Walking out of the body and into the Mountain: dancing, mountaineering and embodied ways of knowing.

‘Walking out of the body and into the mountain: dancing, mountaineering and embodied ways of knowing’ is a Practice Research study that investigates embodiment, performance making and outdoor leadership in relation to mountainous environments. This study draws upon mountaineering, performance and dance training and how these are shared and experienced by others, to further our relational understanding of mountain-place. Through
acknowledging that perceptions of place are culturally and somatically experienced and
expressed through our bodies, this research critically examines gendered, dancing and
mountaineering bodies in relation to the dynamics of a mountain ecology.
The title for this research refers to Nan Shepherd’s explorations of the Scottish Cairngorm
Mountain range in her prose, The Living Mountain (1977, 2011, p.106). Her writing
presents her embodied experiences as a hillwalker and leads towards notions of permeabilities between the human body and mountain ecology. This thesis takes this key text as invitation and guide to further explore notions of intra-connectedness of subjective bodily experiences with place and, more specifically, those of women’s experiences overlooked through historic mountain culture narratives.
Embodiment practices invoke the human body as a vessel for sense-data that is derived from the world around, just as the body is socially constructed (Csordas, 1990). Thus, the body as the ‘existential ground for culture’ (p.5) makes it possible to understand the embodied relationship between the body and the mountains by first examining the moving body at a localized, human scale. This research will consider these felt intersubjective and
interconnected experiences of place through exploring Shepherd’s prose along with the
researcher’s artistic engagements in the geographical environment of the Cairngorms
mountains.