Dancing Wilderness Project: Sierra Nevada Mountains, California 2025

The Dancing Wilderness Project was started in 1997 by Karl Frost as an exploration of the interrelationships among wilderness experience, body-based creative process, and how we choose to live our lives. With open mind and senses, we look for an immediate experience of nature: experience unmediated by ideas or preconceived limits. 13-16 June 2025 4 days of hiking, camping, dancing, movement and sensory meditations, and "just being there in nature". Facilitated by Karl Frost 200-400 sliding scale Organized as a NOT-FOR-PROFIT Fundraiser for grass roots environmental causes! We explore… **Nature as source of metaphor and inspiration for movement and image **Quiet experience of nature as food for the soul **Finding a different sense of space, time, and relationship away from civilization **Dance not simply about the environment, but with it **Extrapolating our knowledge and practice of dance and creative process in the studio to new environments: forest and mountain top as the stage and earth, pine needles, and rock as the floor. The days will be a mix of quiet hiking and exploring time and simple movement scores from the Dancing Wilderness Project, using and building on what we explore in studio. These simple structures invite us into altered states of awareness of place and exploring of meaning in sensory connection to the “more than human” world. We find a sense of “dance” emerging out of functional movement exploration on unusual surfaces and in unusual spaces. As we dance in nature, rather than looking for spaces most like a dance studio, we instead look to see what each space offers. Contact Improvisation and Authentic Movement are two of our main practice reference points, mixed with other sensory and movement explorations specifically about tuning the senses and the animal body into places less marked by the human. For more information and registration, visit the website https://www.bodyresearch.org/workshops/dancing-wilderness-project/sierra-nevadas-california/ --- Karl Frost has been practicing and teaching contact improvisation and related investigations since the late 1980s in California and has shared his work in over 25 countries. He began his movement explorations in martial arts as a teenager, before expanding his studies to somatics, contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and physical theater. His performance work, via his company, Body Research Physical Theater, explores postdramatic works rooted in somatic psychology and paratheatrical exploration and alternates between stage productions and highly interactive performance happenings exploring audience agency and personal meaning. He has an MFA in Dramatic Arts and a PhD in Ecology. He works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture. Of Body Research performing work … ’something startling but strangely beautiful to behold. Molly Rhodes, SF Weekly, San Francisco, August 07