Tourism as Performance: Moving into a New Millennium

This chapter examines the role that dark tourism plays in framing and performing an outward perspective of the north of Ireland. It interrogates how public funding contributed to a proliferation in arts practice and heritage output that engaged with “Troubles Tourism”. Through an analysis of Kabosh Theatre Company's Two Roads West (2008) and The West Awakes (2010), this chapter analyses how Kabosh utilise political (or dark) tourism structures as a means of challenging the dominant binaries of identity present in the north of Ireland post-millennium. In its analysis of both Two Roads West and The West Awakes, this chapter considers the audience-performance relationship curated through these multi-format productions, investigating how audiences are invited to participate in accessing local histories and stories through tourism structures dominating in the north of Ireland in the early 2000s.