They talk about death.

Like cops or firefighters or anyone else who comes close to death often, they have to live with it, though they'd often prefer to dwell more on defying it.

Climber and former Himalaya guide Al Burgess, who lives in Utah, says it's appropriate a multimedia performance revolving around his life also talks a lot about dying. "You can't take your eye off the ball because if you do, you get chopped," he said during a rehearsal for the multimedia show SB Dance Company has created around his stories. The company - plus actors, umbrellas and a giant metal sculpture - will show that world during its "This Mortal Coil" show at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre this weekend.

Stephen Brown, SB Dance's founder and artistic director, has known Burgess for a while. Having dabbled in climbing himself, Brown was intrigued by the idea of trying to portray the climbing mindset through art.

Brown solicited help from another longtime friend, theater writer and director Winnie Wood. Wood, who teaches theater and film at Wasatch Academy in Mt. Pleasant, had already done a student play made up of William Shakespeare's death scenes. She, too, saw the connections. Shakespeare often talked about death, and sometimes his best orators on the subject were the comic characters who happened to be close by when it happened. "This is how you juxtapose the fear and the darkness with something else, because it helps you feel the thing," she said.

The result is a combination of dance, photography, theater and narration, with three actors voicing scenes from Shakespeare, three dancers tearing around the stage, and Burgess breaking in to tell his survival stories in his own words - all against a backdrop of photographs he took on some of the world's highest mountains.

"Morbid fear and rock climbing go hand in hand," Brown said. "Obviously, they're not just risking failure; they're risking death. It's kind of a modern Shakespearean-epic thing to do."

Burgess grew up in England and moved to Utah to climb. Until the 2001 terrorist attacks dried up business, he spent several months each year guiding expeditions in the Himalayas, scaling more than 50 major peaks, including Everest, Annapurna and Nanga Parbat.

Though the slender, craggy-faced Burgess had faced all kinds of life emergencies, they didn't prepare him for playing himself onstage. Nor did the years of showing slides on his exploits.

During the early stages of collaboration, some considered having Burgess quote the Bard. "For me to remember Shakespearean lines - I spent too long at altitude," Burgess said, with a laugh.

He was also used to talking about the technical aspects of his climbing career, not the emotional aspects. For this performance, Wood dug into the stories that would appeal to broad audiences - such as the one about the time a big rock miraculously missed him as it hurtled his way while he clung to a cliff. "Talking to Winnie, who is not a climber at all, drew out the relevance of the stories," he said. "It's not a climbing audience, I don't think, so the climbing is not as important as all the other stuff that's going on. These guys have gotten anecdotes out of me that I'd long forgotten."

Many of those, of course, involve death. Any climber who takes on the toughest peaks knows people who didn't make it. Sometimes the difference between those who die and those who don't comes down to little more than luck. Burgess tells, for example, about a Spanish expedition whose base camp was wiped away by an avalanche on the same mountain where his group was preparing to climb.

There are also broken relationships, cold, altitude, pain and misery that come with the climbing addiction, he says - and the beauty of exploring new cultures across the world. "You can feel in Al's voice that he's lived this," Brown said.

SB Dance's "This Mortal Coil"

The show includes a free photo exhibit of work by Scott Markewitz (Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center will be accepting donations).

* DATES: Friday at 8 p.m.; continues with an 8 p.m. performance Saturday and a 4 p.m. matinee Sunday

* LOCATION: Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. Broadway (300 South), Salt Lake City

* TICKETS: $15, are available at 801-355-ARTS, www.arttix.org or the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center box office.