Turning Tourists into Performers: Revaluing agency, action and space in sites of heritage tourism

Abstract

This paper describe a transition from specialised performance interventions – for example, GeoQuest and A Tour of Sardine Street (both 2010) – in heritage sites to a handing over of the tactics of those performances to general tourists and visitors for the making of their own performance-like counter-touristic visits. This change is based on a re-valuing; moving away from assumptions that tourists are essentially passive in making their visits and that the sites of those visits are neutral spaces to a valorisation of tourist visits as constructive and agentive and of the sites as places of ‘chorastic’ potential. The paper describes the use of a multi-modal research methodology; predominantly mixing participant observation and practice-as-research. It narrates the key moments of transition in the research: a double movement of exorcism and spectral return on a ‘mis-guided tour’ (Water Walk, 2010), the discovery that volunteer panel members were not simply observing tours but beginning to re-perform them, the shift from a dispersal of specialised, technical knowledge to a more generally accessible toolkit model exemplified by the publication of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks in 2011, and a series of experimental visits by the author (some accompanied by panel members) to heritage sites on which ‘tactics’ were both tested and new ones devised. The paper sets the emergence of a performative counter-tourism strategy as a development of practices and ideas informed by or originating in site-specific performance, contemporary Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, walking arts (including disrupted versions of the standard guided tour), and mythogeography.