Performing Mountains

Jonathan Pitches

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781137556011
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Launching the landmark Performing Landscapes series, Performing Mountains brings together for the first timeMountain Studies and Performance Studies in order to examine an international selection of dramatic responses to mountain landscapes. Moving between different registers of writing, the book offers a critical assessment of how the cultural turn in landscape studies interacts with the practices of environmental theatre and performance. Conceived in three main parts, it begins by unpicking the layers of disciplinary complexity in both fields, before surveying the rich history and practice of rituals, playtexts and site specific works inspired by mountains. The last section moves to a unique analysis of mountains themselves using key concepts from performance: training, scenography, acting and spectatorship. Threaded throughout is a very personal tale of mountain research, offering a handrail or alternative guide through the book.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. PitchesPerforming MountainsPerforming Landscapeshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55601-1_1

Begin Abstract

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

Jonathan Pitches¹

(1)

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

Jonathan Pitches

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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 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 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).

Fig. 1

View from Easy Gully down onto Stickle Tarn, November 2016

(Photo Jonathan Pitches)

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.

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).

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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Handrail 1  Beginnings: Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle (W1 and 2/214)
• Part 1: Mountain Studies Meets Performance
• Part 2: Mountains in Ritual, Drama and Site-Related Performance
• Part 3: Performing Mountains
• Back Matter