Performance Research, Volume 24, Issue 2, March 2019

Mountains are places of ‘great cultural importance’, geographer Martin Price has observed. They are constantly being shaped by human hands, sometimes benignly and sometimes with permanent malignance. Culture plays an integral part in this process and has done for centuries, producing an extraordinarily varied gallery of mountain performances. On Mountainsdocuments some of this history. It explores how performance practice is making sense of mountains, celebrating the range of approaches being mobilized to do this thinking: from practice-research and phenomenological enquiry, to historiography, gender studies and performance analysis, and, in the case of a clutch of articles, wild speculation and thought experimentation. In artist pages, discursive writing and richly illustrated photo essays, this issue centres on performance makers’ and scholars’ capacity to reflect on, intervene in and translate the complexity of mountain environments, drawing on vivid examples from India, China, the UK, the United States and Europe.