’Wilderness’ … we scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all those whose nerves and emotions have not been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limits.

-- Edward Abbey

Without experience of nature, humans become mad. – -- Paul Shepard

Theater is the place where we process the question of how we want to live our lives. – -- Peter Brook

The Dancing Wilderness Project

was started in 1997 by Karl Frost as an exploration of the interrelationships amongst wilderness experience, body-based creative process, and how we choose to live our lives. Primarily organized as 3 day to 4 week long wilderness trip/dance laboratories for groups of 6 to 15 artists, it has also birthed a number of stage works exploring the effects on body and psyche of time in nature, away from civilization.

Projects have happened in Ventana Wilderness (1997), Pt Reyes National Seashore(1997, 1999), Big Basin State Park(1997), Death Valley (1997, 1998, 1999), Carson Iceberg Wilderness(1999), S Fork Yuba River (2007)(California), Olympic National Park (1998, 2003), Alpine Lakes Wilderness (2003, 2004, 2005) (Washington), and Dark Canyon (2002) (Utah).

Each trip is unique… unique to the time, the location, and the assembled group of artists. Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, and an open-ended invitation towards listening to the natural world serve as a base and common language, but each person’s human and artistic response to the immersion in wilderness is the drive for investigation.

For general information on the open laboratories, goto Dancing Wilderness Labs

The next Dancing Wilderness Projects planned are

May 9-13, Big Island, Hawaii (tentative)

May 31- June 15, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (begins with weekend studio workshop in San Francisco, CA)

For more information on specific projects, as well as registration, write to info@bodyresearch.org

For an essay on the Dancing Wilderness project from 2000, goto Somatics and Nature