UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the climbing body and how it embodies cultural narratives across performance mediums. It delves into the significance of storytelling in the climbing community and how both the medium in which the story is told and the audience for that medium impact the narrative. This research also highlights the role of theater, film, and performance studies in understanding climbers’ stories. Drawing on concepts from narrative performance and collective body memory, the research investigates how the climbing body constructs and promotes cultural norms within the climbing community. It also emphasizes the potential for climbers of diverse backgrounds to expand the narrative possibilities beyond conquest, transcendence, and survival. I argue that the climbing body acts upon stories, it does something: reinforcing, complicating, and disrupting cultural narratives. In performing the dominant narrative, the climbing body also performs what I call the martyred, apeironic, or vulnerable body. Utilizing textual and performance analysis with a historical and phenomenological approach, ethnographic research, and surveys, this dissertation, with a climbing body as its constant, engages with performances of the climbing body in dramatic texts, theater productions, live performance, and documentary film. Drawing upon existing literature, plays, and films on mountaineering and climbing culture, this study provides context for the climbing narratives present in the climbing community today, then considers the climbing body in theater, performance, and film through the following case studies: K2 by Patrick Meyers and Touching the Void by David Greig, the 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell, an endurance climbing competition in Arkansas, and two documentary films, Black Ice (2020) directed by Zachary Barr and Peter Mortimer, and They/Them (2021) directed by Blake McCord and Justin Clifton. Engaging with documentary climbing films also leads to a discussion of the “stoke” film, a documentary film with an adrenalized anticipatory affective. By examining the narratives associated with climbing, the research illustrates the role of the body in performing its own stories and how those perpetuate or potentially dismantle dominant narratives. In addition, this dissertation demonstrates how the climbing body expands an understanding of narrative in the fields of theater, performance, and film.