Live Entertainment in a Fairytale Art-Peripheral Tourist Setting
Laila El-Mahgary
2016
Laila EL-Mahgary. Transnational Literature
unpublished
Introduction This article focuses on the important role of live music and entertainment in art-peripheral tourist settings. Previous studies have acknowledged that for art-peripheral audiences, live entertainment exists as a second interest. On the other hand, the main arguments in this article will reveal that by focusing merely on the macrostructures, the larger developments and changes in the worldwide seaside resorts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or on the more
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... ve entertainment forms, one can easily dismiss the other popular forms of entertainment and their importance to tourist settings. 1 While Howard Hughes explores the larger developments in tourism, he also looks at the microstructures, questioning the meaning of travel for different types of tourists as he defines art-peripheral hotel settings constituting of audiences and tourists who are more popular-entertainment oriented. 2 According to Hughes, performances in art-peripheral settings are shaped by repetitive and tedious rituals in which the distance between the audience and the performer is greater than that of the more celebrative forms of performances. The main argument he suggests is that, unlike for the core-art tourists who attend professional and highly regulated music festivals, the art-peripheral tourists' experiences with live music or entertainment are rarely celebrative and never a means to an end. Like Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, he observes the western audience's level of physical separation from the performer. 3 He argues that this level of separation is not a direct result of any particular genre of music, but rather, a question of the audience type. This article will suggest that while previous studies have found the genre of music or the audience type important in influencing the level of separation between the audience and performer, in this case study on art-peripheral tourist settings, the primary factor shaping the nature of relationship between the audience and performer is the ambiguous environment of the 'sea as liminality', and which consists of highly transitional, and marginal 'fairytale' spaces. Even though extensive work has been done on the complex relationship between cultural tourism, popular music, and identity, the previous works mainly highlighted core-art tourists' and audiences' experiences. 4 For example, Hans Aldskogius draws a sound picture of the summer festivals in Sweden, breaking up the categories of music festivals according to space, and this work illustrates the roots of choral singing in the Swedish identity as well as cultural tourism. Furthermore, Catherine Matheson provides an interesting account of core-art tourism and music festivals, as she convinces the reader of the contextualised Celtic music festival, and the way core-art audiences' identities are shaped by their authentic experiences with Celtic types of performances. The work of Hughes calls out for a valuable approach that will help shed light
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