Climber, Author, Artist, Teacher, Thinker; Hoxton, England

Fiercely intelligent, iconoclastic, dancing to the eternal vibrations of the rock that the rest of us just pull past —Johnny Dawes, 43, the irrepressible English climber who brought solid E8 (Gaia, an E8 6c at Black Rocks) and the world's first E9 (Indian Face, E9 6c, 150 feet of technical, 5.12c death at Clogwyn D'ur Arddu) to the world during his manic blitzkrieg in 1986. Today Dawes, who continued to bust standards open into the late 1990s, climbs (and well), though he spends much of his rock time imparting his singular knowledge, in his so-called Master Class seminars. He's the Stone Monkey, the Leaping Boy, Off his Head, Bold as Brass Monkey. And he's the Dawes. (Visit johnnydawes.com for more.) —Matt Samet 

Tell be a bit about your climbing teaching, the Master Class…
Ordinarily, I would probably see people climb around first, to see how they are. And to see whether or not my prejudices are actual or not. If you bring them out into the open straight away, then you have the chance to disperse something.  Certain people are easier to teach. You warm to some naturally and not others. 

Basic, the jewel in the crown — the way it’s actually grown, sometimes I don’t share that with people till we’ve done it for a while, until somebody’s less resistant. If somebody’s resistant, it’s such a simple idea, that it’s to their disadvantage if they’ve already come across it. It’s better if they’ve tried other things, which imply that you can do that one thing. 

How long do you evaluate someone for?
Not very long. The way someone sits down on a chair gives you lots of information, the way they walk or the way they stand. Whether they clean their shoes. If somebody cleans their boots well, you can tell that they care about the rock and that they care themselves, because, obviously, if you stand on a smear and your foot’s clean, it’s both good for the rock and good for you. And if you stand on the foothold in the direction that gives that foothold the longest life expectancy, you’re also going to get the most grip out of that hold. So the historical is the momentary as well in that way. 

Tell me a bit about your relationship with the rock.
Well, it’s 29 years of climbing now. 

Because I couldn’t really reach holds, I had to try and work out how to hang on worse holds, or how to use holds below to get holds above. So I had to use quickness. When I used quickness, I think it squeezed out the reflections a bit quicker than it would have otherwise been done — speed’s very… you’ve gotta use intuition if you’re gonna be quick. 

And also, when I’ve tried to do moves, I worked out — “I can’t use that hold. How can I move my body to make sure I can use that hold.” In other words, there’s been an analytical/reflective part that’s gone on as well. I was noticing that my body has to do it w/o thought when it does it. There’s been a reflective side to it, and an experiential side to it. This is really the coming together of the two. 

You don’t have to instruct your liver how to do its job, and the body’s the same way. Our body is something that we’ve landed in, and bit-by-bit you can allow your emotions and your thinking to inform the way that your body works with your mind, so you can make it really, really fast. An interesting experiment is to try and move before you move — which sounds like gobbledeegook — it is gobbledeegook! If you do that, your capacity to hit a hold, you feel the coming shape coming up, and then you wait, and you wait, and you move. If you can sort of move before you move, it has the effect of you moving really fast!