the danger, climbing such a route was a creative act. He compares it to music and poetry and he talks of climbing as a means to achieve a unique and harmonious relationship with nature. (Nelsson, 2007, p.200)

Thirty years later, triggered by the anniversary of this remarkable feat, the Kendal Mountain Festival (KMF) co-commissioned a new performance piece to mark the event of Indian Face, enlisting Johnny Dawes as a consultant and myself as lead researcher and dramaturg. Funded by United Kingdom Research Institute and Arts Council of England, practitionerscholar David Shearing was recruited as director and designer, and a large team of creatives was assembled to make a practice-led research piece in response to Dawes’ climbing history: Claire Carter (Text), James Bulley (Composition), Carlos Pons Guerra (Choreography), Ariadna Saltó Mestre and Marivi Da Silva (Performers), Invisible Flock (Digital Consultants).46 The team began with a series of questions in tune with the Guardian’s article. How can climbing be seen as a ‘creative act’? Is it possible to translate that act into performance on the ground? And what can site-specific research methodologies reveal about a climber’s ‘relationship with nature’? Shearing specialises in creating immersive, multisensory environments, developing a unique skill in bringing weather inside a theatre or commercial space. Pieces like The Weather Machine (2015) and The Weather Café (2016) subtly and sometimes spectacularly appropriated climatic conditions as creative material, developing, in effect, an expanded scenography of weather.47 ‘Through the active use of air as medium (haze, wind, light, warmth, smell and sound)’, Shearing argues, ‘the participant be[comes] bound up in design elements’ (Shearing, 2017, p.146). In creating Black Rock Shearing was working in a mountainous

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setting for the first time, an environment where scenographic weather conditions operate on a grand scale. The research and development phase of the work was split into two periods: a four-day intensive site visit to Clogwyn Du’r Arddu with representatives from a range of contributors to the project (lead researcher, lead artist, mountain guide, climber, KMF arts officer, project mentor); and an 8-month period of creative development with short visits back to the site in Snowdonia and to climbing walls in Leeds, the city which boasted the first-ever professionally designed indoor climbing wall erected in the 1960s (see Part 3.1). The latter period of research involved movement workshops led by climbers and interviews with non-elite climbers, with varying abilities and experience. The team was not quite the ‘matrix of bodies, including artists, producers, landowners, community participants, funding bodies and businesses’ (Rugg and Sedgwick, 2007, p.10) which Kate Lawrence suggests are the key stakeholders in sited work, but as a whole it drew on representatives from the climbing and hiking industry, mountain festival administration, university education and the freelance arts world. These human resources were then brought together with the rich materials offered to the artist from the location itself, in a process Shearing calls: ‘building a world’: for me that’s essentially a web-like connection of encounters, so: encounters with other humans, encounters with place, encounters with buildings, encounters with materials and weather. And you just build up those encounters for an audience to make and construct a world.48

That world—made up of contrasting perspectives and myriad vernacular materials—was then channelled through the sensibilities of the artistic team into the making of Black Rock (Fig. 6). Dawes’ climb may have been the most daring of its age, with a level of potential harm set at an unacceptable high for later even more accomplished climbers following in his footsteps.49 But Shearing was not interested in representing directly the danger of this achievement in Black Rock. During the site visit, the creative team had studied the crag of Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, split as it is into several distinct buttresses. From a distance, Dawes had highlighted some of the more notorious routes— Curving Crack, Vember, Midsummer Night’s Dream—seeing a pattern of lines (or topos) laid over the crag to which the rest of us were blind. We had observed at close quarters the towering scoop of rock which Dawes

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Fig. 6 Clogwyn Du’r Arddu site visit, March 2017 (Photo by David Shearing)

had named Indian Face, coining the local drug dealer, Gabwt’s nickname for the section of the crag; it was so smooth it defied even the most fanciful ideas of scaling it. But jeopardy, heroism, sporting prowess even verticality were not the primary interests for Shearing. Instead he drew on Dawes’ lesser-known capabilities, culled from interviews with the climber during and after the R&D phase: He offered piercing insights that revealed a deep awareness and understanding of the body, a brilliance in decoding geology and profound observations into wider philosophies of climbing – ultimately philosophies for living. (Shearing, 2019, p.38)

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Black Rock 50 as an experience was in fact light on danger but heavy on attentiveness —a way of thinking which cleverly, if indirectly, united the act of climbing with the act of spectating (Figs. 7 and 8). I sit on a warm wooden bench scenting a hint of creosote from the supporting sleeper. Others are facing me doing the same in a traverse stage arrangement. Two large video screens are hanging, high to my left and right. Headphones on my head, I look up to sweeping mountainscapes and intimate vignettes of water and rocks, alternating my gaze from screen to screen. In front of me and between the spectators facing me is a long and shallow trough – a cat-walk of sorts but filled with large rocks, reducing down to a thin black lake. It is a contained and aesthetic rendering of a wild landscape; the rocks are Yorkshire grit, not Snowdonian rock but there is a small piece of Welsh slate beneath me I don’t yet know about. Twenty vertical fluorescents are assembled around us - an urban forest of light, flicking on and off jarringly. The piece has six main sections distilling the site-based research conducted on the trip to Snowdonia and continued in the months between: Deep time; the Call of the Mountains; Quarrying; Indian Face; Edge (Dark Peak); Brilliance (White Peak). Two female dancers move across the space and around the rectangular cat-walk. They perform resized interpretations of climbing moves, delicate abstractions of the gestures discovered in a workshop with local climbers in the summer. They lead and follow. They shape-shift from belay partners, to lovers, to personifications of rock and climber, one becoming the material, the other deftly climbing over and under it. Above the dancers and the audience tiny concrete speakers rise up to the ceiling. They contain the voices of actual climbers reflecting on the feeling of climbing, the heightened sense of presence, of empowerment and of fear. Together they reflect on the particular kind of attentiveness sparked by climbing. The voices complement the old-style radio on the floor, which broadcasts the unmistakable voice of Johnny Dawes elaborating on his unique relationship to Snowdonian rock. The cat walk is gingerly negotiated, the gritstone biting into the dancer’s naked foot and Indian Face, the originator of all this creative energy, is ‘climbed’, not vertically but horizontally. It is a starkly abstracted version of Dawes’ climb: the dancer walks slowly, never rising higher than the three inches of stones piled up in the catwalkcum-lake. Her risk is in negotiating an always-different pattern of rocks, rearranged each night to keep her on her toes. As she treads towards the undisclosed summit of the climb, Dawes’ own straining, gasping voice

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Fig. 7 Indian Face, from Black Rock (Photo by Tom Joy)

accompanies her journey, ripped from the film documenting his first ascent of the Quarryman (Hughes, 2006). Few would recognise any associations with the 1986 climb, even those closest to its history; the dancer is a layered cipher of the many subtle suggestions in the piece – a lady of the lake, a solo explorer, an archetype facing her destiny, unsure of whether it is dark or light. Light wins out in the final section - a design-led theatrical spectacle in Shearing’s self-styled tradition of weather-scenography. Brilliance, Part 6, transports us uncannily from valley bottom to mountain-top. The dancer has disappeared. The fluorescents flicker on. Dense milky haze rolls slowly in around our ankles, filling the space with six-inch thick wisps of white. Those diminutive rocks – gestures to the massive forms seen on the screen are now like peaks jutting out of the clouds, a symbolic mountain in microcosm restored to full scale. I look around to my fellow spectators and their benches, like mine, are floating magically on air. The wonder of a cloud inversion, rarely seen in the landscape outside, is collectively shared in a galvanising and unsettling experience. ‘From here you can see how far you could go’, the voice-over tells us. ‘You can see the height you can fall. You can feel the edge of yourself.’51

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Fig. 8 White Peak (Brilliance) from Black Rock (Photo by Tom Joy)

As a collaborator on the project, watching Black Rock was always a mixed experience. Witnessed as it was on multiple occasions and with such a stake in the proceedings, this was inevitable. This particular moment, though, each and every time, was one I anticipated—actively looked forward to—finding myself transported, as the voice-over suggested, to a different plane of perception. My own experiences of mountain mistiness, good and bad, mixed with the pleasure of seeing other spectators lose themselves in the swirling materiality of the haze. Haze (as distinct from dry ice or fog), so often associated with fakery, glitz and superficiality, nevertheless succeeded in producing an affect of the mountain: reflective, solitary, uplifting. Working with a similar stimulus to Lawrence’s Moving Rocks —the industrially transformed slate quarries of Snowdonia—Black Rock was markedly different in its approach. Where vertigo was a kinaesthetically communicated experience in Lawrence’s work, the one nod towards explicit danger in Shearing’s piece was a large ballast sack, falling like a dead weight from the sky at the end of the Indian Face section. In this project the answer to how to translate the experience of climbing

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to an audience on the ground was not to replicate a sense of peril in the audience. The ‘creative act’ which Dawes performed in 1986 was not best translated to a contemporary audience in the same emotional register as it was first conceived. Instead, two simple scales of attention were employed: generalisation (beyond the Dawes narrative) and personalisation (of the experience for each member of the audience). The generalisation adopted by Shearing and the creative team was to draw on other sources in addition to Indian Face, and to explore the world beyond the very specific context of 1986. The title Black Rock itself signed a conceptual and atmospheric relationship between Clogwyn Du’r Arddu (literally ‘black cliff of the black height’) and the nearby slate quarries with their brooding walls of charcoal-coloured rock. This connection point was extended further in the Dark Peak section which looked at the idea of ‘the edge’, not just in terms of a climbing lexicon but also as a vehicle for interrogating the pain of broken partnerships: Feel slate fall in the quarry of your stomach. These days the edge is closer than we think We didn’t expect to meet it so soon My finite may not be the same as yours and the distance between us can cause the fall.52

The less prescriptive title Black Rock (having rejected Indian Face as the piece’s name) helped provide a launchpad to examine several more universalised themes, including: damaged relationships, bereavement and loss, modes of perception, desire and isolation. The act of climbing, the architecture of the rock formations in the region, and the technology used to ascend them provided a backdrop for a wider examination of humanity, its failings and successes, taking the focus ultimately away from the elite and unattainable. This approach was underlined by widening the voice of the climber, beyond the contributions of the athlete Dawes to the perceptions of amateur climbers pursuing their pastime today. These other voices, ruminating on the ‘why do I do it’ question, were distributed through the concrete speakers which hung overhead, and formed the crux of the final section. Thus, the singularity of Dawes’ voice at the opening of the piece, was contrasted by a chorus of ‘ordinary’ climbers closing the experience. Personalisation returns us to Shearing’s interest in attentiveness, or mindfulness—in his words that which ‘brings the mindful participant into

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a conscious self-awareness with scenography’ (Shearing, 2017, p.151). Careful manipulation of the objects of the stage was designed to bring about a direct experience of their materiality for each individuated spectator—being asked to pick up the slate fragment beneath our seats, run it over in our hands and decide whether to steal it, for instance; or being given permission to clamber over the central stones ourselves, in the ‘decompression’ section of the piece (Papaioannou, 2014, p.167). These simple and direct engagements with the materials of the piece, prompted of course by learning from the R&D phase, invoked disparate and individualised responses: the smell of a wooden sleeper may take you back to childhood volunteering on the railways or to the recycled raised beds in your local allotment. Feedback gathered after the piece focused on the senses and reflected this idea of the personal and individual. ‘How did Black Rock make you feel?’, we asked. ‘Reflective, serene, motivated, unsettled, calm and anxious’, the responses recorded, ‘like a god on top of a mountain, who can blow clouds away’.53 Each spectator created their own mountainscape in Black Rock from experience, imagination or both, a product of the ‘worldbuilding’ at the centre of Shearing’s practice. Pivotal to the success of this approach is imaginative space, creative slack, both to encourage and frame the kind of individual investment Shearing seeks. It is a matter of vital judgement when developing immersive environments and the perils of getting it wrong are manifold, as Shearing observed in interview: So often if people work in immersive ways, they might construct an environment where everything’s lifelike. For me, it’s providing enough materials to build a world which stands on its own without having to furnish it all.54

Get that balance right—between agency and control, between verisimilitude and suggestion—and a spectator can live in the same liminal world Johnny Dawes occupied on Indian Face. At least for a minute or two.

Conclusion In this chapter I have undertaken to construct a tight and localised survey of ‘site-related’ mountain performance. The term, appropriated from Miwon Kwon and applied here in a new context of environmental

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mountain-based performance, has allowed me to look at three varied case studies of contemporary practice, all hailing from Snowdonia. Perhaps counter-intuitively, not all of these case-study performances were staged on a mountain in that region: Kwon’s term, as I have interpreted it, allows for a more inclusive look, not just at the site as host but at the site as stimulus. Consistency is maintained by the practice-led research imperatives driving each artist: each of these works asks questions, interrogates its sources and provides new insights into the landscape which inspired the work in the first place. I have sought to represent the three pieces in a different style to that of the Mountain Ritual (2.1) and Drama sections (2.2), a style more reminiscent of the Handrails which punctuate the book as a whole. I have adopted this register of writing to elevate my felt experience in the analysis and to position it as central to the understanding of site-related performance. These sited pieces implicate the spectator and the performer in different ways to those involved in the witnessing of any of the mountain dramas from the previous chapter. The site demonstrably acts on both spectator and performer in this kind of work and the personalised, experiential voice—from my own sensibility and in the case of Moving Rocks from the maker’s—is, it is hoped, an appropriate one to capture this kind of engagement. Moving between the personal voice and the source-interviews with each practitioner has also allowed for a light touch calibration, for instance when my felt sense of the ‘staginess’ of the central play in The Gathering chimed with Louise Ann Wilson’s own reservations and changing future priorities. The historical ‘narrative’ that emerges from this study is quite consciously a parochial and partial one. I have established one broad context for site-related mountain performance in this chapter—the experimental site-experimenters of the 1960s, operating in a vibrant and groundbreaking cultural movement in Wales. This movement, as I have outlined, was inspired by practices commonly associated with the birth of site-specific work—Fluxus, Happenings, Schechner’s Environmental Theatre—but was inflected significantly to exploit the landscape of Wales, which boasts an embarrassment of mountain riches. That burgeoning of experimentation led directly to a second wave of more developed and consistent work, here exemplified in Pearson and Gough’s site-specific practice (again with selected mountain inflections)—figures who in turn fed into some of the organisational support networks which facilitate work in (mountainous) landscapes, NTW being one of the common reference

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points. The Shiraz-Persepolis festival, at which Peter Brook and Robert Wilson launched their own forays into site-related mountain performance, may seem to be a subplot to this story but through the figure of Geoffrey Axworthy is revealed here as an integral part of a local, Welsh narrative. Other narratives are of course possible, but it is hoped that what is lost here in breadth is sufficiently compensated for in tightness of focus and depth of insight. In truth, Shiraz-Persepolis may be seen as an exotic sideshow to the main story, and the work represented there—in Brook and Wilson’s extravagant spectaculars—shares very little in terms of ethos and approach with the three case studies here. The Gathering, Moving Rocks , and Black Rock all seek to respect the Snowdonian landscape in a longitudinal research process, engaging in different ways with the territory McAuley demarcates for site-specific work: the ‘rights of inclusion and exclusion, memory and history’ (McAuley, 2007, p.7). The work in Persepolis, by contrast—funded and commissioned as it was—was always going to have a short-term interest in the stunning mountainous site it occupied so briefly. For Wilson, rights of inclusion are addressed directly by her practice research methodology, depending as it did on four years of dialogue with local stakeholders, digging out buried histories and hidden agricultural rhythms and presenting them back to her audience. For Lawrence, the history of dangerous hard labour in the region is contrasted with the site’s main use today as a playground for climbers, the slab of Tryfan Bach becoming a palimpsest for the historical ‘advance’ from the mining to the leisure industries. For Shearing, an elite and exclusive act of climbing history, drawn out of the memory of a one-time elite climber, dissolves into the everyday, thanks to the elevation of local voices and found objects. The realisation of a longer-term site-sensitivity is, in each of these Snowdon case studies, extended by its makers to the experience of their spectators, using a variety of tactics—from gentle estrangement to full on fear-induction, from material immersion to the respectful choreography of natural events. Bringing these works together in the still underexposed written context of Wales’s performance history reveals their collective project: to generate, without fanfare or sententiousness, a sense of responsibility and informed enquiry in audience and maker alike. Experiencing site-related work of this kind, and exploring it in such a spirit, transcends clamorous spectacle and establishes an ethics of engagement more in tune with the ecology of the mountainside.

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Notes 1. That is: ‘In theatre building–Outside theatre–Site-sympathetic–Sitegeneric–Site-specific’ (Wilkie 2002, p.150). 2. https://performing-mountains.leeds.ac.uk. 3. https://louiseannwilson.com/work/the-gathering. 4. See James Rebanks on hefting: ‘In theory our sheep could wander right across the Lake District. But they don’t because they know their place on the mountains. They are hefted – taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs – an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years’ (Rebanks, 2015, p.9). 5. https://nationaltheatrewales.org/about. 6. https://nationaltheatrewales.org/about#ourstory. 7. For an elaboration on the work and philosophy of the National Theatres of Scotland and Wales see Jo Robinson’s Theatre and the Rural (Robinson, 2016, pp.73–78). 8. https://nationaltheatrewales.org/waleslab. 9. http://www.performance-wales.org/it-was-40-years-ago-today/ introduction.htm. 10. This is not to imply that the majority of Fluxus scores exploited rural contexts but to note that a significant imperative of the movement was to move performance outside, into the city as well as into the country. Consider, for example: pieces like Bengt af Klintberg’s Seven Forest Events (1966)—‘Walk out of your house. Walk to the forest. Walk into the forest’ (Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn, 2002, p.62)—and Milan Knizak’s Marriage Ceremony (1967)—‘Everyone walks deep into the woods until they come to a clearing’ (Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn, 2002, p.65). 11. Pearson discusses this production in detail in Performing Site Specific Theatre (Pearson, 2012). 12. See Cliff McLucas’s distinction between ‘Host’—the site itself—and ‘Ghost’—the temporary intervention of performance (Pearson 2012, p.70). 13. ‘The Dragon Procession itself was unleashed on about 100 villages and small towns across Wales. The walks that Philip (the Dragon) and I did were mainly on the foothills of Cader Idris (the Dolgellau side) and on various hills (and slate slag heaps) around Blaenau Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog, Maentwrog and on the mountains behind Harlech (in the footsteps of Robert Graves!)’. Email correspondence with the author, 18 April 2018. 14. Mummers plays are often associated with an English nationalist narrative of St George and the dragon so this inspiration—acknowledged by Gough in his paper (Re)Lying on Mountains —is perhaps a mischievous one. 15. Gough recounted his relationship to TDR in an email to the author: ‘In the summer of 1974 (age 18) I went to Cardiff University library every

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

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day and read every copy of TDR […] The work of Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and the entire New York scene enflamed my imagination’. Email correspondence with the author, 9 May 2018. See for instance the reflection on the festival boycott, triggered by concerns over the human rights of native Iranians in the later life of ShirazPersepolis, in Kirby (1976, pp.2–5). Grotowski did of course move to more considered work in the mountains during his paratheatrical phase, specifically on Fire Mountain, near Wroclaw, led by Jacek Zmyslowski (Schechner and Wolford, 1997, pp.243– 247). Bharucha cites Olissia Trilling’s assessment of the blend of Greek, Latin and the ritual Zend-Avesta, effected by Hughes: ‘pretentious gibberish’ (Bharucha, 1990, p.80). The lack of local voices is also reflected in the extant documentation as Matthew Bent points out: ‘Unavoidable within the little documentation which does exist of KA MOUNTAIN is the lack of Iranian voices. While there are some widely-available first-hand accounts of those who were there, the most comprehensive English-language source (found in Laurence Shyer’s book Robert Wilson and his Collaborators ) provides testimonies from members of the Byrd School only and not from the many Iranian performers who contributed to the work’ (Bent, 2015, p.82). See Sprinkle and Stephens’ film Goodbye Gauley Mountain for a novel critique of this destructive mining practice (Sprinkle and Stephens, 2013). The contrast between Wilson’s ambition to whiten the mountain permanently and land artist Christo’s Coast Wrapping (1969) is striking. Christo’s similarly epic scale artwork, made by wrapping the Sydney coast in one million square feet of fabric, was realised and recycled the materials after its 10 week ‘showing’: https://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/ wrapped-coast. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/actions/capitalsculture_en. Email correspondence with the author, 9 May 2018. Email correspondence with the author, 9 May 2018. The Living Landscapes conference co-directed by Mike Pearson and Heike Roms and was part of the AHRC, Landscape and Environment Programme, 2006–2012. For details of its events and outputs see: http:// www.landscape.ac.uk. http://www.wilsonandwilson.org.uk. Interview with the author, Leeds, 9 November 2017. Interview with the author, Leeds, 9 November 2017. See, for instance Pearson and Shank’s definition of the site-specific working from, ‘two basic orders: that which is of the site, its fixtures and

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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fittings, and that which is brought to the site, the performance and it scenography’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.23). The poem is by Gillian Clarke, the writer for The Gathering, culled from unpublished production documents. From the unpublished script of the performance, pp.5–6. https://louiseannwilson.com/work/the-gathering. Interview with the author, Leeds, 9 November 2017. There was of course an element of artifice to the sheep herding as well—as it was constructed to form the coda of the walking part of the piece and repeated three days in a row. For Lawrence herself, Brown and Halprin are more significant than Butoh in a genealogy of Vertical Dance: ‘Vertical dance, as a named form, really emerged in the 1980s alongside the development of more advanced rock climbing equipment. Brown and the Butoh dancers did not use rock climbing equipment, indeed Brown made her own harnesses and Sankai Juku just used rope, more like aerial disciplines’ (Email conversation with the author, 10 September 2018). http://www.ilposto.org/en/about. Pre-session notes by Kate Lawrence for an interview with the author, 27 September 2017. This piece was originally made for Guilford Cathedral and adapted for the National Library of Wales. It drew inspiration from the idea of the angel on the roof descending to meet the people. https://performing-mountains.leeds.ac.uk/symposium/. Pre-session notes by Kate Lawrence for an interview with the author, 27 September 2017. Interestingly, critic M. J. Thomson also highlights the influence of Kaprow and Fluxus on Trisha Brown: ‘A good deal of its immediate thrill for the dance enthusiast and everyday fan lies in its fusion of art and life, in Kaprow-esque logic’ (Thompson, 2004, pp.154–155). Interview with the author, 27 September 2017. Pre-session notes by Kate Lawrence for an interview with the author, 27 September 2017. The title of Dawes’ autobiography is a play on this reputation: Full of Myself (Dawes, 2011). https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=8729 (Accessed 10 July 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/ 2011/dec/22/archive-johnny-dawes-indian-face-1986?CMP=share_btn_ link (Accessed 10 July 2019). The project mentor was Louise Ann Wilson, the project advisor was Henry Iddon and the climbing consultant was Johnny Dawes.

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47. See the artist’s website for full details of the venues and creative teams associated with these pieces: http://www.davidshearing.com/ works/ (Accessed 10 July 2019). 48. Interview with the author, Leeds, 3 May 2018. 49. See James McHaffie on returning to Indian Face, for instance: https:// www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/return_to_indian_face_by_james_ mchaffie-5736 (Accessed 3 July 2019). 50. For Shearing’s own detailed description and analysis of Black Rock see his article in Performance Research On Mountains (Pitches and Shearing, 2019). 51. Claire Carter: unpublished final script of Black Rock (p.12). 52. Claire Carter: unpublished final script of Black Rock (p.11). 53. Black Rock audience reflections, 10–11 November 2017. 54. Interview with the author, Leeds, 3 May 2018.

References Bent, M. (2015) Aspects of Landscape Politics in KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A Story About a Family and Some People Changing, by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School. Platform: Postgraduate Journal of Theatre Arts, 9 (2), pp. 79–94. Bharucha, R. (1990) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge. Brayshaw, T. and Witts, N. (2014) The 20th Century Performance Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Buckminster-Fuller, R. and Sadao, S. (1968) A Theatre. TDR: The Drama Review, 12 (3), pp. 117–120. Christie, J., Gough, R. and Watt, D. (2006) A Performance Cosmology: Testimony from the Future: Evidence of the Past. London: Routledge. Cole, T.I.M. (2010) Military Presences, Civilian Absences: Battling Nature at the Sennybridge Training Area, 1940–2008. Journal of War & Culture Studies, 3 (2), pp. 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1386/jwcs.3.2.215. Croyden, M. (1971) Peter Brook Learns to Speak Orghast. New York Times, 3rd Oct. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1470-2045(17)30641-1. Dawes, J. (2011) Full of Myself. Padstow: Johnny Dawes Books. Dent, M. (2004) The Fallen Body: Butoh and the Crisis of Meaning in Sankai Juku’s “Jomon Sho”. Women and Performance, 14 (1), pp. 173–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407700408571448. Friedman, K., Smith, O. and Sawchyn, L. (eds.) (2002) Fluxus Performance Workbook—A Selection, Performance Research. London: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2002.10871877.

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Gluck, R. (2007) The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran. Leonardo, 40 (1), pp. 20–28. Gough, R. (2011) The Dead Class in Cardiff. In Murawska-Muthesisus, K. and Zarzecka, N. (eds.) Kantor Was Here. London: Black Dog Publishing, pp. 52– 59. Gough, R. (2018) (Re)Lying on Mountains. Hughes, A. (2006) Stone Monkey: Portrait of a Rock Climber. UK. Irwin, K. (2009) The Ambit of Performativity: How Site Makes Meaning in Performance. Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publishing. Kaprow, A. and Schechner, R. (1968) Extensions in Time and Space: An Interview with Allan Kaprow. TDR: The Drama Review, 12 (3), pp. 153–159. Kaye, N. (2000) Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, SiteSpecific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107415324.004. Khaznadar, C. and Deák, N.J. (1973) Tendencies and Prospects for Third World Theatre. TDR: The Drama Review, 17 (4), pp. 33–50. Kirby, M. (1976) The Shiraz Festival: Politics and Theatre. TDR: The Drama Review, 20 (4), pp. 2–5. Kumiega, J. (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski. London: Methuen. Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Langton, B. (1973) Journey to Ka Mountain. TDR: The Drama Review, 17 (2), pp. 48–57. Lawrence, K. (2010) Hanging from Knowledge: Vertical Dance as Spatial Fieldwork. Performance Research, 15 (2005), pp. 49–58. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13528165.2010.539879. Matloff, J. (2017) The War Is in the Mountains: Violence in the World’s High Places. London: Duckworth. McAuley, G. (ed.) (2007) Local Acts: Site-based Performance Practice. In About Performance 7. Sydney: University of Sydney. Nelsson, R. (ed.) (2007) The Guardian Book of Mountains. London: Guardian Books. Papaioannou, S. (2014) Immersion, “Smooth” Spaces and Critical Voyeurism in the Work of Punchdrunk. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 34 (2), pp. 160–174 (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2014. 899746. Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearson, M. (2012) Haunted House: Staging the Persians with the British Army. In Birch, A. and Tompkins, J. (eds.) Performing Site-Specific Theatre. London: Springer Nature, pp. 69–83. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Pitches, J. and Popat, S. (eds.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Pitches, J. and Shearing, D. (eds.) (2019) On Mountains. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 24 (2), pp.1–130 (Abingdon: Routledge). Rebanks, J. (2015) The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District. London: Penguin. Robinson, J. (2016) Theatre and the Rural. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roms, H. and Edwards, R. (2011) Oral History as Site-Specific Practice: Locating the History of Performance Art in Wales. In Trower, S. (ed.) Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–191. Roms, H. and Edwards, R. (2012) Towards a Prehistory of Live Art in the UK. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22 (1), pp. 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10486801.2011.645283. Rugg, J. and Sedgwick, M. (eds.) (2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol: Intellect. Ryan, P.R. (1973) Shiraz Persepolis and the Third World. TDR: The Drama Review, 17 (4), pp. 31–33. Schechner, R. (1968) 6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre. TDR: The Drama Review, 12 (3), pp. 41–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144353. Schechner, R. and Wolford, L. (eds.) (1997) The Grotowski Source Book. London: Routledge. Shearing, D. (2017) Audience Immersion: Mindfulness and the Experience of Scenography. In McKinney, J. and Palmer, S. (eds.) Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. Bloomsbury, pp. 139– 154. Shearing, D. (2019) Black Rock: Routes Through Scenographic Translation, from Mountain Climbing to Performance. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 24 (2), pp. 36–44. Shevtsova, M. (2007) Robert Wilson. London: Routledge. Sommer, S. (1972) Equipment Dances: Trisha Brown. TDR: The Drama Review, 16 (3), pp. 135–141. Sprinkle, A. and Stephens, B. (2013) Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story. United States: Fecund Arts. Available at www. goodbyegauleymountain.org. Thompson, M.J. (2004) Doing Your Thing? Trisha Brown’s Object Lesson. Women and Performance, 14 (1), pp. 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07407700408571446. Trilling, O. (1973) Robert Wilson’s “Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace”. TDR: The Drama Review, 17 (2), pp. 33–47. Turner, C. (2004) Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for SiteSpecific Performance. New Theatre Quarterly, 20 (4), pp. 373–390. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x04000259.

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Wilkie, F. (2002) Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain. New Theatre Quarterly, 18 (2), pp. 140–160. https://doi.org/10. 1017/s0266464x02000234. Wilson, L.A. (2015) Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness. Leeds: Louise Ann Wilson Company. Wilson, L.A. (2019) Dorothy Wordsworth and Her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy: A Feminine “Material” Sublime Approach to the Creation of WalkingPerformance in Mountainous Landscapes. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 24 (2), pp. 109–119. Witts, N. (2010) Tadeusz Kantor. London: Routledge. Worth, L. and Poynor, H. (2004) Anna Halprin. London: Routledge.

Part 3: Performing Mountains

In Part 1, in the General Introduction, I have made a case for cultures of performance to be better recognized within the discipline of Mountain Studies. This claim is substantiated, I believe, by the cultural diversity of mountain rituals, dramas and site-related performances laid out in Part 2, the international breadth and expressive power of which has not been assessed before. That humankind has been making artistic sense of mountains from the west coast of South America to the far east of Australia, on a modest domestic scale to the foundation of entire religions, is reason enough to take mountain cultural production seriously in the ecology of mountain enquiry. But beyond this focus on the outputs of mountain expressivity, what might a layered understanding of culture and performance yield about mountains themselves? What languages, behaviours and creative processes, familiar to the disciplines of theatre and performance, can shed new light on mountains and the people who frequent them? In short, what can the Mountain Studies community learn from performance as it seeks to go ‘beyond scientific research’ and find new ‘synergies’ of thinking?1 In this last section of the book, Part 3, I offer one extended answer to these questions, spread across a trio of complementary chapters. Here, I appropriate three key processes of theatre and performance, training, scenography and acting-spectating, to examine what new dimensions of mountains are revealed when they are exposed to the theatrical discourses which surround these processes. To do this, my emphasis

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moves to specific peaks and mountain ranges—the Cairngorms in Scotland; Tianmen mountain in China’s prefectural ‘city’, Zhangjiajie; and the Alps in Europe (Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Eiger). In the first chapter in this Part (3.1), building on the section on cairns in 2.1, I examine another mountain in microcosm, the indoor climbing wall, narrating its growth from ‘teaching machine’ in the 1960s to a stage for the twenty-first-century Olympian performance. In 3.2, mountain architecture and its influence on behaviour is considered through the lens of expanded scenography. Here, the rising popularity of skywalks is critiqued with reference to ideas of event-space using testimony from the online travel platform, TripAdvisor. In the final chapter 3.3, I trace a near hundred-year tradition of acting-and-spectatorship in the Alps, expressed through theories of deep and dark play. Concentrating on the technologies of mediation, between acts of climbing and of spectating, this concluding chapter reveals a history of performed retelling on Alpine peaks, which helps explain the fascination with modes of self-representation in lifestyle sports today. Viewed together, these three chapters assess the capacity of performance-based ideas and processes to generate new understandings of mountains—as agents of behavioural change, as places of spatial and experiential ambiguity and as spurs for progressive improvisation.

Note 1. http://www.mountainresearchinitiative.org/index.php/who-we-are/ourprinciples. (Accessed 4 April 2019).

Handrail 5 Stepping Up, Training and a New Urgency: Skiddaw and Its Neighbours (W135-140/214)

The original plan was to complete Wainwright’s list of 214 fells in a decade. This, we reasoned, was not exactly fast-track peak bagging but manageable within the constraints of an ever-burgeoning domestic complexity. The two youngest members of the group, whose diaries were blissfully blank when we began, had fast matured into men with lots of other things to do—most of them impossible in rural Cumbria—and it was only going to get worse, the longer it took to complete. It had felt like we were making good headway since the sorry early return from Braithwaite in 2011. Landmarks like the 100th peak (Calf Crag in Easedale) and the 100th left to go (Great Gable in Wasdale) had passed relatively easily and the online map I used to keep a check on progress was slowly turning green. But the truth of the matter was that by 2016, after ten years of trying, we still had 94 peaks to climb; time, money, enthusiasm and opportunity were fast running out. Two things needed to change in this psycho-physical wrangle with Wainwright: outlook and stamina. If we were ever to complete our self-imposed endurance test, we needed to train our minds and

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our muscles to stay on the fellside longer. Crucially, we had to start linking mountains together in ways we had been unable to imagine earlier in the campaign, extending our reach both in the planning and the execution. On too many occasions in the past we had overlooked easy wins, naively blind to the many short hops, detours and tangents which link summits in surprising ways. Now, with each visit charged with a new significance, the vision of our walking ensemble needed to be enhanced, horizons extended and our many differing limitations (age, fitness, finance, commitment, alternative lives) suppressed. It was simply no longer possible to say, ‘we’ll do that one next time’. To address some of these limitations, the older members of the party undertook a new training regime, becoming unlikely visitors to the local cathedral of health and fitness. Here it was possible to walk and climb throughout the winter, irrespective of the conditions, using apparatus dismissed as implements of contemporary torture in an earlier life: the rowing machine, the treadmill and, most fittingly, the stair climber—that dystopian fabrication of a mountain in miniature. There was nothing better to encourage new levels of motivation, we found, than to spend twenty minutes with a threestep escalator on a dark December morning (Fig. 1). Alongside this blossoming love affair with the moving staircase, our approach to planning walks needed an overhaul, to avoid the oversights of the past and to embrace the delights of the detours and deviations longer walks often provided. Moving to the Northern Fells (Book 5 of Wainwright’s guides) for a two-week stay in 2016, ‘a perfect sanctuary for birds and animals and fell walkers who prefer to be away from crowds’ (Wainwright, 2005), was an ideal opportunity to test out this new-found drive in the bleak seclusion of Skiddaw and the region known rather prosaically as ‘back o’ Skiddaw’. The great explorer and creator of one of the earliest mountain skills guides, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, was scathing about mechanical training for climbing. ‘Monotonous repetitions of particular muscular movements are of little service’, he declared in Mountain Craft . ‘They bore the mind and weary the nerves’ (Young, 1920, p.65). He would surely have outlawed the stair

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Fig. 1 New tools of preparation: a stair climber (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

climber from his mountain training regime had it been available to him in 1920, preferring instead the organic benefits of dancing, skipping and swimming (Young, 1920, p.66). But as we trudged up the tourist path to Skiddaw, a relentless and tedious zig-zag path, several times ‘fixed’ due to the peak’s popularity and prominence in the Northern Fells, we were thankful for the preparation we had done through the winter, even if it was mind-numbing at times. On paths like these, I find it is better simply to keep my head down and find a rhythm, using the rim of my hat to obscure the unvaried

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view uphill. At such times, there is little sense of ensemble enjoyment: personal toil dominates, and each member approaches it in a different way. Even with the training through the dark months, the younger walkers’ pace soon outstripped the elders and we became like four mountain metronomes, each stepping to a different beat. Skiddaw, the 4th highest peak on Wainwright’s list and the smallest of the 3000 footers, is blessed with not one but two diminutive brothers—Skiddaw Lesser Man and Skiddaw Little Man.1 These two peaks conspire to drag out the pain of the long ascent from Keswick, forming a series of false summits to beguile and taunt in equal measure. Wainwright himself clearly erred on the side of the former. So bewitched was he by the topography of Little Man and so concerned was he to rid the peak of its size stigma that he likened the smaller brother of Skiddaw to the Himalayan peaks, Kanchenjunga and K2 (Wainwright, 2005, Skiddaw Little Man, p.2), rebuffing the higher Skiddaw’s claim to ascendancy. As far as I was concerned, with a new-found determination, the quicker we were past Little Man, the faster we could move on to Skiddaw itself and to the four other peaks planned for that day. Perhaps we would have been better prepared if we had stayed outside the gym during the winter; it would have certainly given us a more realistic indication of the summer temperatures on the summit of Skiddaw. Arriving there after pausing very briefly on the Little Man, we were met with 35-mile an hour winds and temperatures of just above freezing. Skiddaw’s highest point is a desolate one at the best of times. On the plateau, waves of undulating slate lead up to a ‘half-shelter’, which lives up to its name; today, there was no escaping the biting wind, no matter how low one got to the ground. But views over to the North Western fells, above the seemingly perilous Long Side edge, lifted our spirits. We had climbed so many of the mountains in view now (Barrow, Barf, Lord’s Seat and Broom Fell in the near distance, Eel Crag, Sail and Fellbarrow further away). Maybe there was an end in sight. Previous incarnations of ourselves would have snapped a selfie, consumed a few sarnies, and shuffled back down the zig-zag path, content with two big peaks. But this was a new collective of peak

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baggers and from our vantage point on Skiddaw’s summit we surveyed the rest of the planned walk with something a little like rugged determination. The barbed refrain of ‘imagine coming back and doing this all again’ began to be a part of the climbing lexicon from now on—and it was always a galvanising thought. Instead, we found ourselves adopting a new reflexivity, performing calculated examinations of the landscape, our stamina and our ambition, mentally carving up the region to consider, really for the first time, the bigger picture. The peak of Bakestall is two kilometers north of Skiddaw, on a descent down a long, modestly benign path. But that mountain is more easily reached from Bassenthwaite village, via Peter House Farm, and in combination with Great Calva, another inaccessible outlier. Carl Side, Long Side and Ullock Pike, on the other hand, are all arranged along a ridge just below Skiddaw and out to the West. They are easy pickings. And if five peaks are possible, why not six? Lonscale Fell may be a three-mile detour out across Jenkin Hill but it is nevertheless ‘easy, straightforward walking’ (Wainwright, 2005, Lonscale Fell, p.7) and the alternative steep ascent from the road looks anything but. This mountain, too, can feature in our plans and not be added to the list of should-have-climbed-if-we-had-thought-about-it peaks which inevitably will come to haunt us in the endgame. It may have taken us ten years to assess the topography for such simple practicalities but at least we were learning now. That day we completed all the six fells in our plan, descending to the car in failing light, but with renewed spirit and hope. Viewing these peaks on my online checklist, I notice they are clustered neatly in the bottom-left quadrant of Wainwright’s Northern Fells region; a sign, perhaps unwelcome, of planning and pragmatics taking over, the freedom to roam now tempered by the need to complete. Stepping up is double edged, of course, bringing about an end to things without the time to prepare for it. And what could possibly prepare us for completion in any case? What will it be like when we finally get what we wished for?

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Note 1. Lesser Man is not a Wainwright, though Little Man is.

References Wainwright, A. (2005) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Northern Fells. London: Frances Lincoln. Young, G. W. (1920) Mountain Craft. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd.

Part 3.1 Mountains in Microcosm: The Artistry of Training in the Studio and on the Wall

Introduction Two twisting bodies make unlikely progress up a wall. They are celebrities as far as the group of captivated spectators watching beneath them is concerned. Framed by follow-spot lanterns tracking their movements upwards, two pools of white on black pick the climbers out like fugitives scaling a prison wall. When they reach the top, their ascent is met with a chorus of screams and an explosion of flashlights. The act takes less than ten seconds, the distance covered only 15 metres—directly up. This is not circus—although many of the trappings are the same. Neither is it theatre, although the protagonist is pitched against antagonist under an unforgiving spotlight. It is in fact a competitive speed climbing event run under the auspices of the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC). Performing on a standardised climbing-wall set up identically all over the world, paired athletes battle it out in front of thousands of admirers, trying to ascend the wall in the fastest time; in July 2019 the world records stood at 5.48 seconds for men and 7.10 seconds for women.1 In 2020 in Tokyo this style of spectator climbing was included for the first time as an official sport in the Olympics, contentiously combined with bouldering and sport climbing to reach an estimated audience of more than three billion.2 Originally conceived as a place for quiet training, the climbing wall is now a (vertical) stage, primed for the global mass market, a portal to a new generation of sports enthusiasts.3

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Climbing walls are a relatively recent form of training for climbing mountains or for activity on lower-level crags without ropes—known as bouldering. Their history can be traced to a scout camp in Seattle in the 1930s (White, 2013, p.8) but it wasn’t until the 1960s that climbing intelligence was used to design a climbing wall, recreating on an indoor surface the real-life problems a climber might face outside, so that they could be repeatedly encountered (and ultimately solved) in a safe space. The first of its kind to meet that purpose was the Leeds Climbing Wall designed by Don Robinson in 1964. Fifty-five years later, as the speed climbing example indicates, that safe space for personal training is being reconceived as a spectator sport, shifting fundamentally its purpose from preparation to performance. Such a development evidences one of the key questions for this Part of Performing Mountains: what can Mountain Studies and climbing practice learn from performance? Beginning with training as a meeting point to address this question, this chapter examines in detail the thinking behind the Leeds wall, using testimony from its designer and examples of its use by climbing practitioners. It suggests that the behaviours exhibited on the Leeds Wall may be considered as aesthetic and improvisational practices, and the act of wall design a form of choreography; both designer and practitioner are in short expressing forms of artistry. To follow further this logic, the Leeds Wall analysis is juxtaposed here with its mirror image: a piece of aesthetic choreography made for the climbing wall, part of a performance piece called Into the Mountain (Solo) (2017) by choreographer Simone Kenyon.4 For this piece Kenyon fabricated a climbing wall in a studio in Glasgow, performing her own personalised embodied memories of climbing in the Cairngorms to a seated audience in the theatre. This reflective chapter design will I hope concentrate attention on the utility of performance-based languages for understanding mountain phenomena. But for all its careful construction the material for this chapter is also prompted by one remarkable coincidence. In 2006, the Leeds Climbing Wall was finally decommissioned, and the famous breeze blocks, studded with different rocks, were razed to the ground. On its foundations a new building was erected: the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, to which I was recruited the very same year. Following on from the insights into memory and place from the previous chapter on site-related performance (2.3), such a serendipitous meeting of histories simply had to be investigated; the ghost of the Leeds Climbing Wall is situated no more than a few feet away from my office, after all. To provide a wider

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context to these varied constructions of the mountain in microcosm, and partly to reflect the specialism I bring to this subject as a scholar of performer training historiography, I first survey some key examples of training regimes from theatre and performance, regimes which depend on mountains, either contextually (as places for training to occur), or formally (as inspiring shapes, figures and metaphors). The conceptual meeting point between these two perspectives—the artistry of mountain training5 and the training of artistry through mountains—is the idea of landscape translation. The training wall for climbers and the training exercises for actors discussed here are creative facsimiles—microcosms—of a mountain, operating at various levels of abstraction. They are utilitarian artifices involving the individual in what Tim Ingold, in his explanation of tool use and cognition, calls a ‘process of enskillment, in which learning is inseparable from doing and in which both are embedded in the context of practical engagement in the world’ (Ingold and Gibson, 1993, p.463, emphasis in original). In effecting this alignment, I hope to answer one, two-part question in this chapter: what are the complementarities of climbing training and performer training, and what is the basis of their coming together?

Mountains in Performer Training Mountains have featured in practices of performer training for as long as there have been trainers and trainees—from the antique traditions of South and East Asian practice,6 to the twentieth-century burgeoning of performer training in Europe, triggered by the Modernist explosion of theatre and its radical reconception of how an actor prepares. In terms of training scholarship, expressed in books and articles, it is the twentieth century which witnessed the most obvious uplift in productivity, paralleling a similar development in the literature of mountain training. Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s Mountain Craft (Young, 1920) heralded ‘the development of a more systematized training of climbers’ (Nydal, 2018, p.161) just four years before Stanislavsky announced in My Life in Art that his famous approach to actor training—the System—‘seemed to [be] complete and ordered’ (Stanislavski, 2008, p.297). And where, as Alan McNee argues, late nineteenth-century notions of the body as machine or ‘human motor’ were informing articulations of early twentieth-century climbing (McNee, 2016, p.110), Stanislavsky and his

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pupil Meyerhold were, separately, appealing to the metaphor of the actorengineer, although these took until the post-Revolutionary period in Russia (1917–1940) to be fully voiced (Pitches, 2006, pp.21–23, 54–55). Systematics, organisation and efficiency were features across the entire landscape of training, as Simon Shepherd acknowledges in his introduction to On Training: In about the first third of the century, sport, politics and theatre expressed an interest in bodies made fit and efficient. This ran parallel to the projects of artists and architects […[ who were striving for ‘standardization and purism of form. (Shepherd, 2009, pp.6–7)

Both mountaineering and acting were entering a new phase of professionalism and productivity at the beginning of the twentieth century and the flourishing of books dedicated to both disciplines was evidence of this rise in status.7 There are two main strands of mountain influence on performer training and these may be simply expressed as contextual (that is: training in mountains) and formal (training with mountains, using their form or conceptual clout as a basis for exercises). In this chapter my main focus is on the latter, as the aim is to explore the ways in which mountain features are translated into tools of training, how nature is in effect mediated, embodied, or in Ingold’s terms enskilled, and then performed. Two brief examples of mountains as the context for training must therefore suffice: Korean p’ansori: and Grotowski’s Mountain Project in Poland. Hailing from very different cultural contexts, these two examples illustrate how the environment of mountains has been harnessed to advance the aims of the training.

Training in Mountain Contexts (P ’ansori and the Mountain Project) Reaching its height in the nineteenth century but still practiced today, p’ansori: is a traditional ‘vocal artform in which a single vocalist performing on a straw mat (p’an) tells a story using sung passages (ch’ang) and spoken passages (aniri) along with dramatic gesture (pallim)’ (McAllister-Viel, 2016, p.443). These stories are highly interactive and may go on for several hours so ‘vocal endurance’ is paramount (McAllister-Viel, 2016, p.443). According to practitioner and field

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researcher, Konstantinos Thomaidis this endurance was developed over a long period and the Korean mountain environment was central. Training started: at a very young age, usually under a relative. It then continued with long practice in the mountains in a period of ‘punishing efforts to acquire a “voice”. (Thomaidis, 2013, p.186)

This ‘long practice’, known as sangkongbu (mountain study/training) is valued today as much as it was in the height of p’ansori training and performance, with contemporary practitioners of the form describing the mountain context as an ‘eternal accomplice’ to the vocal work (Thomaidis, 2013, p.209). The reasons for conducting p’ansori training in the mountains are both cultural and pragmatic. Partly it was a legacy of previous generations of teachers celebrating sacred mountains in the region, singing and dancing and ‘praying for national peace and progress’ (Thomaidis, 2013, p.208); partly there was an immersive imperative for the trainees looking to escape the urban centres of Korea and to exploit the natural affordances offered by mountain environments themselves. ‘A mountain site’, Thomaidis observes, ‘offers unlimited resources of favourable acoustics’ (Thomaidis, 2013, p.208). These sites gave trainees the opportunity vocally to compete against mountain streams to develop strength and projection. They also provided a clean atmosphere, a source of unsullied oxygen, as well as imaginative inspiration. Jerzy Grotowski’s Mountain Project 8 contributed to a period from 1969 to 1978 known as ‘paratheatrical’ work or the Theatre of Participation (Slowiak and Cuesta, 2007, p.30). Devised to eliminate the divide between performer and spectator, paratheatrical projects ‘were structured events lasting for days and sometimes weeks, sometimes occurring in closely confined spaces, sometimes in the forest or mountains’ (Schechner and Wolford, 1997, p.174). Whilst Grotowski did not consider these events as vehicles for training, the participants (both actors and non-actors) nevertheless had transformative experiences, triggered by the specifics of the location chosen. For the Mountain Project (1976– 1977) as with the work in p’ansori, the practice exploited the seclusion of the mountains as a stimulus for self-reflection and de-habitualised creativity, a place ‘untouched by the patterns and rituals of our daily lives’

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in Jenny Kumiega’s account (Schechner and Wolford, 1997, p.245). Teetering between a vague mysticism and something more tangibly appropriative of the liminal space mountains occupy, Grotowski explains why mountains (or rather its archetype the Mountain) was chosen for his experiments: If there are places on earth where something beats like a pulse, or a heart, then one of these terrestrial pulse-spots would be the Mountain. The Mountain contains a sense of distance, but from which you return, the Mountain is a kind of test. You must remember in all this that we have in mind a real, existing Mountain and not some kind of image. (Kumiega, 1985, p.187)

There is an undoubted tension here between the capitalised ‘Mountain’ as metaphor, replete with a magical vitalism, and the mountain as an actual landform, with geographical coordinates, and an agreed elevation. Ironically, the ‘real, existing Mountain’ was in fact located in a ‘gently hilly area northwest of Wroclaw’ (Schechner and Wolford, 1997, p.243)—the city where Grotowski’s theatre and laboratory were originally based. There, a partly ruined castle was purloined by the company, which served as the location for the last phase of the Mountain Project , ‘Mountain Flame’ run by collaborator Jacek Zmyslowski.9 Accounts of the work remain elliptical and are, of course, only written by those implicated in the activity. But the main ‘work’ done in this context appears to have been either in interior rooms of the castle or when participants took themselves outside, heightening on return their perception of the ‘almost claustrophobic environment of the mountain’ (Kumiega, 1985, p.192). Activities inside ranged from running, dancing, drumming and contact improvisation, all loosely described as ‘dynamic physical action’ (Kumiega, 1985, p.192). On the outside activity Kumiega is unclear, beyond noting the sense of liberation from the intensity of the castle and the feeling of a ‘test, or initiation’ (Schechner and Wolford, 1997, p.245). Accounts of the first phase of the project (The Way) yield more detail about the use of the mountain environment and are sharply reminiscent of the ritual Shugendo pilgrimage discussed in Part 2.1. Physically demanding and undertaken irrespective of the weather, participants on The Way, like the yamabushi in Japan, skirted round the mountain, communing with the

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elements and spending up to two nights bound together making their way up to the mountain proper. Such exposure in Kumiega’s assessment ‘demands meditational concentration from every cell in the body’ (Kumiega, 1985, p.190). The mountain’s usefulness for Grotowski, then, was to do with its capacity to isolate the participants of the project, denude them of the usual forms of negotiation, and thus to shift their habitual patterns of behavior into a more revelatory and intuitive mode of engagement. As a project which sought quickly to return its participants, ritually transformed, back to everyday life, Grotowski and Zmyslovski’s Mountain Project could only work in relative isolation, but its exploitation of a moderately remote place, high up in the Polish hills, helped to spark an attitude of submission in its participants analogous to those who had experienced Grotowski’s earlier training based on the principle of via negativa or ‘process of elimination’ (Grotowski, 1969, p.101). In Mountain Project , the mountain was recruited as a location to ‘demask’ its inhabitants and to bind them together in a more direct and unmediated relationship, one which Jario Cuesta illuminatingly likens to a climbers’ pact: ‘when you are on an expedition in the forest or high in the mountains, you don’t need to be called. You are there when the others need you’ (Slowiak and Cuesta, 2007, p.114). There are of course many other examples of mountain contexts being used in performer training processes—from Nicolás Núñez’s Anthropocosmic theatre training (Núñez, 1996), and Wlodzimir Staniewski’s training for his company, Gardzienice (both influenced by Grotowski); to Sandra Reeve’s Environmental Movement (Reeve, 2000), and Min Tanaka’s Body Weather Farm based in the mountains around Hakushu in Japan (about which we will say more later). Common to them all is the attitude, that ‘the place functions as a teacher’ (Fuller, 2014, p.199) as Zac Fuller observes of Body Weather: a sense that the various characteristics of mountains—their remoteness and isolation from urban distractions, their climatic unpredictability, their diversity of texture and form—can serve a pedagogical function in the training of performers, even though it is likely they will exhibit the skills acquired away from the mountain and back in ‘civilisation’. It is the latter characteristic, mountain forms, to which I will now turn.

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Training with Mountain Forms (Jingju Training) Jingju, or Beijing Opera belongs to the ‘large family of xiqu’, or ‘theatre of sung verse’ (Li, 2012). Compared to some forms of xiqu, jingu is relatively young (hailing from the late eighteenth century) as opposed to kunju for instance which has its roots in the sixteenth century. Like its older sister, jingu is a highly stylised form of performance in which, in common with other Chinese aesthetic forms, metaphor and symbol predominate and ‘the word or object is used to stir a certain response or to evoke a mood’ (Li, 2012, p.6). Jingju training is long (6–10 years) and exacting and is split into basic techniques and training for specific role types such as painted-face and comic type. Practicing ‘Mountain arms’ is one of the basic techniques of this deep training, undertaken by all jingu trainees. These arms, held in front of the performer in a wide arc, are a metonym of the power and stability which must exude from a jingju performer, a container for their qi or presence as Chinese theatre specialist Jo Riley has highlighted (Riley, 1997, p.207). The arms as container work in tandem with the eyes as conduit for that energy—they are ‘the sprouts of the heart’ as fêted jingju performer and teacher, Li Yuru’s expresses it (Li, 2012, p.19) (Fig. 1). Ashley Thorpe, a western practitioner-academic schooled in jingju, explains both the etymology of the mountain arms exercise and its efficacy: My teachers suggested that Mountain Arms were so-called in reference to the Chinese character for mountain 山 (shan). The bottom line of the character was identified as the shoulders and arms, with the central axis symbolising the neck and head. The position is so integral to movement, and so symbolically indicative of strength on stage, that the arms outstretched needed to be strong enough to ‘hold a mountain’, indicated by the weight of the two outside lines in the written character.10

For Chinese critic, Ruru Li, mountain arms and their long and painful observance in the training, are part of the process of moving from a ‘personal body’ to an ‘art body’, developing core competencies such as balance and concentration and inculcating a belief in the trainee that their learning is lifelong and that their teacher is the primary source of that learning (Li, 2010, pp.72–75). The metaphor of the mountain works on both the performer and the audience, through the containment and radiation of energy, presence or qi. The performer figuratively wraps his arms

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Fig. 1 Shanbang (mountain arms). Examinations at the Indigenous Theatre College in Shanghai, June 2011 (Photo: Meng Chao by courtesy of Ruru Li)

around the mountainside, drawing inspiration from its mass and majesty; the spectator in turn feels the radiation of energy from the stage to the auditorium, a defining characteristic of the jingju experience (Riley, 1997, p.206). Given the significance of mountains in Chinese iconography, it is not surprising that they feature beyond the training in Beijing opera itself, in one of the most famous so-called ‘model operas’ of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): Taking Tiger Mountain with Strategy (1977). Model operas were designated by the Chinese Communist Party as aesthetic and literary exemplars of proletarian heroism on stage.11 They walked a line between appropriating and revising the conventions of jingju. In Tiger, one of nine operas with this state-imposed status, advanced jingju performers stylised the contemporary act of climbing in a scene where twelve soldiers ascend the mountain in heavy snow. As modern climbing apparatus and techniques—ropes and belays—were not part of a traditional jingju lexicon, the performers had to go beyond the usual vocabulary of the speech-song-dance and combat form. Fan Xing describes the fusion

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of traditional conventions (in italics) with the new innovations necessary for the mountain content: The stage is empty, the movement sequences are executed with musical accompaniment, and performers do not use any stage properties. The core of this section features two lead climbers. […] The actors lie on the ground with knees bent and weight on heels and upper backs; they move in the direction towards which their heads point, with their hands alternating in grasping [imaginary] ropes in the air. They then execute diejian [jumping and turning] and stand in gongjian bu [a large step to the right or left] alternating hands three times in grasping the ropes while climbing up, with right hands moving first. They turn around and stand straight, looking up, and climb up the ropes while their feet perform suibu [rapid small steps] […] After a small cuanbu, [a slight jump, leading with the left] the soldier on the right stops in the pose gongjian bu, the left soldier stands straight, and the two pose [to indicate a successful ascent]. (Fan, 2013, p.380)

Thus, the arduous training was put to the test in a spectacular demonstration of physical stylisation. Shorn of any props or realistic setting, these jingju performers are ‘writing the meaning’ (Fan, 2013, p.382) with their bodies, planting symbolic messages in the mind’s eye of their spectators. As part of a state-sanctioned model of exemplary communism, that message was clear: strength, comradeship and revolutionary zeal will triumph over the vestiges of a bourgeois class; the act of mountaineering, with partnership, bravery and endurance so intrinsic to the sport, was the perfect vehicle.12

Training with Mountain Forms (Jacques Lecoq) French practitioner and trainer, Jacques Lecoq, also looked to stylise the act of climbing, though to different ideological ends. Whilst Lecoq may be located in a broad lineage of French theatre activists from Jacques Copeau to Antonin Artaud, Simon Murray has argued that it is beyond the theatre that his ‘defining and abiding curiosity lay’, listing sporting activities and physiotherapy as anchors to his practice (Murray, 2003, p.41). Lecoq was a keen climber and alpinist himself and his series of movement exercises known as the Fundamental Journey, connected to neutral mask work, drew on the sense of awe and freedom he had experienced personally, climbing with his friend Gabriel Cousin.13 Lecoq’s background in outdoor pursuits informs directly his pedagogy, with the

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natural environment playing ‘a central part of the students’ work’ on the neutral mask (Evans and Kemp, 2016, p.106). This is no more evident than in the Fundamental Journey which shapes the outdoors as a rich environmental experience, formed in the imagination of the actor: This journey through nature involves walking, running, climbing and jumping. […]. After daybreak you emerge from the sea; in the distance you can see your forest and you set out towards it. You cross a sandy beach and then you enter the forest. You move through trees and vegetation which grow ever more densely as you search for a way out. Suddenly, without warning, you come out of the forest and find yourself facing a mountain. You ‘absorb’ the image of this mountain, then you begin to climb, from the first gentle slopes to the rocks and the vertical cliff face which tests your climbing skills. Once you reach the summit, a vast panorama opens up: a river runs through the valley and then there is a plain and finally, in the distance, a desert. You come down the mountain, cross the stream, walk through the plain, then into the desert, and finally the sun sets. (Lecoq, 2000, p.41)

In essence a kind of conceptual obstacle course (Evans and Kemp, 2016, p.106), the Fundamental Journey stylises an epic expedition into a series of tightly choreographed mimes, one for each of the environments described. It was ‘a major theme’ in Lecoq’s work and helped his students develop their capacities for ‘identification’ (Lecoq, 2000, p.41)— training a vivid connection between an actor and her partners, materials and spaces. A complex and multivalent example, the Fundamental Journey keys into several areas of training: it has poetic resonances with extant literature—Lecoq cites The Tempest and Dante’s Divine Comedy; it helps symbolise the actors’ emotional feelings and experiences, from adolescence to adult life; and it extends their imagination and physical vocabulary. The exercise originally had a section in the city but later this was removed as Lecoq considered it incompatible with the core function of exploring the elements of nature, a nature which was expressly unromanticised. In the second stage of the work on the Journey, for instance, the imagined environmental conditions are taken to the extreme: ‘the forest is on fire’ and ‘on the mountain, there is an earthquake followed by avalanches’ (Lecoq, 2000, p.42). These dynamic shifts in the environment extend the challenge of the work of the improvising actor. In their expression, they are redolent of Lecoq’s own experience of climbing: ‘enabling the body to go to the limits of its capabilities in an imagined

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state of urgency’ and eliciting ‘very difficult movements which they have never achieved in their own lives’ (Lecoq, 2000, p.42). Primarily the performers’ perspective is shifted from the observational and objective to the experiential and embodied: At the summit of the mountain I feel as though my feet are in the valley and I myself am the mountain. (Lecoq, 2000, p.41)

Such deep identification, phenomenological in spirit, echoes the perspective Nan Shepherd advocates in her seminal The Living Mountain, ‘ I have walked out of the body and into the mountain’, she says, ‘I am a manifestation of its total life’ (Shepherd, 2008, p.106), a point to which we will return in the next section. It begs the question: what does it mean to be a manifestation of the mountain? What are the benefits of appropriating— embodying is a better word—the formal characteristics of the mountain, a task as impossible to do as it easy to write? For Lecoq they are clearly to do with extending the actor’s imagination and physical expressiveness, a challenge not to turn one’s back on the impossible but to embrace it. But in one sense they are strangely analogous with the Chinese explorers in Tiger. The Fundamental Journey is essentially an exercise of expeditionary zeal. Despite the varied landscape, the actor-explorer is always moving forward, looking upward and onwards, undistracted by the minutiae at her feet and incapable of turning back.14 The gaze the exercise elicits is horizonal —as far as the eye can see—and although this future-focus prompts very different ideological associations for each theatre form, those scaling Tiger Mountain and those confronting Lecoq’s ‘vertical cliff face’ are embodying one constant of the mountain form: its elevation above the rest of the world.

The Artistry of the Training Wall Having dealt with the training of artistry through mountains I turn now to the artistry of mountain training, developing more explicitly the idea of landscape translation alluded to in the introduction. To what extent might the artistry of wall design and the creativity of the climber be foregrounded by considering climbing training as an aesthetic practice? I approach this question by juxtaposing walking artist and choreographer,

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Simone Kenyon’s piece, Into the Mountain (Solo), with a close reading of the Leeds Climbing Wall, a wall which after its destruction in 2006 has risen to ‘iconic’ status (White, 2013, p.9). Consider two encounters with a climbing wall, connected historically in unlikely ways but otherwise independent. One occurred at the University in Leeds, West Yorkshire in 2006; the other was prepared in the very same location but transferred to Glasgow, Scotland for its full premiere in 2017. Both actions were filmed for posterity’s sake producing the primary sources for this section (Horton, 2006; Kenyon, 2017).15 The first documents a low-level traverse on the Leeds Climbing Wall by Leeds climber, Dave Horton, days before the wall was demolished after 42 years of use (ironically enough—to make room for the performance studio which housed Kenyon’s work in progress); the second records a similar-length traverse but on a wall constructed for just a few days as part of Tramway’s DIG festival held in May 2017. One action restaged a training route known to generations of Yorkshire climbers; the other known only to the performer Kenyon and her creative team, was constructed as a performance for paying guests. For all the differences in purpose and context, there are some important commonalities here, ones which help draw out the question of artistry. They may be summarised under the following connected themes: (i) landscape translation; (ii) movement design; and (iii) embodied knowledge transmission.

Landscape Translation Kenyon’s aim in Into the Mountain (Solo) was to import her longstanding, embodied understanding of the Cairngorm range of mountains in Scotland, elicited from many field trips and training sessions with mountain guides, into a studio space. She sees place as something which ‘can seep into the bones [and] the muscle memory’,16 informing movement vocabulary in an organic and relational way: The constant reconfiguring of one’s understanding, of how to interact with and relate to environments, is a key factor in dance making, whether inside a studio, on a street corner or the side of a mountain. After all, we are always in relation to something or someone or somewhere.17

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This act of interpretive translation is fundamental to the Into the Mountain project as a whole which appropriates Nan Shepherd’s autobiographical novella of the same name both as a methodology and a primary source. Kenyon’s practice research questions what it means to go ‘into the mountain’. It interrogates how one’s individualised learning may be communicated to an audience in the radically different context of the theatre studio; in this aspect she is asking similar questions to David Shearing in Black Rock (see 2.3). Her process involved the manipulation of stones and rocks, rope use, movement improvisation and abstraction, as well as the literal construction of a climbing route on the walls of the studio (Fig. 2). Into the Mountain (Solo) drew consciously on her own training in Body Weather, a Butoh-related training, with its roots in Min Tanaka’s work in the mountain village of Hakushu near Tokyo from 1985. Body Weather training encourages sometimes extreme bodily connections with landscape, as Gretel Taylor observed in 1999: Min marched us up a very steep nearby mountain, asked us all to put on blindfolds, then left us without vision on the icy, rocky pinnacle for an hour, saying ‘Experience the sensations! (Taylor, 2010, p.75)

Fig. 2 Simone Kenyon, Into the Mountain (2017) (Photo by Heather Forknell)

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For Kenyon, Body Weather training was not just important for its exploration of the landscape–body interface but was also about the emphasis it placed on ‘buddying up’ in mutually critical partnerships. These pairings give the solo performer an external eye on her work, just as a belayer or bouldering partner might help a climber see a route or problem at-adistance from the rock itself.18 The complex act of translating specialist, tacit knowledges of climbing, into the technology of a wall, was similarly part of Leeds Climbing Wall’s designer, Don Robinson’s, objective. Robinson (who went on to form a global reputation for building walls with his company DR Climbing Walls) was the first to embed a climbing intelligence into a wall. He did this through the selection and arrangement of the wall’s contact points, which at the time were stones cemented permanently into the wall (Fig. 3). Robinson’s act of translation was both material and conceptual: he plucked stones from the local Wharfedale river course which were of the same geological make-up as some of the most challenging rock formations in the region and he organised them based on a knowledge of the climbing techniques needed to solve typical problems on the rockface, some garnered directly from climbers on crags behind his house: I used to go to the river [to collect stones], down here in fact because it’s all sandstone and millstone grit, around here, which is very coarse, millstone grit, it’s like Almscliffe19 is made of […] Then I’d cement those in the wall so there was just half of them sticking out so that became a friction hold - there’s nothing positive to get a hold on. So that was

Fig. 3 Details of stones from the original Leeds Climbing Wall

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something that you had to learn to do really, trying to get your hand to stick on that.20

Once the materials were selected, it was their arrangement which mattered, again determined by the need to recreate the problems of the rockface outside in microcosm on the wall inside. ‘The whole wall was built with this sort of concept’, Robinson argued, ‘I used to go around and collect pieces of rock that had some particular quality that I wanted to kind of reproduce, you know’.21 That ‘quality’ as Robinson puts it was not just about the texture of the stones—it was also, in his words, to do with ‘the combination of them, the distance between them and their location’.22 His act of translation, then, is predicated upon his knowledge of vernacular materials, their positioning and their precisely calculated spacing.

Movement Design Such careful design of the vertical landscape in turn demanded very specific movement choices for the climbers on the wall, ones which Robinson had conceived in advance. In a very real sense his design used the wall as choreographer determining the physical language of its devotees and constituting what he called a ‘teaching machine’ of permanently fixed rocks.23 What became known as ‘The Balance Move’ captures this idea most clearly (Fig. 4): I put two bricks on the ground next to the wall and so you had to flatten yourself against the wall, like this, cheek against the wall, flat as you could possibly get […]. If it’s six and a half inches it’s not too difficult, right, if it’s five and a half inches it’s almost impossible. Six inches, I was amazed, six inches is the absolute critical [point] for the majority of people […]

This criticality was measured by Robinson in terms of the movement initiated in the climber’s bodies: So the Balance Move […] you have to flatten yourself against the wall, right, and then you have to lift the other leg, your left leg and it’s got to go higher up, it’s a step-up and then you have to transfer your weight enough for it by keeping yourself completely flat and sliding across the face of the brick wall […]. You know, it was very, very difficult. If you just pull your head back slightly you took your hand off the wall you’d fall off.24

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Fig. 4 The positioning of stones for the Balance Move

This Balance Move was the most popular of all of the innovations on the wall. It took the specifics of a problem experienced from a nearby Ilkley quarry, well liked by climbers, and translated it into a meticulously thought out rock combination at the Leeds wall. Such was the impact of Robinson’s design it was branded into climbers’ embodied memories for decades. For Mick Ward, author of ‘How the Leeds Wall Changed Climbing History’ (2018) this was a measure of Robinson’s genius: Unlike modern walls where you can relatively easily re-set (and fine-tune) routes/problems, Robinson’s creation was literally set in stone. It had to be right first time. And it was. One instance of Robinson’s finesse was the trio of ‘stepping stones’ at the right-hand end of the wall. They gave the most exquisite balance moves imaginable. If those stones had stuck out just a little more, the moves would have been pointlessly easy; if they’d stuck out just a little less, the moves would have been downright impossible. Robinson worked with tight tolerances, with a technology which had to be right first time and created a charming sequence which I recall with affection nearly fifty years later.25

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To call this process of movement design ‘choreography’ is not, I would argue, stretching things too far. Robinson’s ‘charming sequence’ of moves is conceived in similar terms by others in the community of elite climbers, including ‘the Nijinsky of the rock climbing world’ (Perrin, 1990) himself: Johnny Dawes (see 2.3). Climber and travel writer, Jim Perrin had asked Dawes in an interview whether in the deep mutuality he established with a rock face, particularly that of Clogwyn Du’r Arddu in Snowdonia, the ‘rock’s the choreographer?’ Dawes responded: It is the feeling that sometimes I’m completely in sync with what the rock can do, that it’s almost as if it’s asking something of you […] Some geological quirk has made it into a piece of music, which when you listen to it, makes you dance. (Perrin, 1990, p.71)

Dawes was often critical of walls and was notorious for shirking training opportunities benefiting as he did from extraordinary natural strength and ability. But he recognised how Robinson had expressed a type of artistry in the Leeds Climbing Wall, capturing an enduring sense of ‘exquisite’ movement drawn from his deep experience of rock and its influence on behaviour.26

Embodied Knowledge Transmission Effectively the Leeds Climbing Wall example involves a threestage process of transmission: (i) the embodied knowledge of the climber/designer/teacher, (ii) translated into the materials of the wall, which is then (iii) re-embodied by the trainee on the wall. There are distinct echoes of other training processes here, ones which I have analysed elsewhere through ideas of vertical and cultural transmission (Pitches, 2012; Pitches and Aquilina, 2017). Cultural transmission, defined by psychologist Ute Schönpflug as the non-genetic process of learning through ‘imprinting, conditioning, observation, or as result of direct teaching’ (Schönpflug, 2009, p.24), helps bring clarity to some of the models of learning encountered above—the long-form training of jingju performers, for instance. But it offers an incomplete model of what is happening here. Skills are clearly being translated non-genetically but the ‘imprinting’ is happening through the agency of the wall; it is a mediated training model not a direct one. The mediation, though, is of a different

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kind from film—or book-based training as Robinson’s writing, is—well— on the wall. As such, even though he is absent from the teaching space, his control of his trainees’ embodiment is high and the opportunities for them to circumvent his embedded pedagogy are low—they simply fall off until they get it right.27 Mediated training is common in performer training contexts—masks, sticks, costumes, wearable technology, all provide an affordance (the term is J. J. Gibson’s), that is: something that ‘provides or furnishes either for good or ill’ (Gibson, 1986, p.127, emphasis in original). These devices are ‘detached objects’ in Gibson’s taxonomy, which ‘afford manipulation’ and produce ‘an astonishing variety of behaviors’ (Gibson, 1986, p.133). Importantly these affordances are Gibson’s neologism for a two-way dialogue—what he calls ‘the complementarity of the animal and the environment’—and as such each affordance can only be measured ‘relative to the animal ’ (Gibson, 1986, p.127, emphasis in original) In performer training this relativity is tangible: just as a stick is being manipulated in a training regime, such as Meyerhold’s biomechanics, so it is manipulating its user—to find balance, gestural precision, body posture.28 In Robinson’s wall design it is more nuanced. Ostensibly the wall is king, and the affordance is all in the teacher-designer’s hands, but once the climber reaches a level of expertise, it becomes possible to creatively subvert (or add to) the movement mandates inscribed in the wall. Viewing the transmission process involved in the climbing wall in parallel to Simone Kenyon’s piece is again enlightening, even if the two processes have different aims—Kenyon’s wall design was chiefly only for her and the problems inscribed in the route, though real, were ultimately viewed as spectatorial stimuli rather than for training purposes. Interestingly she called on the creative team to test out the route, many of whom had climbing experience and this, in true Body Weather style, helped her see the movement expressions provoked by the wall from an outside eye.29 Kenyon, like Robinson, is analysing her own tacit knowledge of climbing, gained from time spent exploring the Cairngorms, and abstracting it into a traverse route arranged on a vertical plane. She then re-embodies that knowledge in the moment of performance triggered by the demands of the wall. In her own words: ‘I was thinking about it more choreographically rather than thinking about it as a technical problem’, paying conscious attention to movement dynamics, the quality of reaching and how and when the weight goes into the legs.30

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Robinson’s intentions are uncannily similar; even though he would not consider the end point of his ‘teaching machine’ to be the expression of an artist, there are many in the climbing world who dispute that, at least for those who reached elite status on his wall, most notably John Syrett.31 Ultimately it is the practice of creative construction which underpins both examples, one which has a dramaturgy of its own built in: both Robinson and Kenyon built progression and increasing difficulty into their respective walls in order to install a sense of danger, exhilaration and uncertainty. Despite Robinson’s best efforts, trainees got so good they began to do things he never dreamed of, setting up new routes using just the mortar lines in the wall, diverting away from the stones he had set in the bricks. They even developed a subversive practice of ‘chair improvisation’, as Robinson recounted: They started inventing all kinds of crazy things […] You know these metal tubular chairs with plywood seats and kind of slightly bendy, they’re stackable. Well there used to be a lot of them around, so the climbers here took one. The challenge is you climb up the wall with one of these chairs and you hook it on this big sticking out hold, with a spike, and then you sit on the chair. God Almighty, you know, but they did it.32

Such subversion of the designer’s original intentions seems perfectly in keeping with the idea of training as aesthetic practice: the best art is never predictable, after all. It suggests that the elite climbers amongst the Leeds wall disciples were, like the jingju experts working on Tiger Mountain, extending the practice of their teachers, radically interpreting their pedagogy and in doing so creating new art forms. The spectacle of John Syrett perched surrealistically on a chair halfway up a wall may not have drawn a massive audience at the time, but in some ways it sowed the seeds for the revisioning of the climbing-wall-as-stage with which we began this chapter.

Conclusion By focusing on the climbing wall in training and performance, this chapter has examined the historical foundations for a conception of climbing training as a more complex, sophisticated and ultimately artistic practice than the pragmatics of the word training evoke, one which shares with performance the need for invention, improvisation, choreographic

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precision and dramatic possibility. At the same time the wide use of mountain forms and contexts in performer training, historically and today, suggest there is a genuine two-way conversation between the disciplines—as far as their associated pedagogies go, at least. The antics on Robinson’s wall evidence that from the very beginnings of intelligently designed walls, there was a spirit of creativity and subversion in the climbing community which pushed the boundaries of the sport just as clearly as the trainees of theatre pushed their own limits in the studio. That spirit has burgeoned over the years since the 1970s, to the extent that climbing today has numerous examples of creative training paradigms, ones which recognisably express an impish artistry along the lines established in this chapter. Social media provides a potent platform for these inventors, ensuring that, unlike Syrett their innovations are highly visible: Magnus Midtbø (with 373,000 YouTube subscribers) and Udo Neumann’s German Climbing Team video (with 1.8 M hits on the same platform) are two examples.33 Both practitioner-teachers are clearly, probably unknowingly, part of a tradition of playful improvisation on the climbing wall, which Robinson first witnessed four decades ago. Midtbø, for example,34 demonstrates the training possibilities afforded by a chair, rotating under it and back to sitting, with all the dexterity a performer in the UK dance-theatre company Frantic Assembly might exhibit (Graham and Hoggett, 2014). Neumann, similarly, appropriates found domestic objects for unlikely purposes, hanging boards of plywood from the bouldering studio ceiling to challenge his young apprentices to find new physical improvisations, which conventional activity on the wall might suppress. If training as Maria Kapsali argues is ‘contingent and situated’ (Kapsali, 2014, p.103), what do these new performative contexts for climbing training tell us about the state of the sport and more generally about attitudes to mountains? This is a question which will intensify through this third section of the book as the languages of theatre are mobilised systematically to unveil different aspects of mountain culture. For the time being, one thing is clear from the detailed aesthetic reading of the climbing wall: artistry breeds artistry in the domain of training. A Korean singer wrestles out of the arms of his teacher to master the art of p’ansori, a jingju performer takes on a hundred years of codified dance-acting to produce a new movement language. And a truly original teacher, designer of the first intelligent climbing wall in the world, pushes his pupils into expressions of performance he or they could barely have imagined (Fig. 5).

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Fig. 5 Maquette of a climbing-wall project, designed by Don Robinson (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

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Notes 1. https://www.ifsc-climbing.org/index.php/world-competition/speedworld-record-overview. 2. Beijing had television audiences of 3.55 billion, London, 3.64 and Rio, 3.2 (Source: statista.com). The contentiousness of the Olympic decision is in the combination of very different climbing skills in the one medal award, rather like merging the 100 metres with the 1500 metres in running. For one opinion, cf. climber Adam Ondra: https://www.epictv. com/media/podcast/adam-ondra-offers-his-opinion-about-climbing-inthe-olympic-games/604973. 3. “‘We want to take sport to the youth,” said IOC President Thomas Bach. “With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them”’. Cf. climbing.com: https://www.climbing.com/news/climbing-officiallyapproved-for-2020-olympics/. 4. The piece here, designated as (Solo) is part 1 of a series of investigations of Shepherd’s work by Kenyon, all of which have the title Into the Mountain. This stage piece is not to be confused with the walking performance made in 2019, with the same name (http://www.intothemountain.co.uk/ about/). 5. Whilst the term used here is mountain training, to imply that there is a real mountainous landscape out there which was the originary of the climbing wall, the indoor training wall is much more relevant for rock climbing than for expedition-style mountaineering, if indeed its practitioners ever venture out of the indoors. 6. See sections 2.1 on Shugendo and 2.2 on Kudiyattam for instances of mountain training practices merging into performance. 7. For mountain training literature of the period, cf. Dent’s Mountaineering (Dent, 1892), Abraham’s The Complete Mountaineer (Abraham, 1907), Winthrop Young’s Mountain Craft (Young, 1920) Raeburn’s Mountaineering Art (Raeburn, 1920). For literature on the early development of actor training institutionally, cf. Archer and Barker’s A National Theatre (Barker and Archer, 1907), Copeau’s Towards a New Conception of Theatrical Interpretation (Copeau, 2015), Stanislavski’s My Life in Art (1924/2008). 8. http://www.grotowski.net/en/encyclopedia/mountain-project. 9. ‘The Mountain Project consisted of three parts: Night Vigil, The Way, and the Mountain of Flame’ (Slowiak and Cuesta, 2007, p.114). 10. Email conversation with Ashley Thorpe, 28 July 2017. 11. Xing Fan outlines the core plotline of all the model operas: ‘A principal hero or heroine, a mature CCP member of, impeccable proletarian class background, undertakes some long journey or task during which he or she

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

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overcomes insurmountable obstacles, struggles with enemies and traitors, and solves challenging problems, in order to fulfill the mission he or she has been assigned by the CCP’ (Fan, 2013, pp.364–365). See also the anonymous account of the picture book of Tiger, with images reprinted in TDR (n.a., 1971). I am indebted to Lecoq expert, Professor Mark Evans for providing this detail. I was helped to an understanding of these ideas by Harri Pitches, training in Lecoq at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I am indebted to William Patterson of the University of Leeds for making the film of the climbing wall available to me and for brokering contact with Don Robinson. I am equally grateful to Simone Kenyon for sharing her documentation with me. http://southeastdance.org.uk/blog/striding-out-of-the-body-and-intothe-mountain/. http://southeastdance.org.uk/blog/striding-out-of-the-body-and-intothe-mountain/. Interview with the author, 21 August 2017. Almscliffe crag, visible from Robinson’s front room near Otley in Yorkshire, is a millstone grit outcrop, rumoured to be the ‘best gritstone crag in Yorkshire’ with a hundred and fifty-year old history of climbing. https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/destinations/destination_guide_ almscliff_yorkshire-4715. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. ‘That was the fundamental thing in my climbing wall, initially was, the concept to make it like a teaching machine. So if people climbed on it and did the right thing, they would, by trial and error would learn to climb’. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/how_the_leeds_wall_ changed_climbing_history-10122. These views were expressed by Dawes in the very studio which ‘replaced’ the Leeds Climbing Wall at the University of Leeds, as part of the inaugural Mountainsides symposium held at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (6 April 2016). On a modern climbing wall this level of control is arguably less explicit, particularly as novice climbers or those of different heights are forced to find other ways round the problem. Many thanks to Campbell Edinborough for his contributions on this subject. I am indebted to Dr. Maria Kapsali for stimulating this area of my thinking on biomechanics and for introducing me to Gibson in her own writing.

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29. Interview with the author, 21 August 2017. 30. Interview with the author, 21 August 2017. 31. John Syrett was a Yorkshire-based climber who died on Malham cove in 2006. According to the Mountain Heritage Trust biography: ‘He is widely credited with being one of the pioneers of intensive systematic climbing wall training as an athletic aid to improving rock climbing standards. When he arrived at Leeds University in 1968 he had scarcely climbed before but, for some mysterious reason, felt drawn to the then state of the art “mountaineering wall” at the university (basically a slightly adapted brick wall). In an uncannily prescient manner, he anticipated the obsessive training addicts of today by a couple of decades, spending 12 months assiduously training indoors, and becoming a master brickwork gymnast’. https:// www.mountain-heritage.org/entity.php?ID=204. 32. Interview with the author, 11 November 2016. 33. See https://www.youtube.com/user/magmidt88/about for Midtbø’s channel and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bHF5Yfu_jQ for Neumann’s work with the German Climbing Team at the futuristic Stuntwerk bouldering gym in Cologne. Thanks to climber-theatre scholar Campbell Edinborough for bringing these to my attention after reading a draft of this chapter. 34. Cf. the ‘Table Challenge’ video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= hJtz8kwwOK8&t=350s.

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Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2014) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Grotowski, J. (1969) Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuen and Co Ltd. Horton, D. (2006) University of Leeds Climbing Wall. England. Ingold, T. and Gibson, K.R. (eds.) (1993) Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kapsali, M. (2014) Editorial. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 5 (2), pp. 103–106. Kenyon, S. (2017) Into the Mountain. England. Kumiega, J. (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski. London: Methuen. Lecoq, J. (2000) The Moving Body. London: Methuen. Li, R. (2010) The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in a Changing World. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Li, R. (2012) Singing, Speaking, Dance-Acting, and Combat; Mouth, Hands, Eyes, Body, and Steps-From Training to Performance in Beijing Opera (Jingju). Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 3 (1), pp. 4–26. https:// doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2011.646293. McAllister-Viel, T. (2016) The Role of “Presence” in Training Actors’ Voices. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. Routledge, 7 (3), pp. 438–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2016.1217265. McNee, A. (2016) The New Mountaineer in Late Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, S. (2003) Jacques Lecoq. London: Routledge. n.a. (1971) Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Drawing Heroes. TDR: The Drama Review, 15 (2), pp. 268–270. Núñez, N. (1996) Anthropocosmic Theatre: Rite in the Dynamics of Theatre. London: Harwood Academic Press. Nydal, A. (2018) A Difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain Climbing 1871– present. In Kakalis, C. and Goetsch, E. (eds.) Mountains, Mobilities and Movement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 155–170. Perrin, J. (1990) Yes to Dance: Essays from Outside the Stockade. Oxford: Oxford Illustrated Press. Pitches, J. (2006) Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203391204. Pitches, J. (2012) Russians in Britain: British Theatre and the Russian Tradition of Actor Training, Russians in Britain: British Theatre and the Russian Tradition of Actor Training. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203146590. Pitches, J. and Aquilina, S. (eds.) (2017) Stanislavsky in the World: The System and Its Transformations Across Continents. London: Bloomsbury. Raeburn, H. (1920) Mountaineering Art. London: Unwin. Reeve, S. (2000) The Next Step: Eco-Somatics and Performance. In The Changing Body Symposium, University of Exeter, pp. 1–20.

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Riley, J. (1997) Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schechner, R. and Wolford, L. (eds.) (1997) The Grotowski Source Book. London: Routledge. Schönpflug, U. (2009) Cultural Transmission: Psychological, Developmental, Social, and Methodological Aspects. Edited by U. Schönpflug. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shepherd, N. (2008) The Living Mountain. Edinburgh: Canongate. Shepherd, S. (2009) The Institution of Training. Performance Research, 14 (2), pp. 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528160903319190. Slowiak, J. and Cuesta, J. (2007) Jerzy Grotowski. Abingdon: Routledge. Stanislavski, K. (2008) My Life in Art. Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, G. (2010) Empty? A Critique of the Notion of “Emptiness” in Butoh and Body Weather Training. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 1 (1), pp. 72–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443920903478505. Thomaidis, K. (2013) The Grain of a Vocal Genre: A Comparative Approach to the Singing Pedagogies of EVDC Integrative Performance Practice, Korean Pansori, and the Polish Centre for Theatre Practices ‘Gardzienice’. Royal Holloway College, University of London. White, J. (2013) The Indoor Climbing Manual. London: Bloomsbury. Young, G.W. (1920) Mountain Craft. London: Methuen and Co Ltd.

Part 3.2 Skywalk Scenography: Stage-Managing Fear and Delight in Mountain Environments

Introduction Mountains have long been treated as art objects, conceptualised and aestheticised, or as cultural geographer Veronica della Dora puts it in her book, Mountain: ‘turned into a work of craft—by human imagination’ (della Dora, 2016, p.193). In Western traditions this is a result of a ‘twocentury-long process’, she argues, but has a far longer history in Islamic, Korean and Chinese traditions, going back at least to the medieval period (della Dora, 2016, p.193). This phenomenon is clearly perceptible in the fine arts, most obviously in landscape painting, and reaches a height (of sorts) in the European romantic period, led initially by Welsh painter Richard Wilson, and then by figures such as John Ruskin, J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries mountains have witnessed a shift, della Dora argues, from being conceptualised as objects to becoming commodities, and, in the same way as museums have moved from displaying objects to constructing experiences, so too has the aestheticising of mountains moved into the experiential realm (della Dora, 2016, p.210). Her discussion focuses on mountain heritage and, as an example of this shift, she references the five Messner Mountain Museums with their ‘carefully staged openings’ and ‘spectacular panoramic deck[s]’ perched on the top of the mountain (della Dora, 2016, p.210).1 These are dramatic architectural interventions in remote mountain locations, designed as much to augment a visitor’s feeling of the surroundings as to curate the region’s material heritage (Fig. 1). © The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_11

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Fig. 1 Reinhold Messner mountain museum, dolomites (Photo by Katus84. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MuseoNelleNuvole01.jpg# /media/File:MuseoNelleNuvole01.jpg)

There is no doubting that museums have undergone a performative ‘turn’ and this has been expressed directly in the field of heritage studies including Jackson and Kidd’s influential Performance, Learning and Heritage Project (2005–2008)2 and Helen Rees Leahy’s associated assessment that ‘the visiting of museums and heritage sites has itself been increasingly recognised as a performative bodily practice’ (Jackson and Kidd, 2011, p.5). But I would like to argue in this chapter that a more direct way to get to an understanding of the experiential in mountain architecture is not through the discipline of heritage studies but through the lens of scenography—or what has recently been called ‘expanded scenography’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013; McKinney and Palmer, 2017), in conjunction with new theories of dramaturgy (Turner, 2010; Turner and Behrndt, 2016) and of architecture as performance or event (Tschumi, 2000; Kahn and Hannah, 2008). Indeed, one might say that all three

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disciplines (scenography, dramaturgy and architecture) have ‘expanded’ their purview in the last decade,3 with the common thread being a focus on the spectator as co-producer in an experiential relationship under a designed set of conditions. ‘Scenography creates a space for an experience’ as the Cheek by Jowl artists, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod succinctly declared in an interview with scenographer Pamela Howard (Howard, 2009, p.xviii). Interrogating that dynamic—of spectator, space and experience—is central to my purpose in this section, focusing on the rapidly developing trend of the mountain skywalk. To understand better this postmodern manifestation of what Rebecca Solnit has identified as ‘Pedestrian Architecture’ (Solnit, 2001, p.14),4 I first construct a history of skywalks, suggesting some twentieth century origins to this predominantly twenty-first-century development; secondly, I propose a model of designed exposure within which skywalks can be located; thirdly, I briefly establish a working definition of skywalk scenography, drawing on the theoretical territory identified above and responding to Gough and Lotker’s provocation in ‘On Scenography’ (2013) that: ‘notions of expanded scenography’ might include ‘a public square, a theatre venue, a parliamentary building and Everest’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013, p.3). Finally, I look in detail at one example of a skywalk built in the last decade: the ‘Walk of Faith’ on Tianmen Mountain, South East China, using TripAdvisor testimony as a key source, the largest repository of experiences in the world. A series of associated questions flow from these aims: what are the historical precedents of construction-based interventions into the mountainscape? Where do skywalks fit within the wider context of mountain constructions? How might a scenographic lens draw out aspects of landscape performativity that would otherwise remain dormant? What behaviours do such environments produce? And what are the surrounding technologies used to facilitate this heightening of experience—social media and wearable technology for instance?

Skywalks and TripAdvisor The neologism ‘skywalk’ is being put to use in multiple contexts around the world today to describe (or perhaps more accurately brand) a particular kind of experiential architecture—one which has as much affinity with the theme park ride as it has with conventional high-rise architecture. Skywalks now exist in many of the world’s major urban centres—in

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Boston, Auckland, Sydney, Toronto, Calgary, Tokyo and Shanghai, for example—and have spread across tourist locations in rural and remote spaces in recent years. Since 2007 the most prominent of these had been the Grand Canyon skywalk, stretching 21 metres out from the canyon’s edge, and taking four years and $30 million to complete.5 But in 2015, this architectural feat was surpassed with the opening of Yuanduan (At the End of the Clouds ), the ‘world’s longest glass-bottomed cantilevered skywalk’ in Chonqing, China—a calculated 5 metres longer than the Arizona skywalk and costing only $5.6 M.6 Just two years later, in the ongoing architectural arms race of skywalk development, a new skywalk was constructed, also in Chonqing, in the Wansheng Ordovician Theme Park.7 This A-shaped bridge—perhaps better described as an enormous balcony—extends out 80 metres, dwarfing previous levels of exposure by a factor of four. In addition to this most recent construction, skywalks have been constructed in a range of mountain environments: the Austrian Alps (in Dachstein), in the French Alps (Chamonix), in the Canadian Rockies (Jasper National Park), and in the Hunan province of China—the so called Brave Men’s Bridge or Haohan Qiao. Skywalks are clearly a growth industry and they are playing an increasingly influential role in visitors’ interactions with some of the most popular and iconic mountain ranges in the world (Fig. 2).8 From a business perspective, the thinking behind these developments seems obvious: to enhance the one-off ‘eventness’ of the visitor experience; to draw attention away from neighbouring attractions encouraging visitors to choose the skywalk above its rivals; and, crucially, to encourage the sharing of that choice on social media, principally Facebook and TripAdvisor. As tourist researchers Okazaki et al. point out:

Fig. 2 Jasper’s skywalk in the Canadian rockies (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

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Social media offering stimulating platforms for travel communities are quickly becoming a vital prerequisite for the feasibility of online travel businesses, since more and more tourists use such communities as travel references. (Okazaki, Andreu and Campo, 2017, p.108)

The largest online travel review site in the world, TripAdvisor, is dominant in this market of experience distribution, or ‘knowledge sharing’— defined as ‘a travel member’s willingness to share their expertise or experiences with other members’ (Okazaki, Andreu and Campo, 2017, p.110). TripAdvisor is a very useful site for this chapter’s focus on skywalk experiences, partly as the site generates wish lists of visitor experiences based on popularity indices—for example in the posting ‘8 heart-pumping skywalks’9 —and partly as the site acts as a repository of reviews by visitors, harvestable from the comment threads. Whilst this kind of data is complex and contextual, comment threads do offer a valuable window onto the relationship between mountain architecture and the felt experience, the kind of relationship Cathy Turner identifies in her expanded view of dramaturgy: We might argue that the term dramaturgy can be used to suggest an understanding of architecture that includes time-based, narrative and lived elements within it, the unfolding processes implicit, latent, resistant or simply possible within its structures. (Turner, 2010, p.152)

When Is a Skywalk Not a Skywalk? Before drawing out some of the ‘implicit’ and ‘latent’ processes at work in the architecture of the skywalk, it is necessary to address some difficulties of nomenclature. First is the scope of the term, skywalk, itself. The, ‘8 heart-pumping skywalks’ posting exemplifies some of the problems here. There are several kinds of skywalk listed on this page—from the urban glass platform located on one of the high levels of a city-based building in Chicago, through the clip-and-climb experience on the roof of the CN tower in Toronto, to the genuinely terrifying and reportedly often fatal ‘plank walk’ on Hua Shan (Flower Mountain) in West China; city experiences constructed by global corporations and tourist organisations are merged with ancient mountain trails, which have their roots in the Taoist cultural traditions of priests and hermits (Bernbaum, 1997, p.30). The Grand Canyon and Dachstein skywalks are in a different category again,

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as both are new pieces of architecture, like Messner’s Mountain Museums, designed to enhance the experience of the remote environment in particular ways. Distant cousins of skywalks, and a possible inspiration for them, is the skyway. Most notably developed in Minneapolis and Calgary in the 1960s and 1970s, skyways established utilitarian links between buildings, eliminating the need for passengers to descend and re-ascend and encouraging pedestrian and climate-controlled engagement with the city. They helped establish a safe network of covered walking routes across the city and in some cases were not architecturally dissimilar from the mountain skywalks identified above, despite their radically different surroundings. Skyways share with skywalks the use of building-based technology to facilitate travel in high spaces but they differ in their focus on pragmatic access to urban locations (at least in their original conception) rather than recreational access to remote spaces. To sum up, there are several defining characteristics to the mountain skywalk (a subset of the more general use of the term skywalk) and these should help uncover some of their historical roots. Firstly, they are technological interventions into remote spaces, using materials often alien to the environment itself; secondly, they are situated in locations that inspire appreciation and respect; thirdly, they seek to facilitate access to spaces which would otherwise be inaccessible for anyone other than skilled technicians of the mountainside, levelling the playing field of vertiginous experience; fourthly they combine horizontal and pedestrian motion forward with a heightened sense of verticality and gravity, a characteristic evident in the clichéd names given to many of the constructions: ‘step into the void’, ‘walk of faith’, ‘at the end of the clouds’. With these characteristics in mind, we can eradicate some other possibilities from this short history of skywalks—the classic ridge route or high pass for instance: Crib Goch in Snowdonia, Wales, Striding Edge in Cumbria, England or the ultimate in high traverses, the Black Cuillin ridge on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Although these natural features and arêtes clearly accentuate the sense of gravity, leading the climber on a highly prescribed journey forward, no alien technologies are being utilised to facilitate access or to temper the danger other than those carried or worn by the walkers themselves: ropes, boots, harnesses, karabiners, pitons, etc. There are no permanent signs of human intervention into these sites beyond the clear and lasting marks etched into the ground by decades of human hands and feet, scars in the landscape made by people drawn

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to the feature by its notoriety, its beauty, its status amongst friends or its topographical cachet. Whilst these marks remain unadorned with technological additions, they cannot be considered part of a skywalk history unless and until such natural markings are supported by material interventions—until the wearable technology of climbers, for instance, designed to alleviate risk, migrates from the body to the landscape itself. When this happens, when the climbing aid lashed to the belt is transferred to one embedded in the rock, the fundamentals of a mountain skywalk are in place. Two rudimentary manifestations of this act of technological intervention are bolted routes and via ferrata (literally meaning ‘iron way’). Ebert and Robertson explain the former: Bolting is the practice of drilling into the climbing medium permanent metal rungs, which climbers then use to aid and protect their ascent… Bolted climbing is one form of ‘Sport climbing’; this being any form of climbing deploying fixed protection. (Ebert and Robertson, 2007, p.56– 57)

Viewed with real suspicion and sometimes outright contempt by traditional climbers in the UK, bolting (or aid climbing), leaves permanent fixed routes inscribed in the mountainscape, allowing for safer, faster and potentially more technically demanding sport climbing. It began in the 1950s with the development of new climbing equipment allowing climbers, such as the famous ‘big wall’ athletes in Yosemite, to ‘climb from one point to another with occasional help from small ladders’ (Seifert, Wolf and Schweizer, 2017, p.8). This kind of activity is distinct from the architectural mega-projects alluded to above and the emphasis is clearly on vertical rather than horizontal progress. But both bolted climbing and Skywalks include landscape-changing human intervention designed to reduce risk and to extend access—and both divide opinion on the extent to which mountain environments should be redesigned or left unscathed. The same is true for via ferrata or in German Klettersteig (climbing path). Originally constructed to aid military activities in the Italian dolomites during the two world wars, via ferrata have now spread across Europe and North America. As Alun Richardson explains: They break just about every rule of aesthetic mountaineering, but they provide an opportunity to move through spectacular and often extremely exposed Alpine scenery with minimal equipment. They are popular all over

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Europe, and vary from a few cables to help walkers ascend a steep section of rock, to complete walkways and ladders. (Richardson, 2008, p. 114)

Via ferrata share with bolted climbing routes, the practice of drilling into the rock to create connected points for climbing and they are similarly graded for difficulty. But generally speaking, they demand much less from their participants in terms of skill and use of technical equipment. As such, they are one step closer to the characteristics of the skywalk as I have described above: they widen access to areas of natural isolation through permanent redesign of the landscape. The via ferrata in Cumbria on Fleetwith Pike is a good example of this democratising principle, as its website testifies: Honister’s Via Ferrata allows the average person on the street the opportunity to go higher and further from the street than they ever imagined possible. These climbing/walking experiences are hugely popular in the Italian Dolomites and across Europe, but this is a first in the UK. The good thing is it’s all perfectly safe and you don’t have to be a trained mountaineer to do it.10

A Model of Mountain Design and Exposure Via ferrata come in all shapes and sizes and levels of difficulty so generalisations are difficult. Even so, placed on a continuum of risk versus security, they serve as a linking point between aided or sport climbing and some of the elaborate newly built skywalks such as the Arizona Skywalk. One dimension is not enough to explain the full extent of this phenomenon, however. In his ‘Cultural History of Mountaineering and Climbing’ sports sociologist Olivier Hoibian proposes not one but two continua, arranging them in a cruciform model of what he calls the ‘social field of outdoor activities’ (Hoibian, 2017, p.14). His analysis is based on two fundamental tensions in climbing: intensity versus moderation and the untamed versus secure environment. He places via ferrata in the bottom right quadrant (the ‘hedonist’ category): an activity for those seeking leisure, recreation and fun in a secure and safe environment (Hoibian, 2017, p.14).11 But even though his category analysis includes the ‘secure and safe environment’ he stops short of identifying mountain activities in environments such as the ones discussed above—mountain museums

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and skywalks. Appropriating Hoibian’s cruciform approach but with different categories helps explain the core relationships at work in skywalk scenography—those between materials and design on the one hand (technological intervention) and the experience of fear (exposure) on the other (Fig. 3). Whilst there are necessary generalisations at work here—and all of these categories would have exceptions to this organisational principle, where, for instance, an aided (or bolted) route is less exposed than a via ferrata course—this taxonomy does offer a possible route into explaining the surge in popularity of ‘experience-driven architecture’. Balanced on the dividing line, skywalks offer a taste of the climber’s lifeblood—risk and exposure—without any of the deadly realities associated with these phenomena; the danger is obliquely ‘designed out’, even if its trappings are ostensibly on show. Remarkably akin to the psychology of the fairground ride, this new discipline might best be termed an architecture of the sublime. I will return to the key concept of the sublime in the next section on Play (3.3), making more direct reference to Edmund Burke, but for the time being Robert MacFarlane’s elucidation of Burke’s notion is instructive: Technological intervention +

High altitude buildings (Messner Museums)

Skywalks Via ferrata Aid Climbing Exposure -

Exposure +

Ridge Routes Free Climbing

Technological intervention -

Fig. 3

Modelling design and exposure in mountain skywalks

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It was the suggestion of harm, melded with the knowledge that no harm was likely to come, which induced this delightful terror: the improbable parading as the probable. (MacFarlane, 2003, p.75)

Veronica della Dora extends this idea, not uncritically, to the context I am addressing directly in this chapter. For her the mountain museum is a microcosm of what is happening to mountains more generally in the twenty-first century: Mountains (like museums) have become objects for mass consumption. The sublime has become a commodity; risk itself has become a commodity. (della Dora, 2016, p.211)

Considering these developments through the lens of an expanded scenography, and testing what McKinney and Palmer suggest is the ‘potential significance’ of such an approach to understanding human–non-human interactions (McKinney and Palmer, 2017, p.19), frames this process of commodification in new ways, rooting it in the universal currency of this century—experience.

Skywalk Scenography The expansion of the field of scenography, emerging as it has from the tight boundaries of theatre design to embrace the everyday and the special, the natural and the constructed, offers a useful analytical tool to understand the relationship between people and architecture so fundamental to the skywalk phenomenon. As Gough and Lotker argue, scenography has developed along similar lines to Performance Studies generally, valuing both the aesthetic and the quotidian. Scenography: can be built by a scenographer, a collective of artists, an architect or nature itself […] Environments conspire and collude to construct scenographies for our actions, and sites, places and locations are subverted, co-opted, occupied, translated and mutated for the needs of our performances […] What is important is that scenographies are environments that not only determine the context of performative actions, but that inspire us to act and that directly form our actions. (Lotker and Gough, 2013, pp.3–4)

Two aspects of this expanded understanding of scenography are of importance here: the first is the interplay between push and pull—either the

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environment constructing action or the mutation (the word is welljudged) of the environment to meet ‘the needs of our performances’. The second is the suggestion that the scenographic hand, natural or artificial, found or built, effects tangible behavioural change on behalf of the spectator. Viewed alongside the taxonomy I am proposing above, this suggests that all of my examples might be considered through a scenographic lens—from the 50-million-year-old Black Cuillin ridge to the Arizonan and Alpine skywalks constructed in the last ten years, providing, that is, there is ‘inspiration to act’. Arnold Aronson’s observation that scenography today is less about the ‘purely visual, concrete, and semiotic aspects’ and much more to do with ‘the spatial, the temporal, and the intangible’ (Aronson, 2018, p.12) compounds the sense that historical meaning-making in scenography (based on the transmission and reception of relatively stable signs) is giving way to a focus on ‘event’—space and time conflated. This is very much in line with how architect and scenographer, Dorita Hannah, has suggested architectural thinking has moved since radical theorist, teacher and practitioner of architecture, Bernard Tschumi, first conceived the term ‘event-space’ in the 1980s (Kahn and Hannah, 2008): As dynamic spatial action, event-space operates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the subtle and the spectacular, the banal and the epic […] Considering performance space as ‘evental’ repositions built and imagined space as both embodied experience and evolving time-based event. (Pitches and Popat, 2011, p.56)

Though much earlier, Tschumi, like Turner with dramaturgy and Gough and Lotker with scenography, was extending the terms of reference for architecture. ‘The discourse was really about architecture’, he argues: but architecture in an expanded sense whereby the movement of bodies in space was just as important as the space itself. Hence the definition of architecture as space, movement, and what happens in it, that is, the action or what I later called the ‘event’. (Kahn and Hannah, 2008, p. 53)

For Hannah (and Tschumi), all space is fluid, in dialogue with its specific temporal context and subject to constant revision, concepts which may be productively considered for this focus on skywalks with the added spice

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of social media and its fundamental role in the construction of these sites in our imaginations.

The Event-Space of Tianmen Mountain Skywalk Tianmen mountain, in Zhangjiajie, China is best known for the enormous hole in its side, lending it the name Heaven’s Gate (Fig. 4). As one of the most notable landscape features in China, it has attracted several feats of performative display, notably all by men.12 In 2007 urban climber Alain Robert produced a ‘breathtaking precipice ballet’13 as he free climbed the 200 metres up to this natural hole in the mountainside, known as Tianmen Cave; four years later wingsuiter Jeb Corliss flew through it at 150 miles per hour. Most recently (2018), in a highly stagemanaged event, Chinese racing driver Ho Pin Tung drove a Range Rover hybrid car at breakneck speed up the hazardous 99-bend road to the base

Fig. 4 Heaven’s gate, Tianmen mountain (Photo by Landrovermena. https:// www.flickr.com/photos/landrovermena/40040365262 [Accessed 1 August 2018])

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of the mountain; then, even more incongruously, he took his vehicle up the 999 steps to the Heaven’s Gate feature itself.14 The practice of high-powered cars taking to tourists’ walking routes raises serious concerns about the protection of mountain eco-climates, and the presence of such global multinationals as Range Rover, albeit with hybrid motor technologies on display, suggests that the company are prepared to overlook the jarring image of a 4X4 on a mountain in order to raise the profile of their next generation of motor cars. Depressingly enough, the Tianmen ‘Dragon Challenge’ was in fact continuing a century-long tradition of publicity-driven automotive access to the mountains—from the ascent of Ben Nevis in a Model T Ford in 191115 to the navigation of the Miners’ Track on Snowdon in a Hyundai in 2017.16 Then and now these demonstrations of prowess and lunacy represent an interesting balance of push and pull. Are the performers themselves gaining kudos from the spectacular topographical capital of the site or are they agents appointed to build that capital? In the case of Alain Robert, the local Hunan government invited him to scale the mountain to raise awareness of the tourist attraction, recognising the massive boost this feat would achieve via social and international news media. For Range Rover, the hybrid model which so convincingly met the Dragon Challenge was seen on YouTube over 3.5 million times in the first 5 months of posting. Whether, as Gough and Lotker suggest, these are cases of the natural scenographic environment ‘inspir[ing] us to act’ or whether it is the commercial incentives driving the activity is a (not-so) moot point. For those unable to wingsuit or free climb, there is the original Tianmen skywalk, the ‘Walk of Faith’, a 65 m extension of a 1.6 km bridge wrapped around the western side of the peak and completed in 2011. Now one of three glass walkways on the Tianmen mountain, the last constructed in 2016, this first skywalk is located at a height of 1400 m and, like the others, built of steel and glass echoing the materials of the Grand Canyon skywalk. Indeed, the ‘Walk of Faith’ is far from being a sensitive enhancement of the natural features of the mountain; it consciously resembles an urban skyway transported from one of the major cities of the world. The sense of a city vernacular bolted on to the rural context is compounded by the other technological interventions in the national park as TripAdvisor testimony details:

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Inside the national park, you can take the cliffside pathways around the mountains. There are west cliffside and east cliffside pathways, and each has a glass bottom pathway for about 200 m, where you walk while looking down into the valley below. if you’re afraid of heights, it’s probably not a good idea. But it’s such a thrilling sensation, you should not miss it! like walking on air! Pretty cool experience. There is an enormous cave/cavern on the side of the mountain, and to go down there you need to take the escalators.17

Whilst it might appear from the picture record a rather mundane, short hop on a glass bridge, TripAdvisor reviewers adopt the hyperbole customary of tourist-based social media; their act of ‘knowledge sharing’ (Okazaki, Andreu and Campo, 2017) is unmistakably heightened: The cable car ride, the enormous mountains, the glass walk. Everything about this place was ‘wow’ for me! I kept wondering if walking on the already made path was so thrilling, how did they make the path.18 At the top of the mountain, I walked along the Glass Plank Trail …. I had to wear the sock booties before I was let on the 50 m trail. It felt like walking on thin air. It was scary to look down, because there was nothing but an infinity of greens. It was a great experience, though.19 This is an experience you will not want to miss. Everything about the park is spectacular. The views are amazing and the ‘rides’ are thrilling and unforgettable. We got to ride the world’s longest cable car over sheer cliffs, walked on a glass walkway 1 mile above ground, took the world’s longest escalator ride down to a 999 step and very steep staircase, and finally a hair-raising bus ride on a road with 99 turns. An incredible adventure!20

Other reviewers are transparent about the constructed relationship between the attraction and its representation on social media: Had a better experience here than ZJJ National Park. Temperature are cooler, wider walkways, better spots to take Instagram-ready photos. […] As teens, we really enjoyed the place as the 30 minute cable car ride, glass corridors, suspension bridges, sky rides and beautiful architecture allows me to make my friends jealous with my Instagram feed.21

Whether the aims of knowledge sharing are implicit or explicit, ‘experience’ is a keyword that is repeatedly used in these TripAdvisor comments, appearing in 10% of all the reviews of Zhangjiajie National park.22 This is unsurprising for a visitor attraction site, perhaps, but nevertheless telling

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in terms of the scenographic ideas being considered in this chapter. The Tianmen skywalk is ‘evental’ in Hannah’s terms in that it is designed to invoke an embodied experience based on the visceral tension modelled in Fig. 5—the collision of an everyday act of passage over a city-style bridge with the extremity of the mountain valley, viewed through the glass floor

Fig. 5 Tianmen glass skywalk, the walk of faith (Photo by Raki_Man. https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glass_walkway-_Tianmen_Mountain_-_pa noramio.jpg)

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1400 metres below. Skywalks, by definition, are the very quintessence of ‘event-space architecture’ characterised by the movement of bodies in heightened spaces, invoking acts or events (which are in turn captured on social media). Recalling Gough and Lotker’s expanded scenography, the Walk of Faith offers a paradigmatic example of a location ‘subverted, co-opted, occupied, translated and mutated for the needs of our performances’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013, pp.3–4). But the expanded scenography of the Tianmen mountain skywalk operates in another way, too. Space here is made temporal, not just because of the ‘significant historic moments’ which surround the mountain—its 500-year-old Buddhist temple or its 999 ancient steps leading through the cave—but, on a much more quotidian scale. This space is shaped by the multiple, personalised events documented on the TripAdvisor site. Reviewers add to the thread of reviews of the same space and build up a temporal record of their individual experiences (there are eight years of evidence on the thread for Tianmen Mountain, at the time of writing). This, in turn, shapes later experiences fuelling what Hannah calls in a different context the ‘overabundance of quotidian performances happening all around us’ (Pitches and Popat, 2011, p.56). This must not be mistaken for a causal, linear process, however, as social media encourages these quotidian performances to overlap and become confused. One example of this confusion is implicit in the reviews above: the use of the designation ‘plank trail’ for the manifestly modern steel and glass Skywalk. Why do people call it this? One answer is that, sometimes consciously and at others unconsciously, this attraction is being confused with the notorious plank walk in Hua Shan, some 1100 km North from Tianmen, which also appears on the ‘8 heart-pumping skywalks’ page mentioned in the introduction. Hua Shan’s construction of ageing planks, just two feet wide and offering the most extreme, precipitous journey to nowhere, is an Eastern via ferrata in everything but name and has become virally popular across many social medial outlets— YouTube, TripAdvisor, Twitter and Instagram. It has only the most superficial similarities with the Tianmen Skywalk but is nevertheless its scenographic shadow, ensuring the ‘Walk of Faith’ evolves in our consciousness not just across time but also across place. Finally, we might return to Gough and Lotker’s assertion that scenographic spaces ‘inspire us to act’ and consider Tianmen and other skywalks in this context. The TripAdvisor threads are tinged with the residues of this performativity and the suggestion above that the whole National

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Forest Park is like a collection of ‘rides’ suggests that the intrusion of the leisure park industry into mountain environments is not my concern alone. But the social media comment threads must also be viewed alongside the multimedia produced by participants at the moment they engage with the site—what might be called the ‘second-phase’ process of scenographic design. Many of these experiential snapshots and videos, produced by wearable technology such as GoPro cameras and smartphones represent behaviour at either end of the scale of risk and exposure discussed above, documentations of performed nonchalance or terror. These too add to the experiential archive and inform later documentations, wrapping around the physical landscape a layer of virtual mediation which in turn colours subsequent engagements with the site. This blog, Off the Beaten Track, captures the process: Hua Shan has become famous the world over after photos (and later videos) on the web were circulated of one of the mountain’s most famous attractions – the short, but incredibly terrifying length of plank walk fixed into the sheer, smooth granite face of the forbidding South Peak. […] You’ll find loads on this notorious dead-end path, which ends at a small cave where ancient Chinese hermits apparently used to meditate!).23

Links embedded in the post transport the virtual visitor to a headcam view of the drop from the Hua Shan mountainside and countless other versions of this experience on the ‘Up Next’ feed on the right of the YouTube interface. Each of these digital assets is testimony to what David Brake identifies as an increasingly important function of social media for producers: ‘taking the raw material of their everyday lives and interactions and turning them into a form of art’ (Brake, 2014, p.153).

Conclusion What, then, does a scenographic analysis of mountain skywalks lend to an understanding of the twenty-first century performed activities in the mountains? What does it add to this Part’s aim of understanding mountains differently through the languages and practices of performance? Firstly, it brings to the fore the extent to which stage-managing the user experience is increasingly part of an environmental architect’s mission to commodify the sublime, as della Dora puts it. These are sites which heighten the visitor’s appreciation of the landscape by stimulating

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primal responses of fear and survival wrapped up in a corporate vernacular to soften the blow. Their urban aesthetics suggest they are designed primarily for the city dweller to sample the countryside, bringing their relative wealth into otherwise remote places. Secondly, to treat scenography as event necessarily expands the scope of critical analysis, beyond the key components identified by Pamela Howard in What is Scenography— Space, Text, Research, Colour and Composition, Direction, Performers— and places a much greater emphasis on her last component, Spectators (Howard, 2009, pp.xxiv–xxv).24 This is in line with more recent developments in scenographic thinking which expand its purview beyond the theatre context to the interaction of space, bodies and time in multiple environments. Thirdly, it suggests that one of the key technologies in the construction of these skywalk experiences is not the concrete, steel, glass and wood used in their fabrication but the social media used for their representation. This leads to a layered and iterative relationship between the mountain skywalk itself, the experience of visiting it and the mediation of that experience. The extent to which that experience can be controlled or designed is therefore limited, given the agency of the visitors in the making of meaning. Finally and most pointedly, it is difficult to escape the fact that these particular landscape interventions involve ‘sites [which are] mutated for the needs of our performances’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013, p.3). How far that mutation is in keeping with the context of each site is by no means clear. Using Ross Dowling’s five criteria of ‘geo-tourism’—tourism which involves ‘landscape appreciation and viewing of scenic areas’—many significant questions may be asked of skywalk architecture. Dowling suggests that each case for geo-tourist development should be: (i) geologically based, (ii) sustainable, (iii) geologically informative, (iv) locally beneficial, and (v) satisfying for tourists (Dowling, 2011, p.3). There are clear indications of satisfaction in the TripAdvisor listings (particularly for the Tianmen mountain) and evidence of local benefits (for instance on the employment rates of the Arizona Native American tribe—the Hualapai— who commissioned the Grand Canyon skywalk). But where sustainability is defined as not ‘caus[ing] harm to geological features or their surrounding areas, especially in natural settings’ (Dowling, 2011, p.3) skywalks score less well, prompting the same debates about permanent drilling and irreparable transformation which were sparked in the 1950s when aided climbing was invented, but on a much grander scale.

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In the future, if the need to perform our visits to these remarkable landscapes continues to rise in line with social media usage there will be many more branded bridges constructed to satisfy our experiencesharing habits. The ‘arms race’ of skywalk building seems not to be dissipating, even with the shadow of the IPCC’s report on climate change hanging over us all (IPCC, 2018). On the other hand, if social media images became a proxy for the experience of visiting in person such sensitive sites, we could cut down our ‘bucket list’ of must-do locations and reduce the need always to be there.25 If we did this, the world’s mountainscapes—‘sentinels of change’ (Braun, 2016) as I termed them in the General Introduction—might be transformed more sympathetically, and we would be signalling that is time to tread with care when we do choose to walk closer to the sky.

Notes 1. At the time of writing (Summer 2018) there are now 6 Messner mountain museums. http://www.messner-mountain-museum.it/en/ (Accessed 31 July 2018). 2. http://www.plh.manchester.ac.uk (Accessed 27 July 2018). 3. Although there are of course historical precedents. Tschumi for instance cites the Situationists and the political movement of 1968 as key to his idea of architecture as event or architecture as action. (Tschumi, 2000, p. 174). 4. Solnit references the classical covered colonnade which facilitated Aristotle’s Peripatetic school of philosophy. 5. http://grandcanyon.com/planning/west-planning/grand-canyon-skywa lk-at-grand-canyon-west/ (Accessed 27 July 2018). 6. http://www.icrosschina.com/sizzling/2015/0427/11792.shtml (Accessed 27 July 2018). 7. https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/theme-park-china-homeworlds-terrifying-thrills/. 8. A search using the term unique term ‘skywalk’ on TripAdvisor Worldwide yielded 1983 results, 836 of which were designated ‘attractions’. Whilst this is not to suggest that there are as many skywalks in the world, it does indicate the ubiquitous use of the term in reviews. (Accessed 30 July 2018). 9. http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/InfoCenter-a_ctr.skywalksEN. 10. http://www.honister.com/via-ferrata/ (Accessed 12 June 2015). 11. The other categories are: Purist sportsmen (mountaineers), Purist contemplatives (hikers) and Competitors (participants in competitions such as ultra-trails) (Hoibian, 2017, p.14).

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12. Of the recorded attempts I have found of wingsuiters flying through Heaven’s Gate or other comparable rock features—both successful and (fatally) unsuccessful—all have been made by men: Jeb Corliss, Graham Dickinson, Uli Emanuelle and Alexander Polli. However, women have made significant contributions to the sport, perhaps most notably US climber, skydiver and wingsuiter Steph Davis, author of Learning to Fly (Davis, 2013). 13. As quoted on the plaque on the mountain itself. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Tianmen_Mountain#/media/File:Tian_Menshan_Mountain_7. jpg (Accessed June 16 2015). 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUwzWHD3Htg (Accessed 1 August 2018). 15. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-44003271 (Accessed 1 August 2018). 16. Reactions to these feats are of course diverse. The Hyundai ‘stunt’ caused significant unease in Snowdonia but there is little criticism of the Range Rover promotion. https://www.snowdonia-society.org.uk/hyundai-need s-some-new-thinking/. 17. SariSfere: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g494933d1871611-r601692333-Tianmen_Mountain_National_Forest_Park-Zha ngjiajie_Hunan.html. 18. Saras A: http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g494933-d187 1611-r176771895-Tianmen_Mountain_of_Zhangjiajie-Zhangjiajie_Huna n.html. 19. Glynn 0220: http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g494933d1871611-r176575836-Tianmen_Mountain_of_Zhangjiajie-Zhangjiajie_ Hunan.html. 20. DB: http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g494933-d18716 11-r281486730-Tianmen_Mountain_of_Zhangjiajie-Zhangjiajie_Hunan. html. 21. Adamlhsan: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g494933d1871611-r593268288-Tianmen_Mountain_National_Forest_Park-Zha ngjiajie_Hunan.html. 22. A keyword search of ‘experience’ revealed 113 reviews out of 1131 for Zhangjiajie National Forest Park (Accessed 2 August 2018). Other skywalks yield even higher uses of the word—for instance the Grand Canyon at nearly 2000 (50% of the pool of reviews). 23. https://taiwandiscovery.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hua-shan-and-hua ngshan-chinas-mystical-mountain-scenery-at-its-best/. 24. This is a direct challenge to Howard’s argument that: ‘it is possible to have an “event” without performance, where the spectators have an experience engendered by installed objects, but to have a personal heart-wrenching moment of recognition of the human condition can only be conveyed by

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a performer to a spectator. [Installations, for instance …] are not a performance, an interaction between two people, one of which, the performer, knows more than the spectator’ (2009, p.221). 25. Beames, Mackie and Atencio discuss this idea in Adventure, Technology and Society (2019) exploring social media’s capacity to enable ‘participants to share experiences in real time, even when they are located elsewhere’ (Beames, Mackie and Atencio, 2019).

References Aronson, A. (ed.) (2018) The Routledge Companion to Scenography. Abingdon: Routledge. Beames, S., Mackie, C. and Atencio, M. (2019) Adventure and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernbaum, E. (1997) Sacred Mountains of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brake, D.R. (2014) Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Braun, V. (2016) Mountains for Europe’s Future: A Strategic Research Agenda. Available at http://mri.scnatweb.ch/en/projects/strategic-research-agendamountains-for-europe-s-future. Davis, S. (2013) Learning to Fly: An Uncommon Memoir of Human Flight, Unexpected Love, and One Amazing Dog. New York: Simon & Schuster. della Dora, V. (2016) Mountain: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Dowling, R.K. (2011) Geotourism’s Global Growth. Geoheritage, 3 (1), pp. 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-010-0024-7. Ebert, P. and Robertson, S. (2007) Adventure, Climbing Excellence and the Practice of “Bolting”. In McNamee, M. (ed.) Philosophy, Risk and Adventure Sports. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 43–55. Hoibian, O. (2017) A Cultural History of Mountaineering and Climbing. In Seifert, L., Wolf, P. and Schweizer, A. (eds.) The Science of Climbing and Mountaineering. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–16. Howard, P. (2009) What Is Scenography? Abingdon: Routledge. IPCC (2018) Global Warming of 1.5 Degree Centigrade—Headlines Statements. Available at http://ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/sr15/sr15_headline_ statements.pdf. Jackson, T. and Kidd, J. (eds.) (2011) Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kahn, O. and Hannah, D. (2008) Performance/Architecture: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi. Journal of Architectural Education, 61, pp. 52–58.

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Lotker, S. and Gough, R. (2013) On Scenography: Editorial. Performance Research, 18 (3), pp. 3–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.81 8306. MacFarlane, R. (2003) Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination. London: Granta. McKinney, J. and Palmer, S. (eds.) (2017) Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury. Okazaki, S., Andreu, L. and Campo, S. (2017) Knowledge Sharing Among Tourists via Social Media: A Comparison Between Facebook and TripAdvisor. International Journal of Tourism Research, 19 (1), pp. 107–119. https://doi. org/10.1002/jtr.2090. Pitches, J. and Popat, S. (eds.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, A. (2008) Mountaineering: The Essential Skills for Mountain Walkers and Climbers. London: A & C Black. Seifert, L., Wolf, P. and Schweizer, A. (eds.) (2017) The Science of Climbing and Mountaineering. Abingdon: Routledge. Available at: https://www.rout ledge.com/The-Science-of-Climbing-and-Mountaineering/Seifert-Wolf-Sch weizer/p/book/9781138927582. Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust. London: Verso. Tschumi, B. (2000) Six Concepts. In Read, A. (ed.) Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, pp. 155– 176. Turner, C. (2010) Mis-guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20 (2), pp. 149–161. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10486801003682351. Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2016) Dramaturgy and Performance. Revised ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part 3.3 From Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn: Deep and Dark Play in the Alps

Introduction Any consideration of the usefulness of performance processes for the understanding of mountains could not reasonably be attempted without scrutinising the key dynamic of the actor–spectator. Perhaps the primary relationship in all performance, the connection between actor and spectator is central to meaning-making in all live and performed work. As Allain and Harvie observe: The audience and/or the spectator fundamentally constitute theatre and performance by witnessing it and at least partially producing its meanings. (Allain and Harvie, 2006, p.132)

In the previous two sections to this Part of Performing Mountains I have intimated that the co-constitutive processes of acting and witnessing are threaded through conceptions of behaviour in the mountains— most notably on the climbing-wall-cum-stage and the skywalk. Here I turn to play theory—and specifically to notions of deep and dark

An earlier version of this chapter under the title: ‘Deep and dark play in the Alps: daring acts and their retelling’ appeared in the edited collection: Mountains, Mobilities and Movement, Kakalis, C. and Goetsch, E. (eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 15–35. © The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_12

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play—to focus directly on this relationship as it is played out in three examples from different eras of Alpine climbing history (1852–1857, 1936–1938, 2009–2012). I aim to examine whether the actor–spectator interrelationship so fundamental to theatrical expression is as productive a tool for understanding elements of risk, play and representation in the mountains, using evidence from painstaking ascents and bewilderingly rapid descents of mountains within this period. Conceptions of dark play were first formulated in Performance Studies (Schechner, 1993), and are seen as ‘closely related’ (Schechner, 2006, p.119) to the much more established term of deep play. Dismissed by Scott Eberle as an oxymoron or ‘category mistake’ (Eberle, 2014, p.228),1 the term dark play relates to the nature or kind of play being analysed, whereas deep play indicates the level of intensity. As such, dark play in Richard Schechner’s formulation, ‘involves fantasy, risk, luck, daring, invention and deception’ and notably ‘subverts order, dissolves frames, and breaks its own rules’ (Schechner, 2006, p.119). Deep play, as we will see in more detail later, may have all of those elements but must in addition be ‘all absorbing’ (Schechner, 2006, p.119)—a depth of engagement stimulated by close odds and personal investment. As Diane Ackerman phrases it: ‘in [deep play’s] thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they’re taken to intense and transcendent heights’ (Ackermann, 1999, p.12). As early as 1985, Schechner invited his graduate students to document their own experiences of dark play, and, amongst examples of impetuous drug use and of ‘playing chicken’ with New York traffic, he records an instance of particular interest to the context here: Female: I was 16 years old and on vacation at Yosemite with my father. I climbed out over the guard rail to get a better view of the waterfall. When I realised that my father was crying for me to come back, I went to the very edge and did an arabesque. I continued balancing on one leg until he got onto his knees, crying, begging for me to come back. Ten years later, in the Sierra Nevada range I repeated the same act in front of my husband who shouted at me to think of our daughter as a motherless child. My initial inspiration for dancing on the edge was in both cases the thrill of the beauty and the danger of the dance. (Schechner, 1993, p.37)

As an example of dark play this instance is only modestly transgressive and Schechner overstates (and oversimplifies) the power dynamic at work. For him this is a radical devaluation of the ‘patriarchal’ roles of father and

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husband (Schechner, 2006, p.120) whereas it could just as easily be an unexceptional and momentary act of teasing. Of more interest to this discussion, though, is the layering of representation and narrative construction evident here. This act was later restaged and photographed for publication in Performance Studies: an Introduction, a process which determined another cycle of acting and spectatorship after the two previous acts of ‘dancing on the edge’. With ‘each iteration it becomes more of a performance’ (Schechner, 2006, p.120), Schechner suggests. This idea of a conscious representation and narration of danger, along with the possibility of subversive rule-breaking, aligns the discussion of deep and dark play with contemporary scholarship on ‘Lifestyle Sports’ (Wheaton, 2004, 2013). This is a term coined in the early part of this century by Sport and Leisure Studies scholar, Belinda Wheaton, to collect under one banner the number of alternative sports which emerged out of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, many of which, in her words: ‘occur in non-urban environments […] in which one “blends with” or “becomes one with” the sea/Mountain’ (Wheaton, 2004, p.12). These include (wind)surfing, sport climbing and mountain biking, for instance. Wheaton identifies nine characteristics of these lifestyle sports, a list which helps indicate the shared territory between deep and dark play theory and contemporary sport studies. Lifestyle sports promote ‘fun, hedonism, involvement, and self-actualisation’ she suggests. They ‘are based around the consumption of new objects’ and practised predominantly by ‘middle-class, white, western participant[s]’, those with the disposable income and domestic freedom to invest in the trappings of their chosen sport. Critically, some lifestyle sports practitioners ‘refer to their activities as art’, emphasising the ‘creative, aesthetic and performative expressions of their activities’ and the ‘presentation of self to others - whether in lived settings or mediated forms’, Wheaton proposes, ‘seems to be part of the experience’ (Wheaton, 2004, pp.11–12). Wheaton does not draw on play theory in her own writing and her focus is expressly on contemporary sport, but I will argue here that this self-referential characteristic and the tendency to aestheticise the practice of dangerous sports, is not confined to the twenty-first century. Indeed, the performative celebration and remediation of the mountain range in focus here—the Alps—ubiquitously present on social media sites, can be traced back to the explosion of interest in the Mont Blanc massif occasioned by Albert Smith’s 1851 climb of the highest peak in the Alps, subsequently documented in a series of performed lectures for a

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Victorian audience at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. First mentioned in Part 1 (“General Introduction”), I use this early example of performed retelling as context, before moving to examine two locations of mediated dark play: the Eiger’s north face and the Hörnli ridge on the Matterhorn. For the former, the Eiger, I will examine the unique geological conditions that create its reputation as a ‘great black amphitheatre’ (Simpson, 2003, p.140), unpicking the gruesome tradition of Eiger watching; for the latter, the Matterhorn, I will build on the TripAdvisor analysis from 3.2 considering the relationship of social media and wearable technology to dark play, testing Wheaton’s assertion that self-presentation is fundamental to contemporary lifestyle sports and by extension to current modes of mountain representation.

Defining and Reassessing Deep and Dark Play Let me begin by outlining the etymology of the terms deep and dark play and by exploring some misrepresentations. It is customary to ascribe the first use of deep play to the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham—and specifically to his Theory of Legislation, posthumously published in 1840 from a French translation of his work. Diane Ackermann’s introduction to her book Deep Play (1999) is indicative: I’ve borrowed the phrase deep play from Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) […] who dismisses as ‘deep play’ any activity in which ‘the stakes are so high that it is…irrational for men to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose’. (Ackermann, 1999, p.18, emphasis in original)

Ackerman is in turn, citing Al Alvarez’s climbing book, Feeding the Rat (Alvarez, 1988, pp.30–31), a definition that is repeated verbatim in his later Risky Business (Alvarez, 2007, p.11). But both Ackermann and Alvarez are, in fact, making an error of attribution; these are not Jeremy Bentham’s words but Clifford Geertz’s, extending Bentham’s concept in his famous essay ‘Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight’ (Geertz, 1972), later published in The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973).2 Where Bentham’s engagement with the term is restricted to a moralising footnote in which he laments ‘the evils of deep play’ (Bentham, 1840, p.131), Geertz elaborates on and extrapolates from Bentham’s term to advance an eloquent and lively description of the gambling habits of Balinese cockfighting audiences. Central to Geertz’s argument is that the

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best, the deepest, play is only achieved when there is next to nothing to separate the prowess of the unfortunate cocks, when it is nigh impossible to predict the result of their match. Accordingly, the owners of the cocks themselves, waging significant sums of money, are also bound together in a desperately hard-to-call game; or as Geertz suggests: ‘in genuine deep play…they are both in over their heads’ (Geertz, 1972, p.15). These people, especially in the deepest fights, are almost always leaders of their communities and play out regional status games and personal politics through the agency of the fight. Mountain writers have been quick to appropriate Bentham’s deep play in trying to articulate the psychology of the climber, a psychology which in some cases is prepared to face odds little better than one of Geertz’s fighting cocks judging by the fatality rates on some of the Himalayan 8000 m peaks.3 Ackerman (1999), Alvarez (1988, 2007), Joe Simpson (1997) and Paul Pritchard (1997) all use the term with varying levels of accuracy. But surprisingly none reference Geertz, even though his is a far more nuanced and pertinent conceptualisation. Geertz’s notion of deep play is considerably more useful than the sententious footnote of Bentham, for several reasons. Firstly, Geertz highlights the emotional intensity and absorption within the audience at a cockfight—its witnesses are drawn into the event by virtue of its close odds and what Geertz calls its sharpened ‘melodramatic’ structure. This, he elaborates, accounts for a ‘kinaesthetic sympathy’ expressed between actor (cock) and spectator (Balinese villager) as they (literally) move with the ebb and flow of the fight (Geertz, 1972, p.9). Secondly, he identifies the performance of a second-level battle between the owners of the cocks, one based on status, hierarchy and masculinity, carefully facilitated by the complex rules of the cockfight. Thirdly, Geertz positions the cockfight as an ‘art form’—where the actual practical consequences of the act are simultaneously ‘reduced’ and ‘raised’, ‘to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated’ (Geertz, 1972, p.23). On this last point Geertz is particularly interesting, drawing as he does on the levels of reality embedded in the conflict: The cockfight is ‘really real’ only to the cocks - it does not kill anyone, castrate anyone, reduce anyone to animal status… what it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments and other conventions, Lear and Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes - deaths, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance - and, ordering them into

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an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature. (Geertz, 1972, p.23)

Thus for Geertz the cockfight is a stage where deeper cultural, social and economic realities can be explored, made ‘visible, tangible, graspable’ (Geertz, 1972, p.23). The cockfight ring is, ironically enough, a safe space for that to happen. Whilst mountaineering writers have appropriated the term deep play to describe an addictive attitude to risk-taking (symbolised in Alvarez’s colourful title Feeding the Rat ) or to evoke the thinnest of lines between life and death (in Joe Simpson’s Dark Shadows Falling for instance4 ), Geertz’s interest in defining deep play is not in stressing death and danger but in the layers of theatricalised human conflict which surround these mortal facts. The cocks are simply a vehicle for the presentation of death, masculinity and chance, witnessed beyond the edges of the gory pit in the safe realm of human interaction. This is not to say that deep play as a theoretical concept is without utility for the examination of mountain behaviours—far from it—but to argue, crucially, that the acts of witnessing, presentation and emotional investment at-a-distance are essential to a fuller understanding of deep play’s defining characteristics. If the characteristics of deep play can be better understood through revisiting Geertz (1972) rather than Bentham (1840), dark play theory has seen a more recent upsurge in interest, building on Schechner’s work in the 1980s to become an interdisciplinary research term spanning intimate one-to-one performance work (Hind, 2010), video games research (Mortensen, Linderoth and Brown, 2015), and Leisure and Tourism studies. In the latter field, scholars John Lennon and Malcolm Foley first coined the term ‘dark tourism’ in 1996 (Foley and Lennon, 1996), which has subsequently been developed by them (Lennon and Foley, 2000) and by Richard Sharpley and Phillip Stone (Sharpley, 2009). Dark tourism, defined by Sharpley, as ‘the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre’ (Stone and Sharpley, 2009, p.10), is clearly a subversion of the ‘“normal” codes of behaviour’ (Hind, 2010, p.15), associated with holidaying and helps frame the behaviours to be outlined and analysed below, specifically in Kleine Scheidegg at the foot of the Eiger. Sharpley outlines five subcategories of dark tourism, the first of which is travel to ‘dangerous destinations from the past and the present’ (Stone and Sharpley, 2009, p.11), a fitting moniker for the Eigerwand or north face, as I will illustrate below.5

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What, then, does this theatricalised reading of Geertz offers the mountain analyst and how are deep and dark play acted out on the mountainside? To use Geertz’s appealing terminology, what kinds of ‘encompassing structures’ surround mountain culture in the Alps since the middle of the nineteenth century and how have they been presented (and represented) using contemporary technologies of mediation?

Mont Blanc All 4810 metres of Mont Blanc,6 the highest peak in the Alps and in the European Union, were first climbed in 1786 by mountaineer guide Jacques Balmat and physician, Michel-Gabriel Paccard (Newby, 1977, pp.20–26). But whilst this remarkable feat is often aligned with the birth of modern mountaineering, it was not until the middle of the following century that Mont Blanc was truly popularised and became the ‘goto’ peak on the French–Italian border. Albert Smith was central to this uplift in interest and an unlikely progenitor of the golden age of mountaineering (1854–1865). Smith, a Victorian showman and satirical author, finally climbed Mont Blanc in 1851, thirteen years after his first encounter with the mountain in 1838 (Fitzsimmons, 1967, p.31). He wrote about his experience in a novel, The Story of Mont Blanc, published in 1853, including some extraordinary details of the (now ludicrous) provisions taken on the trip.7 But it was his stage show, or more accurately his series of performed lectures (from 1852–1860) that had the largest impact on mountaineering culture and on visitor numbers to the region and it is for this reason that his work is relevant to the discussion here. These performances were Smith’s attempt to translate the gamble he made with his own life—the belief, as he put it in his book, ‘that every step we took was gained from the chance of a horrible death’ (Smith, 1853, p.183)—to an audience hundreds of miles away from Chamonix, in London. As a revue writer and theatre producer, Smith was familiar with the theatrical resources needed for such a translation and he mustered as many of them as he could lay his hands on for his series of lectures: Mr Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc. His biographer, Raymund Fitzsimons outlines the mise en scene for the second season (November 1852): The exterior of a two-storied chalet with projecting eaves, carved balcony and green shutters… filled the centre of the stage…The walls of the chalet rose out of sight when the views were shown and lowered again during the

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intervals… to the left was an inn with wooden roof tiles and a patterned balcony that was an exact copy of the balcony of the Aigle Noir Hotel at Grindelwald8 […] Between the inn and the centre chalet a waterfall tumbled over rocks… Alpine plants fringed the pool [and] were banked up to screen a small piano to the right […] the walls of the lecture room were decorated with chamois skins, knapsacks and flags of the Swiss Cantons. Edelweiss hung from the lampshades. At 8 o’clock the door of the chalet opened and Smith came out. (Fitzsimmons, 1967, p.125)

The ‘views’ referred to here were dioramas , created by William Beverley—stunning vistas of the mountain, painted on transparent material through which light was shone and manipulated, creating a three dimensional ‘immersive’ effect (Bevin, 2008, p.187)). These dioramas were central to the experience of the event for the London audience, exaggerating the threat of the original climb and translating this danger for the urban sensibilities of his London audience. As Joe Kember comments: Beverley’s brilliantly backlit images of the climbers sought to bring the exaggerated dangers of mountaineering into the secure and comfortable confines of the Egyptian Hall… These entertainments mediated the mountain adventure for city-dwellers. (cited in Bevin, 2008, pp.188–189)

By the end of Smith’s last shows, early in 1860,9 the golden age of mountaineering was well underway, with countless Alpine peaks falling predominantly to British climbers supported by French and Swiss guides (Frison-Rouche and Jouty, 1996, p.62). Whilst mountaineering activity for the skilful few had increased significantly in the Alps in this period, back home Smith had succeeded in unlocking Mont Blanc and its environs for a much larger cross section of society in London (Fig. 1). In socio-political terms, reflecting on Geertz’s broader themes and ‘encompassing structures’, there is another, less benign performance at work here. In conquering Mont Blanc—the chapter in his book is called ‘the Victory’ (Smith, 1853, pp.178–197)—Smith was contributing to what Peter Hansen has called the construction of an ‘assertive masculinity to uphold [the] imagined sense of Britain’s imperial power’ (Hansen, 1995, p.304). The Alps were a ‘playground’—in explorer Leslie Stephen’s words (Stephen, 1871)—for the performance of political control and possession; the maximum value lay in unclimbed peaks and, once those were completed, in climbing new routes and new faces. Smith was not, of course, the first ascensionist of Mont Blanc but his act of

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Fig. 1 Mont Blanc: Albert Smith’s party reaching the cabin on the Grands Mulets (Colour lithograph by F. Baumann. http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary. org/record=b1201675)

‘victorious’ British exploration, (ironically made possible only by local guides), brought home a narrative of daring success and leadership in Europe which was infectiously received.10 To capitalise further on that reception, Smith extended his use of theatrical devices beyond the walls of the Egyptian Hall producing several spin-off objects of merchandise, including a portable lantern show to be used at home to recreate several of the exhilarating scenes elaborated upon in the stage performance (Hansen, 2013, pp.175–176). These take-home souvenirs, a nineteenthcentury manifestation of the consumerism Wheaton emphasises in her taxonomy of lifestyle sports above, were some of the first examples of a practice of domesticated dark play, kindled by the technology of the day, a practice which, as will be seen, reaches its apogee in the viewing of extreme sports posted on social media. Smith’s stage show has been the subject of many extended studies (Conefrey and Jordan, 2001; Bevin, 2008; Hansen, 2013; McNee, 2015) but viewing his work in the context of deep and dark play illuminates the performative impact of Smith’s project more brightly. The Ascent of Mont Blanc was cannily exploitative of contemporary theatre technologies, complicit in the construction of a particular mode of imperialism and

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heroism, and consciously designed to manipulate its audience’s emotions, or ‘kinaesthetic sympathies’ (Geertz, 1972, p.9). It created a safe-danger which both documented and sensationalised a landscape which few could envisage before the advent of photography. As a recent study of Smith’s artistry identifies: ‘Beverley’s descending panorama was so effective that “the spectator seems, step-by-step, to accompany the daring travellers in a hazardous journey, whilst Mr Albert Smith, with graphic description, tells every circumstance of the interesting deed”’ (McNee, 2015, p.139).

The Eiger Christian Almer, Peter Bohren and Charles Barrington first climbed the Eiger in 1858, whilst Smith was still performing his lectures at the Egyptian hall. But it was eighty years later before the notorious north face was conquered by a quartet of Austrian and German climbers, Anderl Heckmair, Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg and Heinrich Harrer, following a spate of tragedies earlier that decade.11 These deaths and the first successful summit have passed into mountaineering history and are referenced by more than one contemporary climber, often citing Harrer’s bestselling account of the 1938 ascent, White Spider (1959), as a (perhaps perverse) stimulus for pursuing a mountaineering career. Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void (Simpson, 1988), is typical of this trend: This gripping account of the first ascent … and the subsequent often disastrous attempts that followed should really have put me off mountaineering for life… I [nevertheless] became a mountaineer inspired by the most gripping and frightening mountaineering book I have ever read. (in Harrer, 2005, p.7)12

One of the remarkable features of the north face of the Eiger is its incredible proximity to civilisation. The pain, elation, progress and failure of every climber attempting the Eigerwand fall under the potential scrutiny of hordes of hotel visitors, hikers and journalists in Kleine Scheidegg, nestling at the foot of the 1800-metre face. This fact has led to the morbid phenomenon of ‘Eiger watching’, the close tracking of climbers from telescopes on the balconies of hotels in the valley below.13 Heinrich Harrer was one of many to find this spectacle problematic in its theatricality. The climbers themselves ‘do not want to be looked at’, he says in White Spider, but in spite of this: ‘this particular face […] has become an arena,

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a natural stage, in which every movement of the actors can be followed’ (Harrer, 2005, p.24). As Harrer notes, it is not the climbers who seek out the burden of performing in this example; instead it is visited upon them by the audiences gathered in the mountain pass. Here, the technology of mediation is not in the hands of the artist—Beverley and his dioramas of Mont Blanc for instance—but in the long-distance view of the spectator handling the telescope. These witnesses at-a-distance were, in Ann Colley’s vivid analysis of earlier telescope usage, ‘indulg[ing] their morbid interest in death while taking pleasure in the actor of looking’ (Colley, 2010, p.71). As the balcony-dweller frames an image of the climber in the viewfinder, the art of storytelling is shifted from actor to viewer, either for personal titillation or—if it happens to be a journalist’s eye—for more public enjoyment. Harrer records the latter process in White Spider, citing journalist Ulrich Link’s eye-witness account of the Eigerwand climb from afar, written: ‘in a manner which would grip a layman, but without uncalled for dramatisation’: From 3 to 3.30 p.m. the face was once again enveloped in cloud. Then it cleared again and everyone rushed to the telescopes. The leader of the second rope was just traversing from the rocks onto the “spider” […] it was 4:10. Mist came down on the face again, and we were left cut-off with our fears and our hopes […] At 4:25 it began to rain gently, and exactly 5 minutes later a violent, noisy downpour set in, as if the clouds had been torn apart. It must be hitting the face and the four climbers on it like a tidal wave. One could hear many voices raised in a confused gasp of alarm. (Harrer, 2005, p.109)

Gripping it is, and all the more so as the same telescopes had been focused on the drawn out, frozen death of Toni Kurtz and the rest of his party, just two years earlier.14 It is also highly dramatised, despite what Harrer might say. The telescopic perspective, punctuated by moments of obscurity occasioned by the weather, is a classic viewpoint in mountain dramas. It is seen in the tracking of Irvine and Mallory by Noel Odell on the highest slopes of Everest in 1924, before the ‘mist close[d] around them’ (McFarlane, 2003, p.268) and they disappeared for seventy-five years.15 And it was evident earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the longdistanced telescopic pursuit of Albert Smith’s Mont Blanc climb provided

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the stuff of drama for journalists and their readers. Smith’s actual ascent (not the performed account of it) was reported in The Observer: After their departure, telescopes were fixed from the windows of the inn, and in other places, to watch the progress of their toilsome ascent […] Yesterday morning, as soon as daylight afforded a clear view, the adventurers were again visible by aid of a good glass and by 12 o’clock were seen making the final ascent. (Observer, 25 August 1851, 3)16

In 1966, when the next mountaineering challenge after climbing the north face was to find the most direct line up it, journalists still drew on the telescope as dramatic mediator, as reporter Peter Gillman later reflected: For decades, every fresh drama brought journalists flocking to the scene, ready to bestow their headlines on the latest success or death. In February 1966, I was one of them, covering the attempt for the Daily Mail, the newspaper backing Harlin’s team, talking to the climbers by radio and watching through a telescope on a hotel terrace at Kleine Scheidegg as the two teams climbed, often only yards apart. (MailOnline, 31 May 2015)

Gillman was unfortunate enough to witness the death of US climber John Harlin ‘live’, through the eyepiece of his telescope, as Harlin fell from the face racing to beat the German team to the prize of ‘Eiger direct’. Some forty years later in 2005, Harlin’s son John Junior sought to bury his demons by climbing the north face himself, creating another layer of mediation with the production of the docudrama The Alps , scripted by English mountaineer Stephen Venables (Judson, 2007). Ten years after Harlin Senior’s death in 1976, climber Joe Tasker, described how the phenomenon of ‘Eiger watching’ had liberated itself from the constraints of the Kleine Scheidegg balconies, bringing an even greater sense of theatrical voyeurism: A distant speck, small as a fly, came towards us growing larger and larger - a helicopter. It hovered a few hundred feet away from us. We could see the occupants, cameras or binoculars masking their faces, and I could not move.

The best way he could find to express the intrusion was to cast himself as leading actor on the rock face:

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From stage fright at realising I was a performer in a gigantic vertical arena my feelings turned to resentment that our very private world should become the focus of the curiosity and pastime of others. I could not concentrate until it was gone, could not rid myself of the thought that those visitors, anonymous and safe in their plastic bubble, would’ve had the most perfect outing if they could only have seen one of us fall. (Tasker and Boardman, 1995, p.33)

With tourist guide Lonely Planet : Switzerland noting the history of Eiger watching at the Bellevue Hotel as part of its draw as a ‘world-beating location’ (Williams and Walker, 2009, p.183), the fusion of leisure, locale and licentious voyeurism observed by Tasker in the 1970s, is still an essential part of Kleine Scheidegg’s cultural offer today, affirming its status as a dark tourist hotspot and illustrative of what Stone and Sharpley identify as one of its most important functions: the ‘opportunity to confront and contemplate “mortality moments” from a perceived safe distance and environment’ (Stone and Sharpley, 2008, p.590).17 In optical terms the telescope may shorten the gap between witness on the balcony and ‘actor’ on the face, but in the terms of this chapter it remains a key tool for retaining an aesthetic distance, facilitating a spectatorial objectivity for its users, even when confronted with tragedy.

The Matterhorn If the Eigerwand has a grim history of failed attempts, there is an equally tragic (and well-known) past associated with the Matterhorn, specifically its maiden ascent by the egoist-engraver, Edward Whymper. Whymper had seen Albert Smith’s lecture in 1858 and inspired (if not intoxicated) climbed the Matterhorn for the first time seven years later from the Swiss side, via the Hörnli ridge. On the descent he lost four of his party—Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas Hadow, guide Michel Croz and Charles Hudson—immortalising the experience in his mountaineering classic, Scrambles amongst the Alps (Whymper, 1871), complete with his own engravings and an illustration of the broken rope once attached to the ill-fated foursome.18 Historical interest notwithstanding, in this section I move forward from dioramas, telescopes and helicopters to the technology of the twenty-first century: social media, headcams and wingsuits. In doing so, I want to align more closely understandings of deep and dark play with

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Wheaton’s conception of the aesthetic in lifestyle sports, and to revisit the themes Geertz introduces in his analysis of cockfighting: ‘death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss’, performed for an audience by a symbolic actor. In this final example I want to examine a particularly extreme form of dark play in the Alps—wingsuiting from the Matterhorn—to reveal how practitioners of this relatively new sport19 treat the mediation of their daring acts almost as seriously as the acts themselves; to reiterate Wheaton’s criterion: ‘presentation of self […] seems to be part of the experience’ (Wheaton, 2004, p.12). In one way, the act of mediation in the twenty-first century has come full-circle from Albert Smith’s Egyptian Hall lectures: we are back to selfproduced, narrative accounts of daring acts in the Alps. But the means by which these stories are relayed has of course been transformed by moving online. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo are crammed with audio-visual materials culled from mountain experiences, often created with the use of head-mounted cameras or headcams, the most ubiquitous of these being the GoPro brand of cameras. GoPros have been used to document a long list of signature climbing routes: from Crib Goch in Snowdonia, to the Striding and Sharp edges in Cumbria, from the Khumbu ice fall on the approach to Everest to the sunrise over mount Kilimanjaro.20 Many of the materials produced in this way evidence what has been termed the ‘lifecaching’ tendency of this century: Collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse. (Bruns, 2008, p.228)

Such user-led production and publication signals what Bruns calls a paradigm shift, away from an industrial model of product development and consumption towards a much more ‘fluid movement of produsers [sic] between roles as leaders, participants, and users of content’ (Bruns, 2007). Expressions of mountain culture offer excellent examples of this ‘produsage’ in social media (mountaineer bloggers, YouTube film-makers, mountain ‘Instagrammers’), providing numerous illustrations of the presentational prerogative of lifestyle sports suggested in Wheaton’s work. If, as Patrick Lonergan has argued: ‘social media is a space for the performance of identities - a space that can be seen in many ways as theatrical’ (2016, p.3), then how does that urge for self-presentation play out in the context of contemporary mountain media?

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To offer one answer to this question I would like to consider the following short video, Wingsuit Jump in the North Wall of the Matterhorn,21 created with a headcam and posted on YouTube by the deceased Russian BASE jumper and wingsuiter, Valery Rozov (who died in 2017). It is one of several movies capturing wingsuiting from or around the Matterhorn. As a headcam video it naturally locates the jumper pivotally in the movie using two mounted-camera perspectives on his helmet spliced together with a little footage from the mountainside. From a launch point lower than the summit, the wingsuiter heads down the north face of the mountain for a descent lasting little more than a minute of film time (and not much more in real time). The stunt concludes with a soft parachute landing with Rozov touching down safely in the green pastures of Switzerland, backed by the image of the mountain behind. He ends the video with a brief statement to camera in Russian: ‘First jump in the wingsuit from the northern wall of the Matterhorn’,22 claiming what is in effect a first descent in a wingsuit, and marking the peak in a vernacular more commonly associated with lines up the mountain. This is clearly an act of dark play in a lifestyle sport. It is carried out by the dominant demographic in Wheaton’s categorisation—a white Western male, expressing an individualistic act of self-actualisation (Wheaton, 2004, pp.11–12)—and its popularity is perversely heightened by the everpresent likelihood of death (Rozov was alive when I first drafted this chapter). It may be a very modern form of mountain expression, but Rozov’s claiming of the first wingsuited descent of the Matterhorn is wholly recognisable as an act of ownership little different to that performed by Smith and Whymper in the Golden Age of Alpine activity. Interestingly, though, the mountain is far from lost in Rozov’s short film; indeed the reverse view of the landscape is preferred to the view ahead with the iconic triangular summit of the Matterhorn a constant reference point (Fig. 2). This celebration of mountain iconography is typical of videos documenting wingsuiting from the Matterhorn, and can also be seen in the films of American Jeb Corliss, Rozov’s rival in the Alps. From a helicopter launch, Corliss sped down the Hörnli ridge in his wingsuit in 2009, retracing Edward Whymper’s steps at a speed the Victorian engraver could not have comprehended.23 This feat has been observed by many tens of thousands and was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary (Neil and Campbell, 2009) but the status achieved by these wingsuiters using the massive distribution of digital assets is not solely accomplished through

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Fig. 2 The Matterhorn (Photo Zacharie Grossen. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Matterhorn_from_Domhütte_-_2.jpg#/media/File:Matterhorn_ from_Domhütte_-_2.jpg)

their own sporting audacity.24 It is also achieved through the carefully stage-managed associations with the mountain, its history, its aesthetic and its far more mature record of darkness and danger. Indeed this style of wingsuiting is called ‘proximity flying’ and defines itself in terms of the very close distances between land features and flyers.25 Following a worldfamous ridge, steeped in history and tragedy, adds an additional value to this proximity, beyond the raw danger of flying past, over and through environmental obstacles at high speed. One might call it topographical capital.26 Jeb Corliss expands, justifying his choice of the Matterhorn: It’s very interesting for me to fly from icons. It symbolizes an area, it symbolizes a place so when you do something there, you are becoming part of that place. (Neil and Campbell, 2009)

For Rozov, Corliss and the other flyers operating in the Alps, their audience may have shifted online, away from the Egyptian hall or from the Kleine Scheidegg balconies, but the motivation of a captive spectatorship remains a fundamental driver for this act of dark play. It is difficult to imagine anyone taking such risks without a permanent record ‘cached’

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for future prosperity—and the sponsors emblazoned on the underside of Rozov’s parachute would not, of course, be involved without it.27 Indeed one of the distinguishing features of this twenty-first-century example, is the absence of a national identity being performed: Rozov may be Russian but his allegiances are to his sponsors, Red Bull, not to Moscow. In the critical context of this chapter, social media allows for an almost infinite iteration of the dark play cycle Schechner outlines: ‘played, replayed, documented and now made public’ (2006, p.120). It also offers a new, digital type of ‘encompassing structure’, one which Geertz could never have been able to foresee but which nevertheless retains his distinction between the evidently deadly game in the centre of the activity and the frisson of safe-danger we experience watching it.

Conclusion These three Alpine examples, hailing from different eras and utilising very different technologies for their translation, help illustrate the potency of the acting–spectating dynamic in accounts of mountain sporting prowess. As Geertz’s anthropology of cockfighting and Wheaton’s sociology of sport both acknowledge, play involves the witnessing of an act—its interpreted presentation to others—and as such it is a mediated play. As this chapter has moved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the technologies available to the actors have engaged audiences in different ways: Smith via the proto-immersive stage space of the Egyptian hall and his canny use of take-home slide-sets; the Bellevue hotel with its tempting telescopes and focus for international journalism; and Valery Rozov with the largest potential audience of all thanks to the connecting technologies of the internet, YouTube’s facility for ‘mass-self communication’ (Van Dijk, 2012, p.182). Whilst it is unsurprising that audiences have grown exponentially over these three separate centuries, it is enlightening that they remain consistent in their pursuit of a mediated form of danger, a translated experience of depth and darkness. One way to explain this consistency in the motivations behind deep and dark play, is to align it with ideas of the sublime, so often associated with mountains and culture since Edmund Burke’s highly influential essay ‘A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful’ (first published in 1757). In his essay, Burke does not particularly concern himself with mountains other than noting their vastness as

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one cause of the sublime (Burke, 1887, p.148). But, speaking more generally, he saw the relationship between distance and danger as essential to producing feelings of the sublime: When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience. (Burke, 1887, p.111)

In his chapter dedicated to why people climb mountains, sociologist Richard G Mitchell locates the sublime as one of four reasons.28 For Mitchell, Burke’s distancing modifications are inherently about ‘creative expression’ in the accounts climbers make of their achievements. This is because they: Reinterpret, reform, and recreate the painful, the frightening, the problematic subjective experience [of mountaineering] - first as a subjectively manageable challenge and finally as an accomplished deed. (Mitchell, 1983, p.144)

In more recent scholarship, Robert McFarlane argues for a similar balancing act in his Mountains of the Mind: It would be impossible to appreciate the Sublime if one were, say, hanging by a handhold from a cliff face. But if you came just near enough to a waterfall or a cliff edge to suggest to your imagination the possibility of self-destruction, then you would feel a sublime rush. (McFarlane, 2003, p.75)

From the spectator’s point of view, the shifting technologies considered in this chapter help produce that notion of the ‘just near-enough’; the dioramas, telescopes and YouTube interfaces are in effect various ‘encompassing’ (hence distancing) structures—one can always look away.29 In the field when you directly experience a landscape which is in McFarlane’s terms ‘self-destructive’, it is the imagination which serves that function. This tension between actual harm and its imaginative shadow explains why dark play is not a ‘category mistake’ as Eberle would have it (Eberle, 2014, p.228). For play in this context enhances the darkness whilst keeping the spectator safe. Play provides a platform for the performance of otherwise unpalatable or unbelievable situations just as it ceases to be play—deep or dark—when things go wrong, on the wing or in the ring.

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Notes 1. This is because dark play negates the fun Eberle considers to be a prerequisite of play. He does not consider the possibility of darkness being a cause of pleasure for some people. 2. Compare Ackermann’s citation of Alvarez with Geertz’s actual words: ‘Bentham’s concept of deep play is found in his Theory of Legislation. By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all. If a man whose fortune is a thousand pounds (or ringgits) wages five hundred of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the one who stands to lose. In genuine deep play, this is the case for both parties’ (Geertz, 1972, p.15). 3. Annapurna’s fatality to summit ratio rate is 38%; K2’s is 23.2%. Source: http://www.nerverush.com/the-14-highest-peaks-in-the-world/. 4. ‘Climbers have a rare ability to gamble the rest of their lives on one step, and for this they are both admired and sometimes regarded as vainly stupid. They take to the extreme the notion of Deep Play, whereby what they stand to win from their gamble can never be equaled by the enormity of what they will lose’ (Simpson, 1997, p.196). 5. The other categories are: ‘houses of horror’, ‘fields of fatality’, ‘tours of torment’ and ‘themed thanatos’, by which he means museum collections based on death and suffering (2009, p.11). 6. There is some dispute over the height of Mont Blanc (White Mountain) with a remeasuring happening every two years. It is possible to find heights for the mountain ranging from 4807 to 4810 metres. http:// www.chamonix.net/english/news/mont-blanc-shrinks. 7. Sixty bottles of Vin Ordinaire, six of Bordeaux, ten of St. George, fifteen of St. Jean, eight of cognac, one bottle of syrup of raspberries, six bottles of lemonade, two of champagne, twenty loaves, ten small cheeses, six packets of chocolate, of sugar, prunes, raisins, salt, four wax candles, six lemons, four legs and shoulders of mutton, six pieces of veal, one of beef, eleven large and thirty-five small fowls, spread amongst sixteen guides (cf. Smith, 1853, pp.154–155). 8. Clearly authenticity was not an essential criterion for Smith, as the village overlooked by Mont Blanc, from which Smith launched his ascent, is Chamonix not Grindelwald. Thanks to Dr Scott Palmer for pointing this out to me. 9. Hansen dates Smith’s last lecture series at 1858 and there is a record of a farewell lecture dated Tuesday 6 July 1858 (in Brotherton Special Collections, Leeds). On returning from travelling in China Smith slowly reduced the Mont Blanc content to include reportage of his travels further afield and after summer 1858, performing right up until he died on 23 May 1860 (Fitzsimons 1967, p.185).

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10. There is insufficient space to deal with the complex and fascinating area of British mountaineering, colonialism and empire in this chapter, which reached its peak in the middle of the twentieth century and the coincidence of the first ascent of Everest and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Peter Hansen’s The Summits of Modern Man is an excellent beginning to reading around this subject and specifically Chapter Nine, pages 245–274. 11. Most notably the deaths of Toni Kurtz, Andreas Hinterstoisser, Willy Angere and Edi Rainer (in 1936) and Max Sedelmayr and Karl Mehringer (in 1935). 12. In the same vein, cf. Joe Tasker in the Savage Arena: describing another Eiger classic, The Climb up to Hell: ‘Rather than being deterred by the dangers… The book provided an inspiration for my own first steps’ (Tasker and Boardman, 1995, p.18). 13. Hotel Bellevue is the most famous and long-standing Kleine Scheidegg hotel, having held a position at the foot of the Eiger since 1840. http:// scheidegg-hotels.ch/index1eng.php. 14. It is a story which has seen numerous dramatizations for its heart-breaking account of Kurtz dying just meters away from help. See for instance the German historical fiction film Nordwand (2008). 15. Mallory’s body was found by Konrad Anker on an expedition in 1999. Irvine’s body remains undiscovered. 16. The good news occasioned by this telescopic long view then sparked extensive partying in Chamonix, bankrolled by Sir Robert Peel, many hours before the climbing party themselves returned. 17. The Bellevue hotel is clearly aware of its international status as a viewing spot and centre for the climbing history of the Eigerwand enshrined in the Guardian’s review of 2010 posted on the site: ‘The Bellevue’s corridors heave with climbing lore and the ghosts of Eiger Alpinists, long lost’. http://scheidegg-hotels.ch/berichte/guardian2010.pdf. 18. The rope is still available for view at the Matterhorn Museum, Zermatt. https://www.zermatt.ch/en/Media/Media-corner/Photo-database/Vil lage/Matterhorn-Museum-Zermatlantis/Matterhorn-Museum-Tragedyof-First-Ascent-Matterhorn-Broken-Rope. 19. Wingsuits have been commercially available since 1998 (Davis, 2013, p.278). 20. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRrLwT8Im8g; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1llLj2q0k8; https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=moBJMGNSql4; https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=6VLI5iIs0Qo; http://www.climbkilimanjaroguide.com/gopro-kiliman jaro/. 21. The film is located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2IkI4 QuCuM&feature=youtu.be.

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22. My thanks are extended to Olya Petrakova for providing a translation for me. 23. https://youtu.be/h-lQh1_tUYM. 24. Rozov’s Matterhorn jump has had over 25,000 views; his wing-suit leap from Everest has had 2.9 million hits (as of July 2019). 25. Jeb Corliss explains the appeal of proximity flying in the Channel 4 documentary Daredevils: The Human Bird: ‘When I did the Christ Statue [in Rio de Janeiro] I was only close for a split second. When we get to Matterhorn, the entire flight down the ridge you are close to things’. 26. ‘In Principles of an Economic Anthropology’ (Bourdieu, 2005), Pierre Bourdieu, arguably the scholar most associated with expanding ideas of capital, lists twenty kinds of capital or power, from the best known ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ capital to the lesser cited ‘juridical’ and ‘organisational’ capital. Topographical capital is not considered. 27. Red Bull have built their brand on associations with high risk sports, including Formula 1, snowboarding, BMX and wingsuiting. 28. The others are ‘ridiculous’, ‘purposeful’ and ‘natural activity’ (Mitchell, 1983, p.140). 29. See Ann Colley’s Victorians in the Mountains (Colley, 2010, p.84) for an alternative view of the sublime and technology, with Smith’s stage show ‘vulgarising’ rather than intensifying feelings of the sublime.

References Ackermann, D. (1999) Deep Play. New York: Random. Allain, P. and Harvie, J. (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. Abingdon: Routledge. Alvarez, A. (1988) Feeding the Rat. London: Bloomsbury. Alvarez, A. (2007) Risky Business. London: Bloomsbury. Bentham, J. (1840) Theory of Legislation. Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Co. Bevin, D.J. (2008) The Struggle for Ascendancy: John Ruskin, Albert Smith and the Alpine Aesthetic. Exeter. Bourdieu, P. (2005) Principles of an Economic Anthropology. In The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 193–222. Bruns, A. (2007) Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. In: Proceedings Creativity & Cognition, p. 6. Bruns, A. (2008) Blogs. Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Burke, E. (1887) A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful with an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions. In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 1. London: John C. Nimmo.

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Colley, A.C. (2010) Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime. Abingdon: Routledge. Conefrey, M. and Jordan, T. (2001) Mountain Men: The Remarkable Climbers and Determined Eccentrics Who First Scaled the World’s Most Famous Peaks. Boston: Da Capo. Davis, S. (2013) Learning to Fly: An Uncommon Memoir of Human Flight, Unexpected Love, and One Amazing Dog. New York: Simon & Schuster. Eberle, S. (2014) The Elements of Play: Toward a Philosophy and a Definition of Play. Journal of Play, 6 (2), pp. 214–233. https://doi.org/10.3724/sp.j. 1123.2014.06016. Fitzsimmons, R. (1967) The Baron of Picadilly: The Travels and Entertainments of Albert Smith—1816 to 1860. London: Geoffrey Bles. Foley, M. and Lennon, J.J. (1996) JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2 (4), pp. 198–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527259608722175. Frison-Rouche, R. and Jouty, S. (1996) A History of Mountain Climbing. Paris: Flammarton. Geertz, C. (1972) Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Myth, Symbol and Culture, 101 (1), pp. 1–37. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Hansen, P.H. (1995) Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain. Journal of British Studies, 34 (3 (July)), pp. 300–324. https://doi.org/10.1086/386080. Hansen, P.H. (2013) Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrer, H. (2005) White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger. London: HarperPerennial. Hind, C. (2010) Dark and Deep Play in Performance Practice. Leeds. Judson, S. (2007) The Alps. Lennon, J. and Foley, M. (2000) Dark Tourism. London: Continuum. Lonergan, P. (2016) Theatre and Social Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave. MacFarlane, R. (2003) Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination. London: Granta. McNee, A. (2015) The Cockney Who Sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited. Available at www. victoriansecrets.co.uk. Mitchell, R.G.J. (1983) Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mortensen, T.E., Linderoth, J. and Brown, A.M. (eds.) (2015) The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments. Abingdon: Routledge. Neil, R. and Campbell, L. (2009) Daredevils: The Human Bird. Channel 4.

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Newby, E. (1977) Great Ascents. Vancouver: Douglas, David and Charles. Pritchard, P. (1997) Deep Play: A Climber’s Odyssey from Llanberis to the Big Walls. London: Baton Wicks. Schechner, R. (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (2006) Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Sharpley, R. (2009) Dark Tourism and Political Ideology: Towards a Governance Model. In The Darker Side of Travel—The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, pp. 145–163. Available at: https://books.google.com/books? id=ZCIGvG9tCw8C&pgis=1. Simpson, J. (1988) Touching the Void. London: Jonathan Cape. Simpson, J. (1997) Dark Shadows Falling. London: Jonathan Cape. Simpson, J. (2003) The Beckoning Silence. London: Random House. Smith, A. (1853) The Story of Mont Blanc. New York: G.P. Putnam and Co. Stephen, L. (1871) The Playground of Europe. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Stone, P. and Sharpley, R. (2008) Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective. Annals of Tourism Research, 35 (2), pp. 574–595. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.annals.2008.02.003. Stone, P. R. and Sharpley, R. (eds.) (2009) The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Tasker, P. and Boardman, J. (1995) The Boardman Tasker Omnibus. London: Baton Wicks. Van Dijk, J. (2012) The Network Society. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Wheaton, B. (ed.) (2004) Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity and Difference. Abingdon: Routledge. Wheaton, B. (2013) The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports. Abingdon: Routledge. Whymper, E. (1871) Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69. London: J. Murray. Williams, N. and Walker, K. (2009) Switzerland. Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publishers.

Performing Mountains: General Conclusion

In a gathering of distinguished thinkers of mountain studies held at Cambridge University in 2018, Bernard Debarbieux, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at the Université de Genèvre, made an interesting observation as part of his keynote address: ‘Mountains’, he suggested, ‘are particularly good for thinking about the global’.1 It is a capacity shared by the theatre: a medium which ‘stretches back more than 20,000 years’ and which is, perhaps, ‘the most globalised expression of culture there is’ (Rebellato, 2009, p.10). Debarbieux was not just referring to mountains’ visibility across the world—the presence of towering ranges from the Rockies and the Andes in the West, to Australia’s Great Dividing Range and New Zealand’s Southern Alps in the East. He was also proposing that the study of mountains provokes a certain critical perception of the world, a particular way of thinking, both culturally and geographically. Mountains are, he argues: ‘a category of knowledge, practice and political action’, or in Jon Marco Church’s words, ‘a social construct’ (Church, 2016, p.387) as much as a quantifiable mass. In Performing Mountains I have argued that the debate around the social construction of mountains is missing a key component—the artistic production of theatre, performance and the live arts—and with this book I have sought to illustrate the significance of that omission, in terms of the diversity of performance practice, its cultural value and its impact on audiences. From the domestic to the epic scale, I have shown that there is prolific arts activity dedicated to mountains by arts

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practitioners—within and beyond the disciplinary domains of theatre and performance. I have demonstrated Mountain Arts’ connectedness to important debates in several fields and the layered interdisciplinary thinking needed to understand them. These debates, elaborated here in the General Conclusion include: the place and value of practice in generating new understandings of mountains; the centrality of liminality to mountains, both as an idea and an experience; the use of mountains as a stage for the performance of national identity, colonial power and gender; the impact and evolution of technology—from the Victorian to the digital age—and the complex interplay between mountain interpretation and social media; the capacity of mountain topographies to operate dramaturgically and for that dramaturgy to inform theatre practice and the view of mountains as sites of economic exploitation and of environmental sensitivity. These are globally relevant ‘categories of knowledge’ and Performing Mountains exposes just how intrinsic they are to mountain cultural production, historically and today. In a very real way, then, this book constitutes a plea to the Mountain Studies community, largely STEM and Social Science based, to engage more deeply with the culture in mountain culture and to seek out the critical and practical tools in order to do so. This is not just a self-serving call for the Arts to be ushered in from the margins and recognised for their intrinsic value. It is a demonstration, hopefully justified by the contents of this book, that mountains have been uniquely understood through the practices of theatre and live performance—a mode of knowledge production which is valued across disciplines, and not least by cultural geographers. ‘Practices can enable creativity and communication’, geographers John Horton and Peter Kraftl argue, and as such they ‘are the origin of all meaning’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2014, p.141). But mountains are not just the passive recipients of meaning-making by Mountain Arts practitioners. Much of the work analysed here has evidenced how mountains have fundamentally guided individuals engaged in mountain practices, whether it be through the agency accorded to their form and context in rituals (2.1), their influence on siterelated choreographies (2.3) or in the dialogue they achieve with those in close proximity to their features or affordances (3.1)—‘the complementarity of the animal and the environment’ as Gibson terms it (Gibson, 1986, p.127). Performing Mountains is threaded through with examples of this mutuality and collectively they testify to a relationship more complex than

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the cultural geomorphological term ‘cultural overlay’ (Gregory, 2006, p.186) implies. I suggested in the General Introduction (Part 1) that a key aim of the book was to examine cultural activity in the mountains not as overlay but as interplay and the evidence gathered here strongly suggests this proposed distinction is valuable. The interplay of mountains and performance has been prominent throughout. It is evident methodologically in the practice-led research approach and site-sensitivity seen in Snowdonia (2.3). It is visible in the interactions between humankind and mountain in the practices of cairn building, climbing-wall design and peak bagging or Wainwrighting (Handrails 1–6). Interplay underlines my analytical approach, taking Bernbaum’s ‘clusters’ of mountain themes for instance (Bernbaum, 2006, p.307) to examine a continuum of mountain ritual practice or Fuch’s ecocritical interpretation of ‘climate’ to examine a new canon of mountain dramas, finding connection points across otherwise incongruent pairings of plays (2.2). At the geological level, in terms of plate tectonics, interplay (or more accurately violent collision) is responsible for many of the mountain ranges encountered in this book, the details of which are narrated in the longitudinal sections of the Mountain Drama chapter. These movements, although part of a process of orogenesis begun millions of years ago, nevertheless retain a fascination for artists working with mountains, researching the deep time of their local mountain environments (in the case of artists Shearing, Wilson and Lawrence) or for playwrights, Henrik Ibsen and Norman Nicholson, translating geodynamics into mythic terms. Such a movement from the somewhat detached or hierarchical model of ‘overlay’ to a more balanced dynamic of interplay is in line with David Smethurst’s call, cited in Part 1, for a rejection of the study of mountains as ‘static’ (Smethurst, 2000, p.37). It is equally in keeping with an ecological ethos of research, to which this book subscribes. As Giannachi and Stewart note in Performing Nature: what is so crucial in ecology, and what is subsequently so interesting for the arts, is the possibility of an analysis that focuses on […] inter-relationships, on the in-between of the human and nature. (Giannachi and Stewart, 2006, p.20)

The nature of the space ‘in-between’ human and nature has been extensively explored in Performing Mountains, articulated as a liminality which is at the very core of mountain culture and mountain topography. Its

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most prominent symbol is the summit cairn. Positioned at the apex of a peak and marking the immeasurable space between climb and descent, the cairn is much more than a simple pile of stones or a platform for triangulation. For mountain actors, the cairn is an object of veneration, transition, ritual healing and performative display. It is a material manifestation of the essence of mountainness, a magnet for those who want to mark their achievements and a haunting absence for those who fail. In this book the cairn has been described as a ‘mountain in microcosm’ (2.1), not just because of its pyramidal form but because it metonymically ‘stands in’ for many other mountain characteristics: the interplay of growth and erosion, the essence of orogeny; the natural location for ceremonial expressions of sacredness; the symbolisation of national borderlines and legislative boundaries and the trigger for heightened acts of performance. Fittingly, cairns elicit a host of expressive behaviours: they are a place for celebration, gymnastics and acts of exhibition, a focal point for historic acts of self-declared victory under the gaze of the telescope-user, and a platform for selfies, Instagram images and other forms of creative social media.2 Liminality, though, is not just restricted to the cairn’s many meanings. As a theoretical lynchpin to Ritual Studies, in this book it has been interrogated as a mainstay of mountain rituals, helping to explain the global popularity of mountain sites as platforms for transformative practice, both healing (Shugendo) and harmful (the capacocha) (2.1). Often located just close enough to sites of urban concentration, the fleeting escape to a place of isolation is part of the mountain’s appeal, for instance in the training regimes of Grotowski in Poland and in Korean p’ansori. In both, trainees exploit their location betwixt an often-demonised civilisation and a romanticised wild to discover instinctual behaviours and expressions which have been hidden or suppressed (3.1). A similar space of locational ambiguity, on the borderline of the urban and rural, finds dramatic expression in Nicholson’s ‘Interlude’ in Old Man of the Mountains , Patrick White’s Night on Bald Mountain and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, proof perhaps that there is a sensible power to the summit-as-border which is shared across ritual and drama. The fact that national borders so often bisect mountains makes them highly politicised spaces. This book has built on the work of scholars such as Peter Hansen (2013), Jonathan Westaway (2013) and Veronica della Dora (2016) to identify some of the ways in which these highly strategic regions of the world are woven into geopolitical and gender discourses.

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My focus of course, unlike theirs, has been exclusively on the contribution theatre and performance make to these debates and there are several salient examples in Performing Mountains. From Peter Shaffer’s battleof-the-empires epic, Royal Hunt of the Sun, which presents the Andes as the dramaturgical ground of conflict between Spain and the Incas, to the Communist state-sanctioned Taking Mount Tiger, the stage has been used both to critique and to propagandise expressions of national power, the mountains an inescapable emblem of that power struggle. Rituals such as the annual memorial ceremony on Great Gable have been shown to do the same with the inaugural ceremony in 1924 mixing behavioural gatekeeping with the promise of future liberties. For Elinor Cook, the colonial history of British mountain activity provides the perfect backdrop to challenge its legacy of masculine heroism, based on partial narratives and warped historiographies (2.2). Pilgrims exposes these tropes by concentrating on the domestic front (a love triangle) but the point she is making carries much further: where mountains have been narrated as a playground for a limited number of entitled men, climbing futures need to be written differently. Practitioners Simone Kenyon and Louise Ann Wilson engage in similar debates from very different perspectives, looking to replace mountain masculinities with what Wilson calls a feminine sublime (Wilson, 2019) and Kenyon sees as an antidote to the ‘adrenaline fuelled activity’ of mountaineering’s past (2.3 and 3.1).3 Much of Part 3, evidences the centrality of technology to mountain culture, be it analogue or digital, material or virtual. Technology has been seen in all its contradictory guises: as an enabler (in improving access to hard-to-reach areas, for instance), and a threat (increasing footfall and carbon footprint through social media virality); as a mediator (translating one man’s experience of Mont Blanc to an audience of hundreds of thousands), and an intrusion (telescopes turning climbers into actors whether or not they want to be); as a means to develop high-level vertical skills (starting on Don Robinson’s Leeds Climbing Wall), and as an excuse not to try (the skywalk as corporate commodifier of an architectural sublime). Of course, technological advances impact performance practice as much as they do climbing and this is no truer than in the space between— the hybrid practice of Vertical Dance, for instance. Kate Lawrence’s sitesensitive version of Vertical Dance, like the Yosemite climbing history narrated in the General Introduction, is evidence of the multiple perspectives needed fully to understand what is at stake: geology; land use; sport;

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leisure and tourism mix forcefully with the history and culture of the region she is working in (Snowdonia), as I have shown in Part 2.3. Yet another liminality, as I expressed it in the General Introduction, is the position of the ‘aspirant mountaineer’ (Beedie, 2007, p.30), not quite in the cultural milieu of mountaineers and climbers but sufficiently informed to understand many of its references and to consider critically its assumptions and orthodoxies. This positionality, a given of my own experience and history, is one I have nevertheless adopted as consciously and creatively as possible. In the field of cultural geography it is reminiscent of John Wylie’s evocative definition of ‘landscape’ which, he says, denotes a necessary tension between ‘proximity and distance’, ‘self and world’ and ‘demands that we produce accounts which dapple between interiority and exteriority, perception and materiality’ (Merriman et al., 2008, p.203). In the theatre, such a poised position of reflexivity is occupied by the dramaturg, the role I adopted myself on the practice-led research piece Black Rock (2.3). More generally, though, the practice of dramaturgy has informed many of the discussions in this book—from walking the Fairfield Horseshoe in Cumbria (Handrail 3), to characterising the ‘essentials’ of Mountain Drama (2.2); from the artistry of climbingwall design (3.1) to understanding the recent popularity of skywalks in China and North America (3.2). Since, as Magda Romanska argues, ‘the dramaturgical method of research and analysis can have broader application across multiple arts forms and disciplines’ (Romanska, 2015, p.7), this is perhaps unsurprising for theatre disciplinarians but the dramaturgical lens yields insights for Mountain Studies too. These insights are best expressed using the term I coined with reference to wingsuiting in the Alps: the existence of a topographical capital , a site of geographical power and influence produced by the specific mix of its natural features, histories and previous mediations (3.3). A dramaturgical sensibility—a research method designed to find connections—can expose the construction of this topographical capital and help explain why places are imbued with power. The Hörnli ridge example on the Matterhorn, is a particularly clear instance of this mix but I have identified a number of other examples in Performing Mountains —the use by Louise Ann Wilson of the natural amphitheatre of Cym Llan in The Gathering/ Yr Helfa, for instance (2.3); the conscious siting of the skywalk in Zhangjiajie close to Tianmen mountain’s iconic Heaven’s Gate, (3.2) or the decision to perform ritual sacrifice in one of the most inaccessible and awe-inducing peaks in the Andes, Llullaillaco (2.1).

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A critical and unwanted outcome of topographical capital is that, as with all forms of capital, it can be exploited for purely economic ends. The earliest form of this exploitation explored in this book is Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc (1851), netting a staggering £300,000 in the seven years it ran and ensuring, in Ann Colley’s assessment, that ‘not just Mont Blanc, but mountains in general had entered the marketplace’ (Colley, 2010, p.91). The commodification and exploitation of mountains has been a central theme of this book, and for the majority of the examples this is, contra-Smith, cause for concern rather than celebration. With its transforming backdrop of cardboard mountains, dotted with oil rigs by the end of the play, John McGrath’s Cheviot illustrates in stark scenographic terms the essence of this anxiety; and its partner piece in this section of the book, Nicholson’s Old Man, articulates a similarly depressing vision of the mountains as sites for corporate greed, the rivers which flow from the mythic Carmel Fell blighted with pollution and turned into ‘middens’ or slag heaps (2.2). Patrick White comments too (although more indirectly) on the human and environmental cost of technological ‘development’, lamenting the impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs whilst forcing a reconsideration of the assumed infinitude of the Australian mountains. Other examples are more complicit in acts of exploitation and indicate the potency of the idea of a mountain as a ‘sentinel’, or guide to the immediate future. Invasive architectural developments in the form of skywalks and footfall-encouraging sponsorship of extreme sports (in the case of Red Bull) indicate that the mountains are just as prone to the excesses of late capitalism as so-called urban spaces and communities. Indeed, both skywalks and the social media surrounding lifestyle sports are actively blurring any remaining distinction between wild and developed spaces. This blurring has a long history, stretching back to the first industrialisation of mountain spaces. Pike of Stickle, for instance, a peak in the Lake District, was a prehistoric site of axe-production complete with custom-made cavefactory (Wainwright, 2016, Pike of Stickle, p.3). Incursive development is intensifying in the twenty-first century, however, a view which is more than evident in the image of a glittering Range Rover parked at the doors of Heaven’s Gate (3.2). These examples, critical or complicit, do not just evidence an expression of the environmental changes being experienced in mountain regions. They are not simply instances of cultural production which comment on, or symbolise, an existing and deepening problem.

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They are enmeshed or woven into this problem. The Mountain Arts considered in this book, to reiterate my point above, are in play with the rest of the conditions within which a mountain sits. As such they constitute an integral part of its ecology. Several of these thematic threads are embedded in the Handrails, and my final concluding reflection, before the last word is had in the closing handrail, Endings, is on these exercises of ‘interiority and exteriority’, as Wylie might describe them. Peak bagging is essentially performative, each cairn touched for the first time can never be touched anew; each date marked against the peak cannot be unmarked. That performativity is a motivation and a curse. Never being able to turn back twelve years of progress, ensures that the exercise becomes increasingly loaded with significance, failure more and more intolerable. The nonsensical task of notching off someone else’s list of preferred mountains is internalised, until it’s almost forgotten, replaced by an unarticulated but tangibly felt sense of personal duty—a fooling-of-oneself that this is an unavoidable, vital thing to do. I suspect this is the sentiment, on a much grander scale, which underlies many ‘achievements’ in the mountains—completing the seven summits or the fourteen 8000ers, for instance (Handrail 3)—the promise to oneself, and to audiences gathered virtually or in person that completion is, must be, guaranteed. Many of those I have met have critiqued Wainwrighting as yet another act of appropriation and ownership, albeit on a smaller scale than those on Everest in 1953, or on the Matterhorn a century or so earlier. Doubtless it may appear to be that from the outside. From within, though,— the view I have tried to capture in these six short pieces of ‘grounded’ writing (Ingold, 2011, p.45)—each peak is less of a bagged trophy and more like … an acquaintance: sometimes kind, at others, not so kind. Whilst this may sound too much like dated anthropomorphism for some, I use the term guardedly both to express its emotional distance (acquaintances are very different from friends) and to evoke the word’s other main meaning—‘knowledge gained from having personal or direct experience’ (OED). I am, we are, now acquainted with the Wainwrights by virtue of living with them for a dozen years. Peak bagging is in effect another practice, a practice which, like the mountain performance documented here, converts experience into understanding.

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Notes 1. Global Mountains conference, Cambridge University, 5 July 2018. 2. For one typical example see this posting on Facebook: https:// www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160726801225704&set=gm. 2201846143406049&type=3&theater&ifg=1. 3. https://www.creativeboom.com/features/into-the-mountains-a-uniquelive-artwork-brings-song-and-dance-to-the-cairngorms/.

References Beedie, P. (2007) Legislators and Interpreters: An Examination of Changes in Philosophical Interpretations of “Being a Mountaineer”. In McNamee, M. (ed.) Philosophy, Risk and Adventure Sports. London: Routledge, pp. 25–42. Bernbaum, E. (2006) Sacred Mountains: Themes and Teachings. Mountain Research and Development, 26 (4), pp. 304–309. Available at: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1659/0276-4741%282006%2926% 5B304%3ASMTAT%5D2.0.CO%3B2. Church, J.M. (2016) Review of “The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present” by Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz. Mountain Research and Development, 36 (3), pp. 387–388. Colley, A.C. (2010) Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime. Abingdon: Routledge. della Dora, V. (2016) Mountain: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Giannachi, G. and Stewart, N. (eds.) (2006) Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts. Bern: Peter Lang. Gibson, J.J. (1986) The Theory of Affordances. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (citeulike-article-id:3508530). Gregory, K.J. (2006) The Human Role in Changing River Channels. Geomorphology, 79 (3–4), pp. 172–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2006. 06.018. Hansen, P. (2013) Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horton, J. and Kraftl, P. (2014) Cultural Geographies: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Merriman, P. et al. (2008) Landscape, Mobility, Practice. Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2), pp. 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14649360701856136.

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Rebellato, D. (2009) Theatre and Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Romanska, M. (ed.) (2015) The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. Abingdon: Routledge. Smethurst, D. (2000) Mountain Geography. Geographical Review, 90 (1), pp. 35–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/216174. Wainwright, A. (2016) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (Walkers Edition): The Central Fells. Book Three. London: Frances Lincoln. Westaway, J. (2013) Mountains of Memory, Landscapes of Loss: Scafell Pike and Great Gable as War Memorials, 1919–24. Landscapes, 14 (2), pp. 174–193 (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.1179/1466203513z.00000000019. Wilson, L.A. (2019) Dorothy Wordsworth and Her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy: A Feminine “Material” Sublime Approach to the Creation of Walking-Performance in Mountainous Landscapes. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 24 (2), pp. 109–119.

Handrail 6

Endings: Pillar (W214)

I had been rehearsing this moment in my mind for years. Once it was clear the finish line was in sight, a host of beautifully crafted endings emerged as contenders for the last chapter of our story— although none of them, I have to admit, included the most popular concluding mountain, Great End. There were stories of circularity—finishing where we began, on Pavey Ark, via its unremarkable neighbour Thunacar Knott; stories of sentimentality—revisiting Silver How as a four, after only three of us could manage it 8 years previously; and stories of abject cowardice—leaving the dreaded Yewbarrow with its hellish exit crag until last. But the truth of the matter was that none of these imaginings came to pass. Injuries, impenetrable mist and complicated lives conspired instead to deliver us in to the same valley as Yewbarrow (Wasdale), but to climb a mountain which had never been on the finale list: Pillar. Twelve years almost to the day had passed between our first Wainwright peak and this, number 214. As soon as it was elevated to last place Pillar made perfect sense, its appropriateness subject to all manner of retrospective justifications. In terms of its size, its majesty, its commanding position in

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the valley, Pillar was ‘just right’ but the truth was that this had very little to do with strategy—for all our recent training of mind and body—and much more to do with the ever-decreasing list of options open to us, once the last twenty peaks on Wainwright’s list became the target. Almost imperceptibly, the two years between Skiddaw and this finale day had steadily constrained our capacity to improvise and we were now left with a handful of final narratives: Pillar was the best of a rather arbitrary bunch, including the well-known Scafell (neighbour to the largest peak in England, Scafell Pike) and the much more obscure peaks of Grey Friar and Cold Pike. With all the emphasis I have laid in this book on the storytelling capacity of the Lake District fells—their natural topographical drama—I would have liked to have said that Pillar, the mountain which ‘dominates the sunset area of Lakeland superbly’ (Wainwright, 2005, Pillar, p.3) was carefully chosen for the twilight of our project but, perhaps more fittingly and not to be too mystical about it, Pillar chose us. And when I say ‘us’, who is that, in any case? Throughout this series of threaded short stories I have consciously obscured the details of our group, spurred on perhaps by misplaced ethics or a sense of quasi-objectivity. But these interventions in Performing Mountains are meant to be sensory interjections, revealing qualities of the mountains which are ‘chaotic and all about feeling and aesthetics’ (Ingram, 2015, p.12), as I noted in Beginnings (Handrail 1). There is no getting away from the fact that those feelings have been generated in large part by the particular grouping with whom I have enjoyed these 214 mountains—my wife, Ceri and our two sons, Harri and George—no escaping that this particular ensemble—no, family—transformed though it may have been over the years, has shaped my experience more than anything. Certainly, the rule of kicking the cairn together led to very significant challenges, extending the enjoyment as well as leading to one or two ‘chaotic’ moments, including a near-death experience on the

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rain-soaked, glassy slopes of Seathwaite Fell. But it bound us together in a unique intersubjective clan, a mountain cult on a tiny scale, sharing experiences which are ultimately incommunicable to others, no matter how hard I have tried in these handrails. In situations such as these, in the interstice of sensation and meaning, feelings become ‘embodied in an object’ according to ritual theorist Randall Collins, a process which helps to prolong such sentiments in the solidity of a symbol (Collins, 2004, p.37). The power of that embodiment, concentrated as it was into the same object over a dozen years, only became fully palpable to me in the last moments of our walk up Pillar. All was familiar before that. Tensions over finding a car space in Wasdale Head were replaced by an urgency to get going. We already knew the start of the walk as we had taken the same path up to Black Sail Pass three years earlier, finding ourselves in a semitreacherous red-stone chimney to scale the north face of Kirk Fell. The established pattern of Harri and George ahead, with myself and Ceri some 50 metres behind was once again in place and the rhythm of ascent was set for the day. Once we had gained the ridge leading up from the pass we spotted the series of rusty gateposts, barely reminiscent of a fence, leading the way right up to the summit. They formed an eerie leitmotif as we ascended over multiple terrains, from slippery scree, to gentle grass terraces, to large rock scrambles. I found myself thinking how unnecessary this handrail was in the warm clear sunshine (Fig. 1). On every walk the boys, men now of course, habitually stopped at forks in the path where decisions needed to be made. Once at the cairn they would perch next to it, waiting for us to catch up to bag the peak together. Sometimes the wait was long, although this never seemed to stretch their patience. But this time, as Ceri and I came over the last of a number of brows before the summit, both were hanging back as if there was trouble ahead, even though the path was clear and the cairn way in the distance.

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Fig. 1 The fence up Pillar (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

The cairn. The last cairn we would touch together on this twelveyear adventure. The object which had shadowed our lives, shaped our summers, and punctuated our wanderings for a dozen years was now close enough for all of us to see. Instinctively these two men, untutored in rites of passage, had felt the need to mark this territory, to define the extent of the liminal space which sat between us and completion—a respectful 25 metres or so, leading up to the prominent and shapely pillar on Pillar.

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And then, in that moment of transition, sensitively if unwittingly crafted by my sons, there were two disasters: the cairn was occupied and the mist coming down. ‘No! No! No!’—I wanted it to be perfect, I wanted to cry the tears I had imagined crying. I wanted the closure, the dénouement we deserved, not to be hovering around the periphery waiting for someone to pack their rucksack and put away their guidebook. Most of all I wanted the vista. ‘All the major mountain systems can be seen except Coniston’ (Wainwright, 2005, Pillar, p.17), Wainwright notes of the view, and this was going to be denied us, again, just like on Scafell, Seathwaite Fell, Glaramara, Grasmoor, Great Gable and on all the others. We dragged our heels, prolonging our enjoyment of the space between beginning and ending, suppressing our worst territorial instincts. Then, all of a sudden, the flat top of Pillar emptied; four hands tapped the trig point, champagne flowed down the side of the cairn, the tiny cult with their odd rules were embracing and the mist lifted, just a bit, just enough to unveil the edited highlights of our last twelve years. There was Ceri’s fortieth birthday on Haystacks; there was my same birthday, a year earlier on Fairfield; there was my fiftieth—the terrifying Stirrup Crag off Yewbarrow, where we narrowly avoided a call to Wasdale Mountain Rescue and clung together at its bottom sick with guilt; there was a fragment of Bowfell, 11 years our favourite, and there was Great Gable, unshrouded now, its great grey mass like the head of an elephant hiding its trunk. Everywhere we looked was now part of an epic shared story, drawn out beyond any of our expectations. What lay before us, constructed on the fly by the mist and the wind, was a mountain bildungsroman, a coming of age story for all our ages. It was the perfect ending. And of course I’d tell it that way (Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2 The summit cairn on Pillar (Photo by Jonathan Pitches)

References Collins, R. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ingram, S. (2015) Between the Sunset and the Sea. London: William Collins. Wainwright, A. (2005c) A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Western Fells. London: Frances Lincoln.

Glossary (or Handrail 7)

For those new to mountains, this short glossary offers concise explanations of the climbing and mountain terms used in the book. It does not provide further explanations of the performance-based terminologies narrated in the book. Readers looking for this guidance may consult (Allain and Harvie, 2006, 2014). Belay and Belayer The system used to protect a climber from falling, including the friction device used to slow the rope attached to a climber’s harness. A belayer is the person responsible for operating the system, operating from the foot of the climb (or at a higher belay station) to protect their partner. Bouldering An intensified short form of climbing, performed on small crags or on indoor walls without ropes. Climb Grading (E9 6C) Climbs are graded in different ways to help climbers judge their difficulty in advance. The UK uses a two-part system. The first (e.g. E9, Extremely Severe to the 9th level) gives a sense of the overall

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difficulty; the second (e.g. 6C) indicates the hardest technical move in the climb. Col The lowest part between two peaks, often a mountain pass. Cwm A deep sided hollow or bowl at the end of a mountain valley, carved by glaciation. Also known as a cirque or corrie. Crux The toughest move, or sequence of moves, in a climb; the place of greatest danger. Fell From the Norse, fell and/or fjall: a high hill mountain, or barren landscape. Most commonly used in Northern England (Cumbria), Scotland and Scandinavia. First ascensionist/First ascent (FA) The first climber to complete a climbing route or climb a summit. Reserves the right to name the route and for it to be catalogued as such in climbing guides. GoPro Manufacturer of HD (High Definition) action cameras often associated with extreme sports. These can be mounted on the body or on a helmet to produce a dizzying POV (Point of View). GPS Acronym for Global Positioning System originally designed by the US Military. GPS devices (including mobile phones) use satellite communications to help pinpoint a user’s location and to aid navigation from point to point. Kerkour Another word for a cairn, specifically in Morocco.

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OS (Ordnance Survey) The national mapping agency for Great Britain. The Ordnance Survey, or OS, originally formed for military reasons—to survey England’s southern coasts to help protect them from French invasion at the time of the Revolution in the late eighteenth century. The organisation is now the producer of highly detailed maps indicating public footpaths and rights of way, from the Isles of Scilly in the South to the Shetlands in the North. Peak Bagging (and Wainwrighting) The practice of recording (and sharing) evidence of climbing peaks from a predetermined list such as the Munros, the Hewitts or the Marilyns (see Handrail 3). Wainwrighting is the Cumbrian version of peak bagging undertaken in the English Lake District, in which hikers tick off 214 peaks recorded in: Wainwright’s Walking Guide to the Lake District Fells (Volume 1–7 ). Puja Ceremony A ceremony in which prayers are offered to deities to ask for safe passage. Puja rites are observed on several mountains, including Everest, to pay respects to the mountain and to ask for its blessing. A Tibetan monk leads the proceedings for the entire party of climbers and their Sherpa guides. Rake (as in North Rake) Originally a narrow path on which sheep are driven, there are several rakes in the Lake district, including some quite treacherous ones, such as Lord’s Rake on Scafell and Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark. Tarn A small mountain lake forming in a corrie or cirque Topo In climbing, a line drawing of a route (or routes) up a mountain or crag, serving as a guide for climbers.

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Trad climbing (versus Sport climbing) In Trad (or Traditional) climbing, climbers carry their own ‘protection’—devices to secure purchase points for a rope along a crack or weakness in the rock—and they remove them along the way. In Sport climbing these are already embedded in the rock in the form of bolts and the climber clips in to these. Trig (or Triangulation) Point A fixed platform, often in the form of a permanent cairn on a summit, designed to allow for the triangulation of measurements with two other points. First installed in the 1930s by the Ordnance Survey, a network of trig points covers the United Kingdom but has been largely superseded by new digital measurement technologies.

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Index

A Ackermann, Diane, 238, 240, 241 Deep Play, 240, 255 Acting, ix, 12, 27, 30, 45, 62, 68, 90, 93, 107, 115, 131, 190, 207, 237, 239, 253 Aeschylus, 141 AHRC, 140, 172 Almer, Christian, 246 Alps, 12–14, 17, 20, 21, 42, 52, 218, 239, 243, 244, 248, 250–252, 261, 266 Andes, vii, 28, 42, 52, 58, 61, 67, 75, 86–88, 96, 121, 261, 265, 266 Anthropocene, 12 Appalachian Mountains, 16, 84 Architecture, 15, 155, 156, 167, 216, 217, 219, 223–225, 228, 230, 232, 233 Artaud, Antonin, 196 Asaya, Fujita, 121 Hole, 121 At the End of the Clouds , 218

Auden, W.H. Ascent of F6, 120 Australia, vii, 16, 84, 85, 113, 114, 118, 121, 125, 261 Axworthy, Geoffrey, 146, 147, 170 Ayers Rock. See Uluru

B Bakestall, 185 Bald Mountain, 114, 117–120, 122, 125 Balmat, Jacques, 243 Barba, Eugenio, 142 Barf, 184 Barrington, Charles, 246 Barrow, 28, 123, 130–132, 184 Beckett, Samuel, 120 Happy Days , 120 Beedie, Paul aspirant mountaineer, 27, 266 Behrndt, Synne, 76, 82 Beisner-Martinez, Allisyn, 23

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. Pitches, Performing Mountains, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1

297

298

INDEX

Belay(ing), 66, 201, 277 Ben Cruachan, 19 Bentham, Jeremy, 240–242, 255 Theory of Legislation, 240, 255 Bernbaum, Edwin, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70–72, 86, 97, 99, 114, 123, 219, 263 Bharatamuni. See Natyasastra Birketts, 50, 79 Black Cuillin, 220, 225 Black Mountains, 139 Blencathra, 92 Boardman, Peter, 107 Body Weather, 193, 200, 201, 205 Bohren, Peter, 246 Bolting, 221 Borrowdale, 36, 55, 58 Borrowdale volcanics, 36 Bösch, Robert, 17 Bouldering, 187, 188, 201, 207, 211 Bowfell, 37, 38, 275 Brave Men’s Bridge, 218 Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 115, 116, 122 He who says no, 28, 115 He who says yes , 115 Brecon Beacons, 139, 141, 142 Bricklieve Mountains, 18 Bridwell, Jim, 23 Brith Gof, 140, 147 Brookes, Mike, 141, 147 Brook, Peter, 143–146, 170 Orghast , 144–147 Broom Fell, 184 Brown, Trisha, 155, 157, 158, 160, 173 Equipment Pieces , 159 Buckminster-Fuller, Richard, 143 Bulley, James, 161 Burke, Edmund, 223, 253, 254 Burko, Diane, 18 Butoh, 155, 173, 200 Byrne, John, 93, 94

C Cage, John, 144 Cairn, 15, 37, 38, 48–55, 67, 69, 70, 263, 264, 268, 272–276, 278, 280 Cairngorms, 188, 205 Caldwell, Tommy, 23 Calf Crag, 181 Cambrian Mountains, 16, 139, 141 Capacocha, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 71, 264 Caravaggio, 37 Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, 140, 147 Carl Side, 185 Carter, Claire, 161, 174 Cartmel Fell, 95, 122, 123 Castle Crag, 58 Catbells, 17, 130 Chamonix, 12, 16, 218, 243, 255, 256 Chekhov, Anton, 117 Cheviot hills, 92, 123 Choreography, 18, 56, 61, 62, 149, 155, 156, 170, 188, 198, 202, 204 Chumulunga. See Everest Clarke, Gillian, 149, 173 Climbing wall, 66, 111, 162, 187, 188, 199, 201, 204–211, 237, 263, 266 Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, 138, 161–163, 167, 204 Clouds Rest, 22 Cold Pike, 272 Coledale, 80, 130–132 Colorado Mountains, 17 Cook, Elinor, 86, 89–92, 120–122, 265 Pilgrims , 86, 89–92, 96, 120, 265 Copeau, Jacques, 196 Copeland, James, 94 These are my Mountains , 95

INDEX

Corliss, Jeb, 226, 234, 251, 252, 257 County Sligo, 18 Cousin, Gabriel, 196 Croz, Michel, 249 Crutzen, Paul, 12 Cultural geomorphology, 10, 263 Cultural transmission, 204 Cunningham, Merce, 144 Curious Directive, 84, 98, 99, 103–106, 120 Your Last Breath, 19, 98, 99, 103–106, 120, 123

D Dark tourism, 242 Da Silva, Marivi, 161 Dawes, Johnny, 138, 160–164, 167, 168, 173, 204, 210 Indian Face, 161, 163–168, 174 Debarbieux, Bernard, 261 Della Dora, Veronica, 20, 215, 224, 264 Diorama, 9, 244, 247, 249, 254 Donald Deweys, 76, 79 Donnellan, Declan, 217 Douglas, Francis, 249 Dove Crag, 77 Dramaturgy, viii, 11, 19, 76–78, 81–85, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101–104, 108, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120, 121, 145, 155, 206, 216, 219, 225, 262, 265, 266 Drury, Chris, 16

E Easedale, 1, 181 Eco-criticism, 13, 18, 85, 146, 263 Edwards, Simon, 138, 146, 156 Eel Crag, 184

299

Egyptian Hall, 13, 240, 244, 245, 250 Eiger, 12, 125, 240, 242, 246, 248, 249, 256 Eiger watching, 246, 248 El Capitan, 22, 23 Eliot, T.S., 95 Enactment, 45, 46, 57, 69, 110 En no Gyoja, 65, 116 European Capital of Culture, 146 Event-space, 225, 230 Everest, 20, 46, 50, 51, 53, 60, 68–70, 89, 106, 107, 133, 217, 247, 250, 256, 257, 268, 279 Everest (film), 16 Everyday, 67, 160, 170, 173, 193, 224, 229, 231 Expanded scenography, 216, 217 Exposure, 112, 193, 217, 218, 222, 223, 231 Extraordinary ordinariness, 45, 47, 66, 67

F Facebook, 218, 269 Fairfield, 77–79, 129, 266, 275 Fell and Rock Climbing Club, 53, 68 Fellbarrow, 184 Fidelman, Dean, 23 First World War, 55 Fischer, Scott, 51, 70 Fleetwith Pike, 222 Flower Mountain, 219 Fluxus, 140, 169, 171, 173 Frantic Assembly, 207 FRCC. See Fell and Rock Climbing Club Friedrich, Caspar David, 215 Fuchs, Elinor, 82–84, 91, 92, 111, 117 Fusco, Maria, 19

300

INDEX

G Gardner, Lyn, 17, 148, 149 Geertz, Clifford, 240–244, 246, 250, 253, 255 The Interpretation of Cultures , 240 Gesamtkunstwerk, 86 Gibson, J.J., 189, 205, 210, 262 Gillman, Peter, 248 Glaramara, 275 Goldsworthy, Andy, 16, 17 GoPro, 25, 231, 250, 278 Gough, Richard, 140–143, 146, 147, 154, 169, 171, 216, 217, 224, 225, 227, 230, 232 Goulish, Matthew, 35–37 GPS, vii, 278 Grampian event, the, 92 Grasmoor, 275 Great Calva, 185 Great Dividing Range, vii, 75, 113, 119, 125, 261 Great End, 76, 271 Great Gable, 53–58, 67, 68, 181, 265, 275 Great Rigg, 77 Gregory, Ken, 10–12, 26, 27, 263 Grey Friar, 272 Grieg, David, 16 Grimes, Ronald, 43–45, 47, 51–53, 56, 57, 62, 66, 68, 70 Grotowski, Jerzy, 143, 144, 172, 190–193, 264 Mountain Project , 190–193, 209 The Constant Prince, 144 Grounded research, 4 Gunung Agung, 41

H Hadow, Douglas, 249 Haft Tan Mountain, 145, 146 Half Dome, 22

Halprin, Anna, 155, 157, 158, 173 Handrail, viii, 5, 26, 27, 169, 263, 266, 268, 272, 279 Hannah, Dorita, 216, 225, 229, 230 Hansen, Peter, 50, 51, 244, 245, 255, 256, 264 Happenings, 135, 140, 145 Harding, Warren, 23–26, 30 Harlin, John, 248 Harrer, Heinrich, 246 White Spider, 246, 247 Harrison Stickle, 2, 35 Hart Crag, 77 Heckmair, Anderl, 246 Helvellyn, 75, 123, 129 Heron Pike, 77 Hewitts, 45, 76, 79, 279 High Pike, 77 Hill, Lynn, 23 Himalayas, 16, 20, 44, 46, 75, 92, 106, 107, 113, 124 Hinkes, Alan, 76 Hinrichsen, Sonja, 17 Holt, Nancy, 16 Honnold, Alex, 23 Honnold, Dean, 24, 26 Ho Pin Tung, 226 Houlding, Leo, 23 Hudson, Charles, 249 Hughes, Ted, 144 Hunter, Victoria, 18, 27 Hybridity, 156, 160 I Ibsen, Henrik, 84, 98, 100–105, 118, 121, 124, 263, 264 Brand, 100–103 Peer Gynt , 100, 101 When We Dead Awaken, 98, 101, 102, 104, 106, 123 Immersiveness, 19, 161, 168, 191, 244, 253

INDEX

Incas, 59, 61, 87, 265 Ingold, Tim, 4, 78, 189, 190, 268 Being Alive, 4 Ingram, Simon, 3, 70, 272 Instagram, 228, 230, 250, 264 International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC), 187 Interplay, 20, 26, 27, 47, 102, 141, 224, 262–264 Invisible Flock, 161 IPCC, 233 Iran, 142, 143, 146, 147 Irvine, Sandy, 247, 256 Ishikozume, 64, 116 Isle of Skye, 48, 122, 220 J Jingju, 194 Johnson, Beverly, 23 Jotunheimen, 99, 100 K Kailasodharanam, 106, 107, 124 Ka Mountain KA MOUNTAIN , 146, 147, 172 Kanchenjunga, 184 Kantor, Tadeusz, 144, 146, 147 Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes , 146 The Dead Class , 146 Kaprow, Allan, 140, 143, 173 Kasparek, Fritz, 246 Kendal Mountain Festival (KMF), 16, 17, 28, 161 Kenyon, Simone, 188, 199–201, 205, 206, 209, 210, 265 Into the Mountain (Solo), 188, 199, 200 Kerkour, 52 Kerouac, Jack, 22, 23 Kinder Scout, 55 Knauth, Beryl, 24

301

Krakauer, John, 51 Kurtz, Toni, 112, 125, 247, 256 Kutiyattam, 28, 83, 84, 106–108, 111–113, 124 Kwon, Miwon, 136, 137, 168, 169 Kyogen, 83, 113–118, 121, 125 Owls , 113, 115, 117 L Lake District, vii, 1, 2, 5, 9, 17, 35, 36, 53, 56, 77, 98, 123, 130, 148, 171, 267, 272, 279 Lakeland Light Festival, 28, 132, 133 Land Art, 16 Landscape translation, 189, 198, 199 Langdale, 2, 36, 80 Lawrence, Kate, 18, 138, 146, 151, 155, 162, 173, 265 Descent of the Angel , 157 Moving Rocks , 138, 146, 147, 155, 157–160, 166, 169, 170 Roped Together, 157 Lecoq, Jacques, 196–198, 210 Fundamental Journey, 196 Leeds Wall, 188, 203, 206 Lifestyle Sports, 239 Lifting Mount Kailash, 106–108, 110, 124 Liminality, 17, 27, 42, 44, 46, 52, 64, 66, 67, 69, 97, 121, 168, 192, 262, 263, 266, 274 Llullaillaco, 60, 61, 266 Lonely Planet , 70, 124, 249 Longitude, 62, 84–86, 95, 104, 114, 120–123, 170, 263 Long, John, 23 Long, Richard, 16 Long Side, 184, 185 Lonscale Fell, 185 Lord’s Seat, 184 Lotker, Sodja, 216, 217, 224, 225, 227, 230, 232

302

INDEX

Loughshinny Folds, The, 21 Low Pike, 77 M Mallory, George, 247, 256 Marilyns, 76, 79, 279 Martinez, Nicola, 23 Matterhorn, 17, 22, 23, 240, 249–252, 256, 257, 266, 268 McAuley, Gay, 136, 137, 139, 156, 170 McFarlane, Robert, 247, 254 McGrath, John, 92, 93, 267 The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil , 92, 93, 95, 123 McKenzie, Phillip, 142 Melet, Tancrède, 10, 28 Messner, Reinhold, 215, 216, 220, 233 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 190, 205 Meyers, Patrick, 84, 106, 111–113, 125 K2, 84, 106, 107, 111, 112, 121, 125, 255 Midtbø, Magnus, 207 Montage, 19, 103–105, 110 Mont Blanc, 9, 12, 28, 239, 243–245, 247, 255, 265, 267 Moretti, Wanda, 155 Mountain Arts, 11, 16–19, 26, 262, 268 Mountain drama, 81, 83, 113, 114, 116, 120, 137 Mountaineering, 27, 51, 60, 76, 86, 89, 92, 111, 112, 190, 196, 209, 211, 221, 242–244, 246, 248, 249, 254, 256, 265 Mountain rescue, vii, 149, 275 Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), 13–15, 28 Mountains 101, 15 Mountain Studies, 9, 12–16, 19, 20, 25, 26, 67, 120, 188, 262, 266

Mount Carmel, 95 Mount Fuji, 64 Mount Kaata, 46 Mount Kailas, 41, 42, 106 Mount Kilimanjaro, 14, 250 Mount Kitanglad, 58 Mount Kumano, 64, 65, 71 Mount McKay, 58 Mount Omine, 65, 125 Mount Popa, 41 Mount Sanjogatake, 65 Munros, 45, 50, 69, 76, 79, 279 Mynydd (Mount) Epynt, 141

N Nab Scar, 77, 78 Nair, Sreenath, 107, 110 Nangarparbat, 44 National Theatre of Scotland, 139 National Theatre Wales, 138, 139, 151, 169 Natyasastra, 107 Netflix, 23 Neumann, Udo, 207 Nicholson, Norman, 37, 38, 92, 93, 95–98, 121, 123, 145, 263, 264, 267 Old Man of the Mountains , 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 122, 264 Noh theatre, 64, 82, 113–117 Norman, Carmen, 17, 133 NTW. See National Theatre Wales Núñez, Nicolás, 193 Nuttalls, 76, 79

O Ormerod, Nick, 217 Ortiz Mountains, 43 OS, 3, 279 Outerside, 28, 130–132

INDEX

P Paccard, Michel-Gabriel, 243 P’ansori, 190, 191, 207, 264 Patterdale, 75, 129 Pavey Ark, 1–3, 5, 35, 36, 271, 279 Peak District, 55 Pearson, Mike, 76, 131, 132, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 149, 155, 169, 171–173 Penk, Albrecht, 13 Performance Studies, 19, 38, 42, 110, 224, 238 Performative/performativity, ix, 2, 18, 27, 49, 50, 52, 68, 141, 148, 155, 207, 216, 217, 224, 226, 230, 239, 245, 264, 268 Perrin, Jim, 204 Persepolis, 142–145, 147, 170, 172 Peru, 58, 59, 84–89, 121, 122 Pike of Stickle, 267 Pilgrim players, 95 Pillar, 271–276 Pinter, Harold, 120 Mountain Language, 120 Plank walk, 219, 230 Play, 11, 13, 24, 26, 43, 62, 64, 81–83, 86–98, 101–107, 109, 111–118, 120–123, 135, 136, 142, 145, 152, 155, 169, 173, 237–243, 245, 249–255, 267, 268 Pons Guerra, Carlos, 161 Potter, Dean, 23, 26 Power, 19, 25, 46, 47, 56, 61, 68, 71, 83, 86–89, 92, 96, 98, 115, 121, 136, 137, 152, 194, 238, 244, 257, 262, 264–266, 273 Practice research, 12, 137, 161, 169, 170, 200, 263, 266 Price, Martin, 9, 20

303

Q Quotidian. See Everyday R Rahmet Mountain, 143 Rasa, 110 Realism, 84, 104, 111, 112, 121 Red Bull, 25, 253, 257, 267 Reeve, Sandra, 18, 193 Remembrance Day, 53 Risk, 12, 160, 164, 221–224, 231, 238, 242, 257 Ritual, viii, ix, 5, 19, 26, 27, 38, 41–47, 51–53, 56–64, 66–71, 81, 86, 97, 106, 114, 120, 121, 136, 140, 146, 169, 172, 191, 192, 262–264, 266, 273 Ritual specialness, 38, 39, 41, 45, 66 Robbins, Royal, 23–25, 30 Robert, Alain, 226, 227 Robinson, Don, 188, 201, 208, 210, 265 Roms, Heike, 140, 147, 172 Rozov, Valery, 251, 253 Ruskin, John, 20, 215 S Sail, 184 Saltó Mestre, Ariadna, 161 Scafell Pike, 92, 123, 272, 275, 279 Scandinavian Mountains, 98, 99, 106 Scenography, ix, 11, 27, 93, 104, 111, 118, 122, 161, 162, 165, 168, 173, 216, 217, 223–225, 227, 229–232, 267 Schechner, Richard, 38, 43, 69, 110, 143, 169, 172, 191, 192, 238, 239, 242, 253 School of Performance and Cultural Industries, 188, 210 Seathwaite Fell, 273, 275

304

INDEX

Shaffer, Peter, 86–89, 91, 121, 265 Royal Hunt of the Sun, 86, 122, 265 Shearing, David, 71, 138, 146, 160, 161, 163, 174, 200 Black Rock, 19, 138, 146, 160–162, 164–168, 170, 174, 200, 266 The Weather Café, 161 The Weather Machine, 161 Shepherd, Nan, 198, 200 The Living Mountain, 198 Shiraz festival, 146 Shugendo, 62, 63, 65, 67, 114, 116, 192, 209, 264 Silver How, 271 Simpson, Joe, 16, 240–242, 246, 255 Dark Shadows Falling , 242 Touching the Void, 16, 246 Site-related, ix, 135–142, 144, 147, 153, 155, 159, 160, 168–170, 188, 262 Skiddaw, 36, 92, 123, 182–185, 272 Skiddaw Lesser Man, 184 Skiddaw Little Man, 184 Skiddaw Slate, 36 Skywalk, 217–224, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 237, 265, 266 Skyway, 220, 227 Smethurst, David, 13, 263 Smith, Albert, 12, 13, 21, 28, 239, 243–250, 255, 257, 267 Story of Mont Blanc, the, 243 Smithson, Robert, 16 Snowdon, 138, 149–151, 155, 161, 170, 227 Social media, 25, 217, 218, 226, 228, 230–233, 235, 239, 245, 249, 250, 253, 262, 264, 265, 267 Solnit, Rebecca, 217 Spectating, ix, 164, 253 Speed climbing, 28, 187, 188

Staniewski, Wlodzimir, 193 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 30, 189 My Life in Art , 189, 209 Starling Dodd, 76, 77 Stephen, Leslie, 244 Stewart, Nigel, 149 Stickle Tarn, 1, 3–5 Stile End, 132 Stob Binnean, 92 Strindberg, August, 100, 118 Sublime, the, 12, 223, 224, 231, 253, 254, 257, 265 Sugar Loaf, 11 Summit fever, 50, 70 Syrett, John, 206, 211

T T’ai Shan, 41 Taking Tiger Mountain with Strategy, 195 Tanaka, Min, 193, 200 Taniko, 64, 82, 113, 115, 117 Tasker, Joe, 248, 256 TDR, 142, 147, 171, 210 Technology, 15, 19, 23, 25, 98, 105, 157, 167, 201, 203, 205, 217, 220, 221, 231, 240, 245, 247, 249, 257, 262, 265 Thirlmere, 36 Thomaidis, Konstantinos, 191 Thomas Cook, 12 Thunacar Knott, 271 Tianmen Mountain, 28, 217, 226, 227, 230, 232, 266 Tokyo, 187, 200, 218 Topographical capital, 227, 252, 266, 267 Topography, 17, 55, 66, 69, 82, 100, 102, 130, 139, 141, 142, 152, 155, 184, 185, 263

INDEX

Training, ix, 24, 26, 27, 30, 50, 66, 139, 141, 182, 187–191, 193–201, 204–207, 209–211, 264, 272 TripAdvisor, 217–219, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 240 Troll Wall, 98, 99 Tryfan Bach, 138, 157, 159, 160, 170 Tschumi, Bernard, 216, 225, 233 Turner, Cathy, 76, 82, 219 Turner, J.M.W., 215 Turner, Victor, 42, 43, 50, 69 Turrell, James, 16 U Ullock Pike, 185 Uluru, 114 Urals, 20 V Valhalla, 99 van Gennep, Arnold, 42, 52, 69 Vertical Dance, 138, 155, 156, 159, 173, 265 Via ferrata, 221–223, 230 Vimeo, 23, 122, 250 von Humboldt, Alexander, 13 Vörg, Ludwig, 246 W Wainwright, A., 1, 3, 5, 35–37, 39, 56, 75–77, 80, 123, 130–132, 181, 182, 184, 185, 267, 272, 275 Wainwrights, 2, 50, 79, 129, 268, 271 Walk of Faith, 217, 227, 229, 230 Wasdale, 36, 53, 55, 56, 181, 271, 273, 275 Welfare State International, 142 Westaway, Jonathan, 55, 56, 264 Wheaton, Belinda, 239, 240, 245, 250, 251, 253

305

White, Patrick, 81, 113, 114, 117–119, 255, 264, 267 Night on Bald Mountain, 81, 113, 114, 117, 264 Whymper, Edward, 17, 249, 251 Scrambles amongst the Alps , 249 Wilkie, Fiona, 136, 137, 171 Wilson, Louise Ann, 17, 28, 125, 138, 142, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153–156, 159, 169, 170, 172, 173, 215, 263, 265, 266 The Gathering/Yr Helfa, 138, 146, 148, 149, 151–154, 157, 266 House, 148, 149, 154 Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/fertility and Childlessness , 148, 154 Wilson, Robert, 143 KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, 143–145, 147 Windermere, 2 Wingsuiting, 30, 227, 251 Winthrop Young, Geoffrey, 55, 68, 182, 189, 209 X Xenakis, Iannis, 143 Y Yamabushi, 63–66, 68, 82, 114–116, 118, 192 Yewbarrow, 271, 275 Yosemite, 21–26, 30, 221, 238, 265 Young, Geoffrey Winthrop, 53 Mountain Craft , 70, 182, 189, 209 YouTube, 23, 57, 124, 207, 227, 230, 250, 251, 253, 254 Z Zmyslowski, Jacek, 172, 192