ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how tourist places become produced, stabilised and consumed, and how tourists' performances are central to the processes. It examines how 'the beach' is (re)produced through a multiplicity of social and material practices as well as the enactment of contradictory cultural discourses. The chapter aims to bring out the practices and discourses enacted within the micro-geographical spaces of the beach. It also examines the 'spatial morphology' of stages for tourist performances through an analysis of the staging of the beach. The chapter describes the social and cultural construction of the beach and the inscription of particular interconnected discourses on the shore of the North Sea in Denmark. It shows how the micro-geographical space of the beach is staged through particular practices and relations of people and objects. The chapter discusses some contradictions between hegemonic and marginalized performances of the beach, and how these are entangled in the spatio-temporal rhythms of the particular beaches that are staged.
