Performing Moretonhampstead: rurality, participation and cultural value

ABSTRACTThis paper is based on a multi-sited ethnography of subjects engaged in performance-based participation – amateur theatre, community-based theatre and Carnival – in the market town of Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor in the South West of England. Given its setting, the case study examines the rural dimensions of participation and cultural value. In addition to understanding the meaning and value of performance-based participation taking place in shared communal spaces, including the parish hall and the high street, this article seeks to understand everyday participation as a fundamentally embodied and emplaced practice. Place is not simply a venue or site for performance (or any other type of) participation. Drawing on the place theory of Edward Casey, who follows the European school of phenomenology, it is argued that place is, rather, the fundamental ground of human experience: embodied subjects and places co-evolve in a dialogic process of inter-animation. The main question we ask is how rurality s...