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Turning Tourists into Performers: Revaluing agency, actioand space in sites of heritage tourismPhil Smith

Published online: 14 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Phil Smith (2013) Turning Tourists into Performers: Revaluing agency, action and space in sites of heritage

tourism, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18:2, 102-113, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.807174

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I began, armed with a commonsense attitude.

I ‘knew’ that tourists were passive andunreective consumers manipulated by the

image-productions of leisure companies.

I ‘knew’ that the heritage objects of their visits

 were policed by managing institutions to

reproduce nostalgic and nationalist narratives.I may not have framed things quite so bluntly

(dressing them up with ideas about ideology,

structures of feeling and ‘authorized heritage

discourse’), but, in practice, as I began three

 years’ research in 2009, the performance

interventions in heritage sites that constituted

a major part of that research reected just such

a brutal  valuing.

By the end of that research, a mixture of

participant observation and practice-as-

research (in the latter case drawing upondramaturgical, textual and pedagogical

tactics garnered during thirty or so years of

performance making and teaching), I had been

forced by unexpected ndings to revalue boththe agency of the visitors and the affordancesof heritage tourism space – shifts that led me to

disperse my own practice and begin the attempt

to hand on its parts to the very tourists I had

originally tried to disrupt.

It was in the second half of 2009 that I  began

the series of performances and performance-

like interventions in designated heritage sites,

Turning Tourists into Performers

Revaluing agency, action and space in sites of

heritage tourismP H I L S M I T H

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18·2 : pp .102-113

http : / /dx .do i .o rg/10 .1080/13528165.2013.807174

 ■ A mis-guided tour for theGeo-Quest (2010).Photo Melanie Border, English

Riviera Global Geopark 

ISSN 1352-8165 pr int /1469-9990 onl ine

© 2013 TAYLOR & FRANC IS

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mostly in the South West of England, that were

part of my three-year doctoral research project.

The sites included National Trust properties,tourism-orientated landscapes and urban

quarters with explicit heritage narratives. I hadbeen making performance walks (or ‘mis-guided

tours’) in comparable sites since A Carnal Tour  

in the grounds of Exeter Cathedral (UK) in2001. These places seemed to trigger strong

personal and social resonance for their visitors,

 with a tendency, despite their management and

policing, to act as fanciful or nostalgic utopias.

My initial interventions from 2009 onwardsincluded a number of ‘mis-guided tours’,

taking the constituents of a standard tour

and by exaggeration, disruption or adaptation

recreating them as the means to challenging thedominant heritage narratives of their routes. My

understanding of these narratives was informed

by my own observations while visiting and

 working in these sites and by Laurajane Smith’s

description of an ‘authorized heritage discourse’

(2006: 11) that combines grand narrativesof nation and class articulated in ‘expert’

aesthetic judgements about beauty (with an

implied obligation to preserve and protect)

and assumptions about ‘innate and immutable

cultural values of heritage’ (4), naturalizing

assumptions about there being such a thing as‘heritage’ and its equivalence to ‘old things’.

Alongside my ‘mis-guided tours’, I sought to

inltrate myself into the interpretational

narratives at certain heritage sites, creating

texts for information signs, boards and an

Interpretation Room in Torbay (Devon, UK) and

created with Siobhan Mckeown a subverted

 version of a tourist information lm (Wish You

Were Here?  [2011]1) in which a voiceover seems

to describe the unique qualities of its location

 while the lm ‘gives away’ their unexceptional

and yet engaging nature. Informing this rangeof interventions were ideas I had previously

developed as ‘mythogeography’ (Smith 2010a):

sustaining the multiplicity of a place’s meanings

against homogenization and privileging

trajectories over the bounding of place.

The intention of my interventions was to set

 visitors in disrupted and self-conscious motion

through heritage sites; to hypersensitize themto the ne textures, the conicting and multiple

narratives and the accidental ironies of these

places; and to provoke them to make their own

interrogations of them. The initial responses

of those members of my sixty-strong researchpanel who participated as audiences or visitors

in these early interventions and the evidence ofmy eld notes through 2009–10 suggested that

the interventions were broadly (and repeatedly)

effective in achieving the aims that I had set

for them.

The key interventions from which I gathered

detailed feedback were GeoQuest (2010), a

 week-long journey through the English Riviera

Global GeoPark in South West England witha daily routine of workshops, walking, early

evening mis-guided tour and evening feast and

performance;2 Water Walk (2010), a mis-guided

tour of Exeter’s West Quarter and ‘HistoricQuay’; and A Tour of Sardine Street  (2010),

a mis-guided tour of Exeter’s Queen Street.3 

Given the responses to these interventions,

I complacently expected that my research wouldmove smoothly on from these performances to

devising and testing various means for a

dispersal of their tactics and my research

1 This lm can be viewonline at www.youtubcom/watch?v=vaWJfs

3 Water Walk and SarStreet  were created wSimon Persighetti. Thlatter was documenteCrabman & Signpost(2011).

2 GeoQuest was madeseaside entertainer TLidington and compoHugh Nankivell. Filmdocumentation can bfound at www.youtubcom/watch?v=vZAWtd210

■ The ‘tourist surreal’(Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett). Photo Phil Sm

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ndings about them to specialists in

performance practice and Tourism Studies and

among heritage professionals.However, the very theoretical tools I drew

upon from Tourism Studies and PerformanceStudies in 2009 and 2010 to begin and develop

an interrogation of my interventions, along with

tendencies in my own practice towards a strainof ‘nomadic thinking’ within critical theory,

focused and magnied by certain ‘lenses’ of

mythogeography (layering, rhizomatic

interweaving, the making of ‘anywheres’ and

the self-mythologizing of the activist),4 led me

to challenge my assumptions. Rather than

adding to or honing specialist skills, I found that

the impetus of my research was turning me

towards an increasingly relational aesthetics(Bourriard 2002).

The decisive moments for this change of

direction came during a period of case-study

assessments begun in 2010. The various

materials collected during my interventions(questionnaire responses, emails from audience

members, photographs, eld notes, lms)

 were examined through the four ‘lenses’ taken

from mythogeography. What emerged from

these interrogations (often by overlaying onelens with another) was unexpected: I began

for the rst time to detect a pattern not ofsubversion of heritage materials and discourses,

but of their adaptation, détournement and

‘mis-use’, particularly a double motion of thestripping away of ‘standard’ behaviours and

their return in spectral forms. Stresses and

contradictions in my practice began to show

up in the form of anxieties about identity,

agency and personae. In my resistance to anytotalizing characterization in the performance

of my ‘mis-guided tours’ I was recruiting from

the very voices I had set myself against – the

authoritative guiding voice, the storyteller,psychological characterization. I was drawingon the functional performance resources of

mainstream tour-guiding (pointing, describing,

policing) in order to disassemble theatrical

expectations. In trying to understand the

production of these tours, I found it useful toplace them within the context of tendencies

described by Hans-Thies Lehmann as ‘post-

dramatic’: ‘disintegration, dismantling and

deconstruction’ (Lehmann 2006: 44), and

a ‘de-hierarchization of theatrical means’ (79)

sited on a plane of synchronicity and myth:‘[N]ot a story read from … beginning to end,

but a thing held full in-view the whole time …

a landscape’ (Fuchs 1996: 93). All of which

sat fairly comfortably with the interventions,

but not with my attempts to develop meansby which their post-dramatic tactics may be

passed on. One specialist talking to others

about techniques seemed more like a bounding

and reinforcing of closed identities than a de-

hierarchization or dismantling.

These contradictions informed a democratic

‘turn’ in my research that would eventuallysend me back in early 2011 to review existing

Tourism Studies literature, looking for critical

tools to understand my ndings, and necessitate

that I nd a new relation to my performances.First, however, I sought a resolution to these

contradictions in new models for the dispersal

of my interventional tactics (Smith, 2010b)

taken from political activism (such as ‘cells’).

However, when I attempted to advocate ordeploy these models in the context of heritage

tourism they felt prescriptive and impractical

and were ignored or rejected by those to whomI sought to promote them. In order to progress

beyond this impasse (although at the timeunbeknownst to me – or at least unrecognized

by me – volunteer panel members were already

nding their own solutions), I returned to one

paradigmatic concept in Tourism Studies that

I had read about early on in my research – theagentive tourist – and in seeking to reconcile

its apparent voluntarism to my ndings

encountered another: ‘chora’.

The concept of an agentive tourist has

established an inuence close to orthodoxyamong tourism researchers over the last

thirty or so years, partly due to the impact of

ethnographic studies illuminating the ways

that tourists play key roles in the production

as well as consumption of tourism. In contrastto portrayals of tourists as passive ‘dupes’ of

a package industry (Turner and Ash 1975),

4 Layering: an investigativeand questioning lens, anempathizing immersionin layers and textures,seeking to expose thehidden and to release

the repressed. Rhizomaticinterweaving: itsre-assembling of disparateelements and journeys iscomplementary to theinquisitive dismantling ofthe layering lens;maintaining differenceswithin collectivity. Themaking of ‘anywheres’:an impetus towards placesof interconnectivity anddiversity, irony andbricolage rather thanconformity to principles.The self-mythologizing ofthe activist: a breakingdown of identities, socialroles and functions whileavoiding the developmentof alternative milieus; aself-mythologization thatis limited, temporary andtransferable.

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 ■ Outlands: a mis-guitour around the site oScott of the Antarctic’schildhood home (2010Photo Mark James

more recent trends in Tourism Studies suggest

that tourists construct their own variations,

assemblages and sociability from the attractionson offer, and subject the sites they visit to

their own narratives, relations, associationsand reconstructions. This has led to a novel

 valorizing of the behaviour of tourists and

of the affordances of their sites (at variance with dominant popular prejudices): rather

than functioning as unquestioned hegemonic

machines these sites are now more often seen

by Tourism Studies’ academics as ‘arena[s] in

 which the meanings are contested not justat an abstract level, but through the active

involvement of the consumer as a reexive

agent’ (Meethan et al. 2006: xiii), where

meanings are ‘at least in part … constructed andsignied by the tourist’ (Crouch et al. 2001: 254)

and where the tourist chooses from a ‘plethora

of tourist roles, experiences and meanings, and

attitudes’ (McCabe 2009: 34).

In one sense, encountering these ideas was

enormously encouraging to my work. Themultiplicity of viewpoints and the assemblage

of meanings from many things that I was

seeking to encourage among audiences were,

apparently, regularly observed among ordinary

tourists, albeit in a not always self-reective

or self-reexive manner. I was encouraged tointensify my practice. However, when it came to

dispersal I  was unable to overcome what I felt

 was a profound and debilitating disconnection

between the agency of the ordinary tourist andthe package of specialist skills within a complex

performance and textual practice that I had

been developing and categorizing in order to

pass on.

Somewhat becalmed, certain external

pressures came to bear on me in a fortuitous

manner. First, in May 2011, Simon Persighetti

and I (under the pseudonyms ‘Signpost’ and‘Crabman’) self-published A Sardine Street Box of

Tricks about the ‘mis-guided tour’ we had beenmaking over three years (2007–10) for Exeter’s

Queen Street (Crabman & Signpost 2011). The

text of this booklet is predominantly mine;

the images and the design are predominantly

Simon’s. The text took me a  very long time

to write. I was attempting to break from the

memento/explanatory gloss that we had

produced for our Water Walk of 2010. While somerecipients of this had reported their enjoyment

at the exposure of ‘the underbelly of the process’,another agged up a problem; the pamphlet:

let me put things in pigeon holes and generally‘understand’ what had happened – which is

 what I want even if it might seem not to be what you wanted because I might have continued toexperience more vivid affect if I had been left ina state of uncertainty and mild panic.

For the Sardine Street  booklet I sought to

avoid such rationalizations and instead tried to write something that would sustain the tour’s

affects. I practised Matthew Barney’s model of

delaying product and returning obsessively tothe starting point until something unplanned

emerges (Spector 2002: 5–6). What emerged

 was an interweaving of a description of the

making of the tour with a handbook for

the reader to make their own; it was more

conversational, practicable, tangled and

narrative-based than I had expected. It was lessof an analysis and more of a toolkit.

The immediate response to A Sardine Street

 Box of Tricks was also unexpected. The book

 was used by a range of different walking

artists, students, those involved in therapeutic walking, mainstream tour guides, cultural

geographers and solo exploratory walkers. In

the six months after publication I  was emailed

about, or found accounts online of, the use of

 A Sardine Street Box of Tricks in twenty-eightdifferent projects. The pamphlet operated like

a ‘fanciful map’ – a documentation that looks

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to meet Peggy Phelan’s concerns about the

transformational qualities of such descriptions

of performances: ‘[P]erformance cannot be

saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise

participate in the circulation of representationsof representations: once it does so, it becomes

something other than performance’ (Phelan

1993: 146). A ‘fanciful map’ seeks to build uponPhelan’s ‘something other than performance’

to create a documentation that does not force

performance to ‘betray and lessen the promise

of its own ontology’ (146), but, instead, serve as

a provocation to perform once more; it can onlybe understood by a reader prepared to enact it.

More by accident than by design, by mid-2011

a model of dispersal had begun to emerge: an

entanglement of exemplary performance witha toolkit. I hoped that this model would address

a constituency of agentive tourists, adding to

their existing agency. I  was again fortunate:

The publishers of my Mythogeography (2010a) –

Triarchy Press – were keen for me to nd a  way

of recreating the accessibility of my ‘mis-guidedtours’ in book form. Triarchy encouraged me

to move away from the convoluted structure

of Mythogeography  (something akin to the

labyrinthine ordeal of an initiate of an esoteric

order); instead the publication that I began to

 write in 2011 emerged as a popular means foraddressing the ideological labyrinth of heritage

space. It was not for specialist tour guides

leading others around the labyrinth, but for

those ‘others’ prepared to lead themselves.

In strategic terms, I could now, in composing

this toolkit, draw on existing popular, ‘lay’

skills of assemblage and narration identied by

Tourism Studies’ researchers, while offering to

the everyday tourists who habitually deployedthem the self-reexivity and self-awareness

of the makers and performers of ‘mis-guided

tours’. By early 2012 I  was turning my problemsregarding dispersal into opportunities (and,

no doubt, into some new problems). By

making tourists rather than guides the agents

of intervention, I was ‘adding value’ to my

tactics (to put it in the most banal terms) by

broadening the potential ‘market’ for them.

More importantly, visitor groups of friends and

families now provided me with existing ‘cells’, whereas previously I had found myself trying

and failing to speculate them into being. The

potential site of my practice was also dispersed

and broadened: from a space that affordedand was tolerant of guided tours, to any

heritage space.

This turn to the general space of tourism

 was complemented by what at the time had

seemed like unconnected reective work for

my case study on Water Walk (2010), written inearly 2011. Water Walk was a ‘mis-guided tour’

created and led by Simon Persighetti and myself

around the West Quarter in Exeter. It focused

on the role of water in the historic industries

and the social life of this area; a medieval

merchants’ and priests’ quarter, by thenineteenth century it was the site of tanning,

cloth-making and forges and an impoverished

 working-class community who suffered infant

mortality rates worse than any recorded in theUK at the time. The area was largely cleared in

the rst few decades of the twentieth century

and its residents despatched to a suburb.

Something distinctive happened on this tour.

I was not aware of it at the time, but reviewingthe responses to questionnaires and emails

from panel members who attended the walk it

became clear that for a signicant proportionof those feeding back, the walk not only

triggered their sensitization to the multiplicity

of meanings of the site, consistent with the

effects of other mis-guided tours, but that it

had also caused panel members to actively

reect (and act) on the way in which they were

constructing that multiplicity of meanings (and

their construction of ‘heritage’ in general) while

in the process of producing it.

Water Walk had been different from other

tours I had worked on. It was quieter. There was

less commentary; we requested silence from ouraudience for much of the tour. Along the routethere was an emphasis on simple actions at

‘stations’ rather than complex narratives. Simon

and I had prefaced the tour with an opening

‘lecture’ in which, consistent with post-dramatic

dismantling and the de-hierarchization ofmeans, we had announced in detail all the

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 ■ Heritage industry

absurdities. Photo Phil

guide-like actions we would not be performing

and all the guide-like information we would not

be sharing. At the conclusion of this ‘lecture’ we took off our matching tour guide blazers,

put aside our folders of documentary materialand left behind our pointing sticks. Once on

the tour route, our guiding roles returned, but

in a spectral, transparent form – doing littlemore than leading the way and organizing the

audience in participatory  actions.

When, for my case study, I came to re-read

closely the responses to this performance,

I saw repeated accounts of participants’ self-conscious reconstitution of themselves as

makers of heritage meaning: ‘[T]he mechanics

of the process were not only on show, but we

 were actually part of it and constructing itthrough our actions’ (Panel Questionnaire).The participants were not simply charmed by

the defamiliarized heritage site, but despite

(or because of) the charged atmospheric and

sensory nature of the walk had observed their

own production of place and history. There

was some of the familiar setting loose of

multiple narratives (‘I saw places I had never

seen before … made me feel how limited my

habitual pathways are through the town’ [Panel

Questionnaire]), but more pronounced was

a sustained and deferred quality of affordancethat seemed to spatialize its disruptions,

sustaining a guided tour largely free of its own

tactics. This ‘guiding without tactics’ seemed

to have suggested, and fore-fronted to its

audience, that the guided tour is sustained just

as much, if not more, by the assumptions and

 work of its participants as by the performance

and commentary of its guides, and had

facilitated a certain self-mythologization ofthe audience members that enabled them to

transfer the disruptive qualities of the tour and

its space to the disruption of themselves:

[M]y understanding of the West Quarter is notformed solely by what you chose to tell/show us,but rather, has been informed/changed/morphedby my re-walking, re-telling and re-membering.…[It] made me question our understanding of siteand history in a much larger way which is not

restricted to Exeter … not a case of swapping

one mode of perception for another, rather

that my understanding and engagement withplaces of heritage will be plural and far moreopen to changing, rather than trying to ‘x’a particular understanding.

(Panel Questionnaire)

But what were the mechanics or dynamicsthat drove this self-awareness and reexivity?

This question chimed with an anxiety I had

come to feel about the idea of the agentive

tourist; while an effective antidote to the

dominant miserablist criticisms of the 1960sand 1970s, was it sufcient to adequately

describe the complex ways that tourists

construct their tourism? My own observations

conrmed their active production, but it was

not one that appeared to me to be always free,reective, inevitable or un-manipulated. The

agency of tourists had not washed away the

machinations of ‘authorized heritage discourse’.

Seeking a more precise way than a simple

 voluntarism to describe the subtle relationsbetween an agentive tourist and the ideological

productions and reproductions of the sites of

their tourism, I drew on the concept of ‘chora’ to

describe how such an agency may be mediated

by particular spaces.

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The concept of ‘chora’ as a characteristic oftourism spaces is proposed by geographers

Stephen Wearing, Deborah Stevenson and

Tamara Young (Wearing et al., 2010) as

a corrective to the contemplative passivity

and dominant visuality of the ‘âneur’ as

a metaphor for the tourist in tourist space.

Wearing, Stevenson and Young use ‘chora’ to

describe a notional, intermediary space between

existence and becoming – an idea from Plato,

 via Elizabeth Grosz, who characterized it as:

the space that engenders without possessing, that

nurtures without requirements of its own, thatreceives without giving, and that gives without

receiving, a space that evades all characterisation

including the disconcerting logic of identity, of

hierarchy, of being, the regulation of  order.

(Grosz 1995: 51)

This sounds rather mystical, and Grosz and

Wearing, Stevenson and Young have pointed to

the dangers of a feminist/feminine-essentialism

replacing the dispassionate, masculine and

authoritative essentialism of the gaze of the

âneur. However, as dened by Grosz, theconcept does encompass a kind of gentleness

comparable to the spectral transparency

of a stripped-down performance like Water

Walk, a space of transformation, a resistance

to exchange (in the sense of a refusal of

both commerce and the obligation of ‘the

gift’, a refusal of reciprocity) and the evasion 

(rather than violent dissolution) of identitiesand hierarchy.Fortied by my growing understanding of

the signicance of comments made by panel

members at an Annual Panel Meeting in

late 2010 that seemed to imply that Water

Walk had had the ‘gentle’ and non-exchange

characteristics of ‘chora’, I saw increasingly

the need for a different kind of valuing of

the site of a performance walk; one that was

not of its material qualities or even of what

a performance-walk may provoke that site

into becoming, but rather of the qualities ofa notional ‘space’ for  such a becoming. Such

a ‘space’ had apparently been intuited by Water

Walk’s audience members as a fruitful instability

– ‘(I)deas oated between us’; ‘[T]he rhythm ofthe walk was uid like water’; ‘permitted and

encouraged space for the shifting of meaning’ –

and as an invitation to feel: ‘[Y]ou allow feelings

to be felt. You allow us to touch, and be touched

by, the past … the freedom you give to feel it forourselves’; ‘[W]e are not just learning facts but

FEELINGS of places’ (Panel Questionnaires).

It seemed that through an engagement withsomething like a notional space of ‘chora’,

Water Walk had provoked, offered and enabledan opportunity for its participants to engage,

at least partly self-consciously (with subjective

 variations), with those pre-ideological

productions and reproductions of meaning

that Raymond Williams called ‘structures of

■ Testing the resistance ofan artefact. Members ofPhil Smith’s volunteer panel‘attempting’ to push aVictorian lamp into theRiver Exe. Photo Kris Darby 

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feeling’ (1997: 133–4). In this self-conscious

construction of self and place – by registering,

acknowledging and triggering the ‘chora’

inherent in a touristic space – the preconditions

for the emergence of its ‘anywhere’ qualities(‘utopia that almost exists, wherever you are’

[Hodge et al. 2006: 110]) became active and

‘(T)he layered and fragmented nature of the walk, along with … choice of texts, permitted

and encouraged space for the shifting of

meaning’ (Panel Questionnaire).

If ‘chora’ was a quality latent to touristic

sites in general, as Wearing, Stevenson andYoung claim, then here was a conceptualization

that encouraged an escalation from spaces

that afforded guiding to those of heritage

tourism in general. The relation of ‘chora’ tothe aspiration for heterotopic ‘anywheres’,suggested that ‘chorastic’ space could be general

and ‘returnable to’ and that participants in

interventions in such a space could return to

its instability by themselves or with others,

both as a space of structured feelings and as ananterior to the re-structuring of those feelings

(a precondition for their changing). At the

2010 Annual Panel Meeting of volunteers I had

encountered, for the rst time (but had not

sufciently appreciated), anecdotal evidence

that this was already happening spontaneouslyamong the panel members. One panel member

spoke of returning to the site of one of the

‘mis-guided tours’ with friends; another

commented that they could now only visit theWest Quarter ‘for specic reasons. I suppose it

is because of the ritualistic nature of the walk.’

A third described how they had ‘re-walked some

of those routes and described it to others …

informed/changed/morphed by my re-walking,re-telling’. Unexpectedly, a minority of the

 volunteer members of my research panel

 were spontaneously repeating and dispersingmy  performances.

A growing appreciation of this discovery has

had a profound affect on my practice. Rather

than drawing up blueprints for how others may

nd a specialized means to perform in heritage

sites, similar to my own (with all the problems

of exclusion from such specialization), through

late 2011 and early 2012 I grew increasingly

convinced that I should leave such choices

to whoever was already performing (or likely

to perform) ‘chorastic’ visits to these sites.

I radically re-valued the sites themselves:I was always ready (through the ideas ofmythogeography) to expect such sites to render

up their own ironies, voids and affordances,

but now I was acknowledging their latent

quality of a somewhere between being and

becoming, temporarily resistant to obligations

of exchange and commerce and evasive of

identities and hierarchy, and began to valorize

them as sites for transformation, capable of

transitory states that the double movement

(exorcism and spectral return) of a particular

kind of transparent performance may provokeand sustain. This new characterization

developed my early hunch about the particular

resonance of heritage sites, while continuing

to take account of the powers and effects ofthe ideological codes of tourism and heritage

by locating the instability of such codes in

a pre-ideological space where such codes could,

albeit briey, be subjected to an active poetics

of subjectivity. This was a space where, in the words of sociologist Ann Game, ‘[T]he museum,

the trail, the pamphlet … is punched and torn

open’ (1991: 217).‘Chora’ not only has implications for space,

but for individual subjects as well. It adds

to ‘the agentive tourist’ a variation of theconcept of agency that is more immersed

and engaged than either a passive gazing

or a voluntarist, aggressive ‘intervention’;

a ‘conceptual space for imagining the traveller

as being fully engaged with, and in, the travelexperience and traveller space’ (Wearing et al.

2010: 131). Imagining everyday heritage site

 visitors in that conceptual space and reading

the observations of performance participants,I have been drawn from attempts to pass on

a specic interventionist performance practice

and towards the provocation of performance-

like visits.

The double movement of Water Walk – rst

exorcism, and then spectral resurrection –

seemed to invoke a ground of ‘chora’ in the West

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Quarter by its preparatory lecture’s evasion of

guiding tactics, the deferral of a new synthesis

through the doubly emptied formalities of thetour, and the pseudo-ritualistic actions opened

up to all participants: carrying water, washing,pouring, posing, throwing water, melting ice. By

late 2011, I could at least provisionally assume

that such a moving onto the ground of ‘chora’

 was a precondition for the re-making of heritage

space as an ‘anywhere’; a heterotopian space

 where multiple meanings were set in motion.

The consequence for my research (and practice)

 was that my aspiration for the dispersal of myperformance interventions was itself subject

to a similar double movement, re-emerging

as a far broader, lighter, more transparent

and more popular counter-tourism project.I was now more concerned with dispersing the

means to prepare and sustain the ‘chorastic’

ground of heritage sites than promoting a set

of performance techniques; I had shifted my

 valorization of dispersal from the technical

sophistication and specialization of its contentsto the efcacy of its effects. I began to compile

a toolkit of tactics, using which ordinary tourists

could perform a double movement of travesty

and spectral return on the quotidian (although

excessive, ironic and surreal) behaviours of

heritage tourism. I now ignored any distinctionbetween tourists and artists/performers as far

as the dispersal of tactics was concerned. By the

second half of 2011 I had changed my research

methodology: switching the emphasis from theparticipative observation of my performance

interventions to practice-as-research, inviting

my panel members to join me on ‘forays’ to

heritage sites to devise and experiment with

 various counter-tourist tactics (each intendedrst to travesty touristic behaviours and then to

resurrect them as re-deployable in spectral and

transparent form like the hollowed-out ritualsof the Water Walk).

Here, now, was the underlying strategy of‘counter-tourism’ (and the shape of my present

practice), and its democratized, transformative

grounds: the familiar forms of heritage tourism

could be exorcized (through travesty,

exaggeration and irony) and then spectrally

re-enacted (as hollowed-out rituals) in order totrigger the ‘chorastic’ qualities of transformative

potential in heritage sites, thus engaging a 

re-valued space and agency of tourism. This

informed two counter-tourism publications inlate 2012 (Counter-Tourism: A pocketbook and

Counter-Tourism: The handbook) – with

similarities to (mis)-guidebooks such as The

 Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel 

(Antony and Henry 2005) and Wrights & Sites’ 

 A Mis-Guide To Anywhere (2006) – thirty-oneshort lms made with Siobhan Mckeown5 

demonstrating counter-touristic tactics and an

online presence including the use of social

media6. Each of these outcomes sought to pass

on to the everyday tourist ‘counter-touristic’

tactics that rst parody and then resurrect theconventional etiquette of the heritage visit in

that double movement that seems to open

‘chorastic’ space, while in turn opening that

tourist to their own ‘chorastic’ potential.

The tactics vary from simple exercise-liketasks (walking barefoot, collecting dust, falling

asleep in a site, ignoring the site and exploring

its boundaries or visiting the gift shop as if it

 were the heritage artefact) to others that require

preparation or imaginative performance-like

enactment (creating a silent tour inside and

during an ofcial one, writing an absurd code ofconduct or setting up a ‘Tourist Misinformation

Centre’). All of them take a recognizable

touristic behaviour, displace it or hollow it out,

and then return or resurrect it in an abject or

provocative form. Each of these tactics, simple

or complex, foregrounds the visitor’s production

of their own visit.

It is the ‘visit itself’ (rather than anyheritage object) that is cited by Laurajane

Smith as the key touchstone of authenticity

for visitors to country houses; for the visit

provokes ‘feelings and emotions that wereseen as “real” or genuine and that helpedpeople feel “comfortable” about their social

experiences, social position and values and

their sense of community’ (Smith 2006: 41).

Rather than denouncing such crass negations

of empirical knowledge, I am seeking, through

the idea of counter-tourism, to recruit this

5 The lms can be viewedonline via the links atwww.countertourism.net/ tactics.html

6 There is a presence onFacebook at www.facebook.com/ 

countertourism?fref=tsand a website at www.countertourism.net

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 ■ Counter-tourism taclook a statue in the eywhere does that placePhoto Lorraine Sutherlan

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privileging of the visit itself  by encouraging the

excessive performance of visits as a means to

forefronting and addressing the silencing ofthe historical narrative. In doing so I hope to

create a shifting ground (as part of a generalmaking ‘chorastic’), such as Raymond Williams

identies, between the personal (experiential)

and the social:

[C]hanges of presence … emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await denition …before they exert palpable pressures and seteffective limits on experience and on action …elements of impulse, restraint and tone … affectiveelements of consciousness and relationships: notfeeling against thought, but thought as felt andfeeling as thought.(Williams 1977: 131–2)

In counter-tourism this may mean engaging

people’s feelings of ‘peace and quiet’, security

and homogenization, awe, acquisitiveness,

luxuriation, image-bathing and immersion;

in order to conict with and challenge thosemoments when such feelings assume the

condition of structures (coherent sets of

relations with their various parts) to produce

ideological relations in the sites of heritage

(such as subservience, compliance, passivity,imagined-integration, commodication,

homogenization or identity formation), and todefer and deter that formation of (precipitation

of ‘structures of feeling’ as) ideological relations.

This is an attempt to create a model of affectivedeferral; the ‘chora’ as a kind of ‘plateau’ (a

‘region of intensities whose development avoids

any orientation towards a culmination point

or external end’ [Deleuze and Gautarri 1987:

24]), an excitement that is neither resolved nor

punctured, but sustained so that the visitor is

challenged by her or his own pleasure, appetite,

humility or sense of peace; an agitation by

emotional means.The tactics passed on through the handbooks

and lms seek to make heritage visits

performance-like. They are tools to produce

a visit knowingly, animating the visitor’s own

lay skills while adding to them the reexivity

and self-awareness of a performer of a ‘mis-guided tour’. They seek to encourage visitors

to ‘experience the world as enchanted. As

creatures in transition … apprehending

themselves in the process of transformation’

(Fischer-Lichte 2008: 207). Visitors are

encouraged to deploy fragments of touristicbehaviour and post-dramatic theatricality,

testing the sites through pleasurable excess

and sensual, even sexual, engagement, through

moments of play and pretending – re-making

the sites through their use of them. No longer

a visit to artefacts or to heritage objects; the

‘thing’ of the visit is now its own eventness.

Starting from these simple provocations, the

toolkit of books and lms offers the more

adventurous ‘counter-tourist’ a set of tactics formaking their own dramaturgical interventions

and a strategy for the inltration of heritageorganizations, although even in the most

complex of such personal journeys, the simple

ambulatory exploration always remains as theprimary and underpinning  tactic.

In order to devise this ‘counter-tourism’

toolkit, I drew on my experiences of creating

interventions in heritage sites, supplemented

by joint ventures with members of my researchpanel to try out various tactics on a series of

half-day or day-long visits to heritage sites and

landscapes, on a 16-day walk in September/ 

October 2011 around East Anglian heritage sitesfollowing the route of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings

of Saturn, and with eight of my panel members

using tactics in and around the Cathedral Yard

in Exeter. Over three days of lming in Suffolk

in January 2012 I tried out thirty-ve different

tactics, lmmaker Siobhan Mckeown editingthe resulting material into Tactics for Counter

Tourism (2012), a collection of thirty-one micro-

lms that each demonstrate one or more of

the tactics.

The lms, handbook and pocketbook

are attempts to pass on and hand over thetactics of hypersensitization, self-disruption,

interrogation of site and assemblage of

a performance-like tourism (including

a conscious re-making of the meanings of

heritage sites) that I had rst developed as

‘mis-guided tours’. Now, within a dispersal and

democratization – triggered, on the one hand,

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by the spontaneous behaviour of volunteers

and, on the other, by a re-valuation of heritage

sites and their visitors – I have attempted torealize and disseminate mythogeography’s

limited-nomadism in thinking and action,and the post-dramatic and transformative in

performance – so that, taken together, the

 various toolkits may guide an ‘agentive tourist’on their own social and personal pilgrimage

from consumer-producers of tourism to

performer-producers, invoking the ‘chorastic’

qualities of heritage sites as sufcient grounds

for turning tourists into performers.

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Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Paris:Presses du reel.

Crabman & Signpost (Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti)(2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks, Axminster:Triarchy  Press.

Crouch, David, Lars Aronsson and Lage Wahlström (2001)‘Tourist encounters’,Tourist Studies 1(1): 253–70.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felxi Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand

 Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London/New York:Continuum.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008) The Transformative Power

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