Theatre and Performance artist, Bill Aitchison is to hold a unique tour of Bath, The Tour of All Tours from Friday 24th to Sunday 26th October, at 11am and 3pm each day.
Presented by ICIA, University of Bath, the tour starts outside the Pump Rooms Restaurant in the City Centre.
The Tour of All Tours is a guided tour of guided tours: a unique style of work that occupies a slippery space somewhere between tourism and contemporary art.
Amusing and critical at the same time it offers a new and original way to experience the city.
It is a tour for people who never take tours, but are curious to know what they are like. It is a genuine, albeit novel, review service for tourists. But more than that, it is a show about the city and the many different ways we perceive it.
The Tour of All Tours brings tourists and local residents into the same frame as equals.
It achieves this by focusing upon something both are familiar with: the mechanics of the tourism industry.
In this way, The Tour of All Tours can function as a conventional tour for tourists, who will be only too familiar with the mechanics of tourism and at the same time also engage local residents in order to destabilise both groups and create a meaningful encounter between them.
It makes a playful and highly self-referential commentary upon contemporary tourism that extends its gaze to the wider society.
Bill Aitchison is a theatre and performance artist who has presented his works in galleries, theatres and festivals in Europe, Asia, America and The Middle East.
He holds a practice-based PhD from Goldsmiths College, is published in several languages, has worked on radio and TV and is associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Tickets for the tour cost £5 but are free for B&NES Discovery Card holders and University of Bath first year students. They can be purchased online www.bath.ac.uk/icia or by calling the ICIA Box Office 01225 386777.
