Output details

Counter-Tourism: The Handbook

This book is one of several outputs arising from a practice-as-research project which attempted to develop strategies to inspire general, ‘non-specialist’ tourists (that is, people who are not trained or professionals in performance-making) to make their own performance interventions in heritage sites. Drawing from the critical paradigms of both Tourism Studies and Performance Studies – including the identification of a ‘chorastic’ space of tourism, postdramatic theatre’s de-hierarchization of means, and the concept of the self-reflexive ‘agentive tourist’ – the project’s concluding manifestations, in a variety of complementary forms, comprise a multifarious ‘toolkit’ for the turning of tourists into interventionist performers or ‘counter-tourists’. The Handbook offers a strategic journey, moving from playful intervention to subversive structural engagement with the heritage industry. Its ‘Afterword: The Heritage IS The Visit’, is a popularised summary of the project’s research findings which, at the risk of alienating some readers, seeks to render the grounding theoretical work accountable and accessible to those who are invited to use the counter-touristic tactics based upon it. However, the project outcomes are also manifested in the more intentionally accessible Counter-Tourism: A Pocketbook as well as a series of 31 short films, entitled Tactics for Counter-Tourism, made in collaboration with Siobhan Mckeown (all published simultaneously). The tactics passed on through these outputs are intended as tools to facilitate knowingly produced visits to heritage spaces. They vary from simple exercise-like tasks to others that require some preparation or imaginative enactment. By deploying elements of touristic behaviour and post-dramatic theatricality, visitors are able to test the sites through moments of play and pretending as well as through pleasure, excess and sensual engagement, remaking these sites through their use of them. The overarching research trajectory of the enquiry is described in a paper for Performance Research entitled ‘Turning Tourists into Performers’ (Smith, 2013).