Experiencing Festival Bodies: Connecting Massage and Wellness

TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH VOL. 31(1), 2006: 57-66
Experiencing Festival Bodies: Connecting
Massage and Wellness
JENNIFER LEA
This paper looks at the spaces and practices of a music festival through the lens of experiential consumption. The
bodily experiences of the festival (and in particular the ‘healing space’ of the festival) are examined, in terms of the
space itself, and how it intersects with the practices that take place. The healing space includes a range of massage
practices. The paper doesn’t attempt to prescribe what a ‘well’ body might consist of, but rather opens wellness up in
terms of a corporeal experimentation with different modes of being in the world.
Keywords: massage, wellness, non-representational theory, experiential consumption, embodiment, music festivals,
sensory engagement.
Introduction
Wellness is undoubtedly a bodily phenomenon,
comprised through experiential qualities of sensations and
feelings. As such, this paper approaches wellness through
the techniques of bodywork practices (specifically massage)
in the Body and Soul area of a music festival. In doing this it
asks what wellness might be in an ‘economy of experience’
(Pine and Gilmore 1999) in which the currency is the
enhancement of bodily pleasures and sensations. The paper
begins by introducing the two main themes of music festivals
and wellness, and then moves on to discuss massage and its
relation to festival bodies, enrolling non-representational
theory in order to valorize the embodied knowledge and
intelligence of the body (Dewsbury 2000). The experiential
methods used put the body at the centre of the knowledge
production process in order to interrogate how the spaces
and practices of the festival (more generally) and the Body
and Soul area (more specifically) are folded together towards
the production of a corporeally experienced wellness.
Festival Spaces and Experiencing Wellness
Festivals
Despite their popularity in the UK context (Glastonbury
for example has a capacity of 112,000 people and attracts
considerable media coverage) there has been relatively little
research done around music festivals. In general, research
has focused more widely upon rave (Hill 2002) and dance
music culture, with more specific attention being paid to
clubs and clubbing practices (Malbon 1999; Thornton 1995
for example). However, some inroads have been made by the
tourism and sociological literature.
Tourist studies have predominantly considered music
festivals in terms of motivations of attendees, or revenue
generation. Crompton and McKay (1997: 429) suggested that
festivals are ‘one of the fastest growing types of tourism
attractions’. As such they consider an important point of
intervention to be analyzing the motivations of attendees in
order that ‘practical settings and contexts in a festival can be
amended to facilitate fulfilment of them’ (1997: 426). They
perform a quantitative analysis, concluding that the majority
of festival-goers are motivated by a desire for interpersonal
socialization, and ‘the desire to obtain psychological
(intrinsic) rewards through travel in a contrasting (new or
old) environment’ (Iso-Ahola: 1982 quoted in Crompton and
McKay 1997: 428). These are interesting findings, but seem
to over-simplify the case in a number of ways, for example
overplaying the rational aspect of visitor motivations and
placing too much emphasis upon the psychological aspects
of experience. The other emphasis within tourist studies is
the revenue gained from a festival. Although, not focusing
specifically upon music festivals O’Sullivan and Jackson
(2002: 326) note the economic value of festivals is related to
their ‘considerable income generating properties and…ability
to provide jobs’. They examine the potential for festival tourism
to ‘contribute to sustainable local economic development’
(O’Sullivan and Jackson 2002: 337).
The sociological literature generally frames music
festivals through the suggestion that they are a subculture
phenomenon; Purdue et al. (1997: 647) label them as ‘DIY
(do-it-yourself) culture’; a ‘self proclaimed cultural
movement, challenging the symbolic codes of mainstream
culture’. They go on to suggest that festivals are, ‘apart’ from
everyday life, spaces where the ‘symbolic frameworks of
JENNIFER LEA is a Doctoral Candidate at School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. e-mail: [email protected]
©2006 Tourism Recreation Research
Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
everyday life are suspended’ (Purdue et al. 1997: 660).
Through the mobilization of expressive identities,
individuals are able to shape experimental identities and
new forms of sociality (in particular, the authors draw upon
Maffesoli’s concept (1996) of neo-tribal identities, and ideas
of communitas (Turner 1969). In this paper I want to suggest
that this framing is not adequate for either the diversity of
music festivals that have developed in the UK or the variety
of experiences offered by festivals.
Tourist studies has recently seen a move towards
themes of performance (e.g., Coleman and Crang 2002; Cloke
and Perkins 2002; and Edensor 1998) and experience (Ryan
2002; Li 2000 for example). Similarly, there has been a turn
in the geographical and sociological literature towards the
experiential, emotional (Davidson and Bondi 2004) and nonrepresentational (Thrift 2000a; Dewsbury et al. 2002; Lorimer
2005). Despite this, the experiential economies of festivals
have not really been addressed (although see Getz and
Chenye 2002 for a brief consideration).
As it is based less around definable measurements of
‘health’, wellness is experienced as the movement towards
a different embodied state, characterized by the ‘enhancement
of bodily sensations – bodily bliss, pleasures and joys’
(Bauman 2005: 91). In common-sense understandings of
massage, the recipient purchases the treatment in order to
feel more relaxed, connected, and in general to experience
his/her bodies as ‘well’. As these sensations can be relatively
transitory (although they can also feed into longer term
experiences of wellness), there is a contrast with the relatively
linear progression towards health (identified by Cassidy)
that is the aim of the biomedical model.
The festival spaces offer a heightened experience of this
wellness because they give the massage recipient some
distance from their ‘everyday life’ and offers an environment
that is designed to facilitate embodied experiences. As such,
the next section introduces the case study festival, The Big
Chill, and contextualizes the massage area (the ‘Body and
Soul’ area) within this.
Wellness
The Big Chill
The attainment of ‘wellness’ is based upon a different
economy of bodily experiences than the biomedical model of
‘health’. Whereas biomedicine follows a progression of
observation, analysis, definition and intervention through
pharmaceutical drugs or surgery (Cassidy 2004: 80),
wellness is much less clearly defined. Watt et al. (1998: 225),
argue that wellness is not concerned with the diagnosis,
treatment and prevention of disease, but rather is comprised
of the active engagement of individuals with their ‘health
and health care’ and as such can be aligned with
complementary and alternative health systems.
The Big Chill has a media reputation for being a festival
that is ‘a refreshing alternative to the more alternative
weekends in the summer festival calendar’ (Rose 2004). This
particular newspaper article suggests that the festival has
This active engagement with our bodies is identified
as a societal trend by Bauman (2005) as he argues that we
live in a constant state of anxiety about our bodies. Through
these active interventions, the corporeal becomes the
‘ultimate value’ in a society of consumers, and its ‘well-being
is the foremost object of all and any life-pursuits’ (Bauman
2005: 91). Here may lie the impetus for the increasing number
of individuals who choose to engage with corporeal practices
in order to create a holistic state of wellness (taking into
account intellectual, physical, social, emotional,
occupational, and spiritual aspects (Hatfield and Hatfield
1992). In interrogating the ways in which the body is
constructed as the ‘ultimate value’ (in economic terms a
‘potentially inexhaustible source of profits’ (Bauman 2005:
91), this paper looks at the ways in which the biomedical
constructions of the body as a ‘pure object of science’ (Parr
2002: 243)1 might be questioned experientially through the
practices of massage.
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established a firm following among a particular demographic:
those who used to go to Glastonbury but can no longer
stand the crowds or the drugs; those who never went to
Glastonbury and now feel too old and uncool to go; and
those who still want to behave like kids, alongside their
kids, in a safe setting. (Rose 2004)
Two other articles suggest that there is such a thing as
a ‘Big Chill generation’, a breed of ‘responsible
hedonists’…who harbour a long list of escapist fantasies’
(Brinton 2005), or ‘in marketing spiel…Guardian-reading,
cocktail-swilling, organic food-munching, middle-class
media creatives’ (Foster 2005). Although, these provide
caricatures and are as such, over-simplifications of the range
and diversity of people that attend the Big Chill, it is fair to
make this distinction between the Big Chill and the ‘more
alternative’ festivals such as Glastonbury or the Big Green
Gathering2 which could perhaps be analysed within Purdue
et al.’s (1997) subculture framing. Neither can the Big Chill
be grouped with the more ‘commercial’ music festivals such
as ‘V’ festival (sponsored by the Virgin group) or ‘T in the
Park’ (sponsored by Tennants brewery). In addition, it is
difficult to categorize the festival either in terms of the music
(stretching as it does across folk, world, techno, drum and
bass, electronica, chill out and more) or in terms of the
demographic that attends.
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
Rather, the Big Chill was chosen for this research as it
is part of a new breed of festival in the UK, explicitly based
around an economy of experience, as Pete Lawrence and
Katrina Larkin, the co-organizers suggest:
The Big Chill offers its committed community of followers a
highly evolved, all-round experience that is completely
unique. Whilst the world gets ever faster and more transfixed
with novelty, The Big Chill is committed to the organic,
the intimate and, above all, the human. The Big Chill’s
ethos is a fusion of vision and tradition, flair and expertise,
harmony and vitality…We believe that by coming together
and creating a synthesis of spirituality and hedonism, The
Big Chill is harnessing what many see as the original festival
spirit. (www.bigchill.net/bigchillethos.html)
Through music, performance, art, dance and film, in a
carefully chosen location, the Big Chill offers a space in
which participants can (if they so choose) experiment with a
different mode of embodiment based upon the experiential
register. Over the ten-year history of the Big Chill the
organizers have focused upon the location and design of the
festival environment. In 1998 the festival moved to a site in
Dorset, and was named ‘The Enchanted Garden’. Situated
in the Larmer Tree gardens3 the festival was characterized
by the peacocks that wandered through the crowds, and the
macaws flying above. In 2002 the festival moved to its current
location of Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, which is situated
in a valley bottom deer park, looking across to the ‘fairytale’
style turreted castle.
These festival sites offer a space removed from the
everyday lives of the participants which allows them the
opportunity to experience themselves, other people, and the
festival environment in a slightly different register. Pete
Lawrence, the co-organizer suggests that the festival
will play its part in bringing people together to celebrate
how awe-inspiring this world can be, slow us down to the
speed of life and send shivers of pleasure down the spine too
The Big Chill could be framed in terms of hedonistic
practices, in which the participants attempt to become
‘somehow ‘more’ than themselves when released from the
constraints of everyday life’ (Smith 2003: 103-108).
Hedonistic tourist experiences (e.g., Saldhana 2002) are
constructed around narratives of escapism, and these
narratives may indeed resonate with some or many of the
attendees of the Big Chill. It does seem, however, that this is
too straightforward an analysis, and that framing the festival
only in terms of escapism is not adequate for the range of
practices that come together to make up a music festival. As
such, this paper focuses upon practices that question this
narrative, suggesting that at the core of music festivals
perhaps there is an inherent tension between moving beyond,
and moving toward ‘the self’.
These practices are located mainly in the Body and
Soul area which is a self-contained site (see Figure 1) within
the festival site, situated outside the main arena, near to the
club and ‘sanctuary’ tents. It offers massage treatments to
the festival-goers over the course of the weekend. When this
research was conducted there were one hundred therapists
in the area in a mix of communal and individual tents, who
offered treatments (such as Thai massage, Tui Na, Shiatsu,
Aromatherapy massage, Reflexology, Indian Head massage,
Craniosacral, Acupuncture, Acupressure massage,
Alexander technique, Sonic healing and Tarot reading) and
workshops (in which festival-goers can try practices such
as yoga, t’ai chi, creative thinking and hand reflexology).
The Body and Soul area is organized by ‘Realease’, a
company that specifically provides ‘healing’ areas for a
number of similar festivals4, and in the workplace. As such,
the Body and Soul area offers a more coherent and organized
space than, for example the Healing Fields at Glastonbury.
This meant that the Body and Soul area offered the
(Lawrence 2002: 10)
The festival then is engineered around a different speed
from everyday life, one which draws attention to the
excitation of all the senses. The music provides auditory
stimulation, and the purposely chosen beautiful locations
(decorated with lighting, art installations and visual shows
of films) engage the visual. The festival also provides
olfactory stimulation (through the pleasant smells of the food
stalls and perhaps less pleasant smells of the portable toilets),
the tastes of the different foods and drinks available, and the
tactile sensations of proximity to grass and canvas. The
participants themselves can choose to work on their sensory
and experiential registers, transforming and heightening,
through the consumption of alcohol or recreational drugs.
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
Figure 1. The Entrance to the Body and Soul area.
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Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
opportunity to study an area explicitly designed for the
production of wellness. The organizers suggest that
having a treatment at the Big Chill is to experience the
balance of health and hedonism. This is core to the Big Chill
philosophy – a creative, spiritually uplifting environment
where people can become their best selves. To feel your own
tension release, to get in touch with the very nature of your
body. (Big Chill Magazine 2002: 23)
This offers an alternative discourse from that of
escapism, instead suggesting that having a massage or
treatment at the festival might instead put you in touch (in
some way) with yourself. This is a trend identified by Smith
(2003: 103-108) in her study of ‘holistic holidays’ when she
writes that instead of becoming ‘more’ than the self, the
‘holistic or spiritual tourist is likely to be seeking an authentic
sense of self’. The treatments at the festival work towards
this becoming your ‘best self’ on a number of different levels,
and are not just about touch or manipulation and their
intrinsic therapeutic properties (Field 1999). They are also
about working the energy lines (also called sen lines, nadis,
meridians, depending upon the tradition) that are believed
to run through the body. The practitioners work the lines in
order to restore the free flow of energy through the body,
which is believed to correspond with an increased feeling
and experience of wellness.
Rather than being based upon the observable reality of
recovering from a particular condition (as in the rationality
of biomedicine), energy (like wellness) is much more difficult
to pin down. It cannot be measured, seen or touched directly;
it is only through touch that the practitioner can feel the
energy flows, and even then it is not completely clear what it
feels like, as one of the interviewees, a yoga teacher and
Shiatsu practitioner explained:
We don’t even have a concept of it – cause the word is Chi
– in Chinese or Ki in Japanese, or Prana – and prana is the
sum total of everything in the universe, okay? Whereas
energy [in a Western understanding] is something which
flows and is measurable like electricity or heat or light – it’s
very different. (Interview with Andrew 18/11/04)
This concept of energy problematizes how we can begin
to conceive of bodily experience and wellness, because in
working with something invisible and immeasurable, it
becomes difficult to measure increases in wellness. As such,
it can only be located in the experiential realm. This has
consequences for both the way in which this research was
conducted, and also the theoretical framing that the paper
works with.
Practising Research
As the whole festival is located in the space of bodily
flows and visceral sensations, the research required an
60
approach that began to tap into this particular mode of
embodiment. This poses problems for traditional academic
approaches to the body, which do not have a vocabulary
that values these bodily registers of experience, as Stafford
argues,
bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence in general [has been]
damned to the bottom of the Cave of the humanities. In
today’s text-based curricula, sensory and affective
phenomena continue to be treated as second-rate simulations
of second-class reflections. (Stafford 1991: 2)
However, there have recently been some moves towards
trying to apprehend these more experiential aspects of
embodiment and bodies. Social constructionist and
phenomenological accounts of the body take it as the object
of knowledge as argued by Dewsbury (2000). For these
accounts, to a greater or lesser extent, the body can be known,
either as passive (an object to be inscribed with our desires
and wants) or as a container (of our souls, brains,
personalities). Either way, these approaches ascribe a specific
logic to the body. They take the body as self-contained; a
‘whole organism comprised and structured out of an intact,
logically proportioned set of organs that bind its matter and
energy flows neatly within unleaking ends’ (Dewsbury 2000:
482).
This has consequences for what we call knowledge; if
we suggest that the body can be wholly conceptualized and
understood, then knowledges are reduced to the wholly
explainable. Epistemologically bound, the body is reduced
to a coherent object; actions and passions become rational
and academically explainable. These approaches leave no
room for the unexplainable and immaterial forces of energy,
and so are of little help in the spaces of the Body and Soul
area. This research adopts an alternative framing of ‘nonrepresentational theory’. This is an attempt to move research
on from its
current emphasis upon representation and interpretation
by moving away from a view of the world based on
contemplative models of thought and action towards theories
of practice which amplify the potential of the flow of events.
(Thrift 2000b: 556)
Nigel Thrift (1998) has drawn upon wider trends in
the social sciences and humanities to develop ‘nonrepresentational theory’. This has been taken up in a number
of different empirical sites (for example Dance Movement
Therapy (McCormack 2003), walking (Wylie 2005), cities
(Thrift 2004)) and in a number of different styles (Dewsbury
et al. 2002; Dewsbury 2003; Harrison 2000). Broadly
underpinning these differing approaches are three themes;
firstly an attention to the practical rather than cognitive
aspects of the world; secondly a re-figuration of ‘what counts
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
as explanation and knowledge’ towards more active,
engaged views of the world, and thirdly a valorization of
‘the skills and knowledges [people] get from being embodied
beings’ (Thrift 1997: 126).
Non-representational theory takes a distinctive
approach to the body, figuring it as the subject of knowledge,
in which it is made through its encounters with the world.
Its orientation within the world is made and remade
(negotiated) through sensate encounters (touch, taste, smell,
sight and sound) which stimulate bio-chemical and
energetic flows. As such, the body is not
made up of the black and white signifying symbols of the
written page – malleable and easily defined – but of
biological flows of energy, matter and stimulating chemical
fluids (adrenaline, pheromones, endorphins) which are in
excess of such definitions, irradiating, condensing,
intersecting, building and rippling our senses of being-inthe-world. (Dewsbury 2000: 485)
These fluids and flows (which as Lingis (1994: xi)
argues have not been valued in our ‘politico-economic
discourse’ up to now) have a very real (and undeniable)
effect upon our experiences of the world, connecting and
transforming the body, and reshaping our experiences of
our embodiment. The body has a plasticity, being shaped
and reshaped through its encounters in the world.
As such then, two research techniques were used to
record the ways in which bodies acted as ‘receiver/
transmitter of sensations’ (Bauman 2005: 93). Firstly, indepth interviews were conducted with the organizers of the
Body and Soul area, Avril Stanley and Janee Swan from
Realease, who were asked about the design, function and
usage of the space over the years that they have been running
the space. A number of the therapists working at the festival
were recruited through letters distributed at the festival and
were interviewed in the weeks following the event.
Experiential research in the Body and Soul area was also
carried out, sitting and observing the space, and also
participating in massage and movement activities. These
engagements were recorded through video and
photography, and also through a research diary in which I
wrote about bodily sensations, feelings, movements, and
events. Using the body as a recording device recognizes that
‘all parties assembled in the research process, researcher
and researched, bodies and texts, instruments and fields,
condition each other and actively constitute the knowledge
‘event’’ (Whatmore 2003: 95) and allows the research
to become more intimate with the materiality and
immateriality of the world. It also allows a move beyond
common sense understandings of massage as ‘relaxing’
towards a more nuanced idea of the actual experiential
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
qualities of ‘wellness’.
Engaging with the World
In accepting that the world shapes and reshapes our
experiences of embodiment, it becomes crucial to interrogate
the role of the Body and Soul area in creating experiences of
wellness, because ‘the world is not something that is given
to us but something that we engage in by moving, touching,
breathing, and eating’ (Varela 1999: 8). We are in constant
engagement with the world, even before we are cognitively
aware of it. We connect and disconnect through skin, muscle,
senses, nerves, balance, all of the time altering both on bodies
and minds. The festival and the Body and Soul area are not
simply backdrops for our practice, but rather offer modes of
spacing and repertoires of practice that we can experiment
with. As already argued, the festival opens up the possibility
of a different corporeal rhythm, energy and perspective from
‘everyday life’.
The space of the festival in general is one in which
there is an openness to practices such as yoga, and
bodywork. Sitting after having breakfast in the campsite, I
noticed someone doing yoga, moving through shoulder
stand, downward dog and its variations; walking along to
the main site of the festival there were people doing sun
salutations on the hillside, and waiting for a shower we
spotted someone doing t’ai chi. Practices arise spontaneously
throughout the site, and are not confined to the Body and
Soul area. In terms of the festival, although wellness might
result as an indirect effect of being at the festival (through
decreased stress, distance from stressors etc.) it is not
necessarily the prime motivation for attendance. In contrast,
the Body and Soul area is specifically designed to facilitate a
movement towards wellness. Avril Stanley explained the
geography of the Body and Soul area to me:
We’re given a field and this field we have to turn into a
healing space – so my vision is that that is a place that
before people get there there’s lots of energy and input and
intention and focus…this year…it’s a five petal lotus
shape… the centrepiece is one of the most important parts
of the whole healing area because it holds it all together,
and that is done in a very clear way, by somebody who
works with crystals, by somebody who works with the land,
and by somebody who knows about elements…So it’s
worked on at a kind of more spiritual level, on a more
magical level, on more working with the elements, working
with the land, working with whatever it is that we can see,
and we can’t see that helps us in our lives.
(Interview with Avril, 10/6/04)
As such, there is a clear intention behind the space,
worked through on both material and less tangible ways, so
that the imagined healing space becomes concrete through
practice. On a material level (as Figure 2 shows), the area is
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Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
figured around the theme of the five elements (based on
Chinese astrology); metal, water, fire, wood and earth. For
each of these elements there is a different tent in which
practitioners can work, grouped into similar types of
treatments and massage (Avril told me that ‘the fire tent has
got the therapies that are more dynamic, the earth tent has
the therapies that are more grounding, the air tent has the
therapies that are a little bit more kind of esoteric, the water
they work ‘with’ the land rather than against it. The creation
of the space moves beyond designing a space that functions
practically, into creating an atmosphere that people can
tangibly experience. Douglas, one of the 2004 massage
practitioners at the festival, hinted about this atmosphere in
an interview with him:
I think it creates a nice space to work in because people
around you are doing the same thing…so it creates a good
vibe, a good sense of electricity, of ‘let’s massage and take
care’. I don’t like to use the word ‘heal’ for some reason, but
‘let’s heal these people’. I think it creates a great energy
basically. (Interview with Douglas 24/8/04)
Avril told me that she sees it as a ‘place where people
come in and from the moment they come in there’s a distinct
difference from the festival’. Janee also took up this thread,
in her description of an incident that she witnessed in the
Body and Soul area:
People walk in there and feel the difference as well…it’s an
intense calm – and um, I had a situation where a guy
walked in – he was obviously a performer – I think he’d
been brushing his teeth with rum or something – you know
he was just being real loud and funny. And out there [in
the main festival space] it went down a treat, but when he
came into the body and soul…It was almost like the energy
of it had a magnetic – you know how magnets can repel –
you felt him being repelled from the area.
(Interview with Janee 2/6/04)
As Janee sees it, the energy of the space makes certain
kinds of practice welcome, and others are repelled. The
performer did not connect with the energy, or the prevalent
practices of the Body and Soul area, and his mode of
performance was incommensurable with the space of the
Body and Soul area. Clearly then, on an entirely tangible
and corporeally sensed level, there is a different mode of
spacing that composes the Body and Soul area; a loose
‘repertoire of conduct’ (Rose 1996: 143-4) is established.
Discourses, practices and architectures come together,
affording a potentially different way of being in the world.
Figure 2. The layout of the Body and Soul area.
has the ones that are more fluid like your massage with the
oils’).
Janee and Avril are concerned with the ways in which
this material design feeds into the more immaterial aspects
of the space. They work with the idea of energy when
designing and building the Body and Soul area, folding the
intention, energy and spirituality into the materiality of the
spaces. As the above quote suggests, they see it as vital that
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You just see people – it helps them to relax more…just
kind of slowing down a little bit – a lot of people come from
London and you do - you see them start to unwind – they
come into our area – by the time they leave, they’re already
kind of like, they’re on their way.
(Interview with Avril 10/6/04)
Avril suggests that just the encounter with the space
changes the mode of being in the world towards a more
relaxed and less tense mode of being in the world. As already
discussed wellness is not an inherent quality of an
individual, but rather about a change in stance to the world;
a difference in the mode of engagement with spaces, bodies
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Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
and practices. This potential for ‘wellness’ is, as the next
section will argue, intensified by actual engagement with
the practices of the Body and Soul space.
Unfolding Wellness
The previous section argued that the potential for
wellness is opened up by a visit to the Body and Soul area,
because of the ways in which ‘the materiality of place lives,
is inscribed in our bodies’ (Game 1995, in Thrift 1998: 314).
The fact that the massage takes place at the festival opens up
different possibilities of wellness, than if it had taken place
in a natural health centre, for example. As already suggested,
the festival as a whole offers a space apart from the ‘everyday’,
but it is the festival practices that facilitate a ‘gaining of
distance’. Janee told her vision for the Body and Soul area
was as
a place where people might come to the festival and they’re
in a beautiful setting, but they might be still frantic in their
minds, or still in the city…so I can see it as a place where
people can really come and get grounded and come back
into their bodies, and then with that, they can walk round
in a more enlightened and blissful state when they go out
into the festival. (Interview with Janee 2/6/04).
Key to the practices of the Body and Soul area (as
experiential consumption) is this idea of opening up a mode
of engagement that is based more in the body. Janee goes on
to suggest that the space is about ‘people coming into their
bodies to change their mood and change their way’ without
the more ‘manufactured’ ways of changing mood, such as
music or drugs. This ‘coming into’ the body can be
experienced in a wide variety of ways (and of course this is
not to say that everyone will have these experiences), but
generally it undoes the supports that usually underpin our
engagements with the world. These supports are habitually
engrained patterns that can be built up through practice,
and which mean that we only have less ways of acting into
the world. As Cyndi Lee, a yoga teacher from New York puts
it:
Yoga is the practice of creating the conditions for opening to
occur…If we only allow ourselves to feel one way all the
time we are not open, we are robots. Totally shut down and
programmed…If we are one-dimensional, we cannot be
open. If our mind gets hard in an effort to hold up our body,
we are not open. (Lee 2004: 91)
These supports then can be anything from the noncognitive ways in which we hold our bodies (habitually
instituted through years of sitting at a desk, which tends to
shorten the hamstrings and round the shoulders forwards),
to the attitudes we cultivate towards our bodies (perhaps
even forgetting we have a body until it cuts into our
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
consciousness because it is in pain). Whatever these supports
are, the combination of the space and practices of the Body
and Soul area have the potential to (but of course will not
always) initiate a difference in the body and mind.
It’s not about a dependency, it’s not about someone coming
along and then just literally making them feel better, which
happens anyway. It’s about your potential – it’s about
experiencing your body feeling great and therefore knowing
it can. (Interview with Janee 2/6/04)
The massage unfolds us, and as we lie back, our posture
(which is held in position ready for movement and action
most of the time) is undone; hands press the shoulders (that
normally round forward) towards the ground, at the same
time suggesting to the shoulder blades that they move down
the back. Legs might roll outwards and feet (rather than
pointing up to the sky) might begin to roll towards a 45
degree angle. The touch, and unusual action of lying still for
an hour although (the massage might include some quite
dramatic movements) gradually relaxes the body.
And each different massage offers a different way of
‘coming into the body’. To take one more active practice as
an example, Thai Yoga massage moves the limbs and joints
through their full range of movement, perhaps opening up a
different kinaesthetic awareness of the body. The body is
moved in ways that it has not been before, and the recipient
may become aware of some limitations in movement, and
some freedoms that they were not aware of previously. As
Douglas (a Thai massage practitioner at the festival) told me
it makes me feel like my body has been worked – like
C-3PO5 being put in this oil bath and coming out – you
know my whole body being seen to and you feel energized,
you have mobility, erm, and the mind as well – it helps
clarify thinking. (Interview with Douglas 24/8/04).
The epidermal contact (either directly with oils, or
through clothing depending upon the treatment received)
draws the focus of the recipient to areas of the body that they
might not otherwise have that much awareness of, for
example the back of the body. Our major sensory organs,
with which we tend to make sense of the world, are at the
front of our bodies (our eyes, nose, ears, hands). During a
Thai massage for example, the practitioner can apply the
whole of their body weight through the back of the body,
kneeling on the backs of the thighs, and applying pressure
through their hands up either side of the spine. This direct
touch upon the back draws attention and experience to this
part of the body, and often the recipient cannot help but
become aware of the deep pulse that throbs just below the
belly button, and perhaps they also notice the fullness of
their bladder, or even just the way that the deep pressure
applied to the back relaxes and works into the muscles.
63
Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
These more active forms of massage can also allow the
recipient to experience the interconnectedness of their body;
in Thai massage the feet are palmed outwards and towards
the floor and the action of this can be felt right up the legs
into the hips. This interconnectedness is not just about the
body, but also the mind; the massage recipient can become
more aware of the fact that ‘when I move my hand, I’m
changing my brain, according to…understanding[s] in
modern neuroscience’ (Goleman 2004: 209). Massage can
turn our awareness inwards, cultivating an awareness of
the more deep, and less quick bodily movements, the flows
and pulses of fluids and energetic charges. At the same time,
our awareness is turned outwards, as we feel the massage
practitioner manipulate and move our bodies, sometimes
the music drifting from the club tent cuts across our
consciousness (perhaps a song we know), or the warm breeze
brushes across our skin6.
Other more static treatments such as acupuncture or
craniosacral therapy, where the recipient lies still for the full
hour treatment also reshape our engagements with ourselves.
Claire, a craniosacral therapist at the festival told that:
you know it’s not physical in the sense that you’re
pummelling the muscles, but the shifts are amazing – you
know you’re working on deeper levels – you’re working on
the bone, or you’re working on the cerebral spinal fluid
around the spine. You know you’re working on systems
that are so core to your health.
(Interview with Claire 4/8/04)
Simply lying still not moving, trying not to fall asleep
during the hour-long treatment reshapes our relation with
our body. While the body is still, it is possible to lose a
kinaesthetic sense of where we are in space because it is the
movement of the body that activates the sensors in the
muscles that feed back and inform the brain where the body
is in space. Or this lying still can precipitate a change in
consciousness, as Claire and I talked about after I had received
a treatment from her:
J: When I was having the treatment there were points
where I was really aware of my body and really aware of
myself and who I was, but then there were also points
where I just kind of lost all track of time…there was the
massage and that was it.
C: That’s similar – what you’ve described there is
meditation. Where you’ve emptied your mind of its normal
processes (its normal ‘I’ve got to do this’ or ‘I’ve got to do
that’)…It’s great that you’ve got to that point because
some people find it hard. You’ve got to get to the point
where you can actually empty it all out and just be there is
the moment, when you can live in the moment, the moment
is so vast that it’s not time bound, it’s not even body bound.
You get to that point of such peace that its like, it feels
(Interview with Claire 4/8/04)
infinite.
64
This experience of ‘being in the moment’ breaks the
habitual pattern of the chatter that our minds engage in; a
stream of thoughts that project us into the future (‘what bands
will we see tonight?’) or back into the past (‘I wish I had
drunk some water before this treatment began’). Things creep
back into your consciousness though, whether an external
stimulus (a sound from the festival), a habitual pattern
(drifting into sleep, or an unsolicited thought rushing you
forward into the future, or reverberating in the past), or an
unconscious corporeal event (the jerk and spasm of a leg, or
a lengthened and deepened breath that takes you by
surprise). The body is in constant change in relation to the
practices of the treatment, but as these moments from the
experiential recording of my body during treatments and
the interview extracts with the practitioners have shown,
the practices of the Body and Soul area can open up a
difference in our habitual relations to our bodies; massage
shapes the ways in which we ‘move, touch, breathe, eat’
(Varela 1999: 8).
As such, massage has the potential to ‘teach’ the
massaged bodies a different set of grammars that offer a
different mode of experience than the one we generally
embody. As Bruno Latour (2004:210) argues, ‘what we say,
feel and act, is geared on differences registered in the world’
and ‘the more contrasts you add, the more differences and
mediations you become sensible to’ (2004: 211, original
emphasis). This difference is the cornerstone to the ‘wellness’
that this paper has engaged with, because the bodywork
treatments can mean that the body is not trapped within
established grammars of being. The massage treatments
explore the ‘dynamic range’ of the body, and its corporeal
plasticity means that the body forges different ways to
respond to the world.
The Body and Soul area offers a space apart from our
routines and habits, and conceptions of our bodies. Rather
than being specific about the ways in which massage opens
up the nervous system, soothes painful muscles, increases
energy flow, enables the easy flow of oxygenated blood to
tissues, or generates mood enhancing chemicals such as
dopamine, we can talk about wellness in terms of a breaking
out of certain habits and corporeal regime of stress, towards
a more open and vital attachment to the world. Latour (2004:
211-229) argues that for himself, he ‘wants to be alive and
thus, want more words, more controversies, more artificial
settings, more instruments, so as to become sensitive to even
more differences’. In this he suggests that we should
experiment with other modes of being in the world, to work
with practices which might problematize our existent modes
of dwelling (Harrison 2000: 511). This paper has illustrated
a number of the ways in which massage and bodywork
Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006
Massage and Wellness: J. Lea
practices at the festival allow this experimentation.
Conclusions: Wider Wellnesses?
This paper has offered an experiential, bodily scale
exploration of wellness as experienced through bodywork
practices such as massage in the space of a music festival.
The festival space offered a heightened economy of
experience in which the body is opened up to different and
more experimental modes of embodiment, and it is this
possibility of a different mode of engagement with the world
that is experienced as wellness. The paper suggested that
the experiential folding together of the spaces and practices
of the Body and Soul area opens up the potential for our
engagements with the world to have a different shape,
whether we categorize the experience in terms of feeling
relaxed, ‘spaced out’, or energized, or just a sense that we
have been moved (physically, emotionally, or both) in a
certain way. A further point of investigation comes from the
ways in which these different shaped engagements with the
world underline that experiences of wellness are never just
individual; we are always implicated in the milieu that
surrounds us. Our bodies and actions affect others, just as
their bodies and actions might impact upon our experiences
of our own wellness, and this is a point that Janee and Avril
make clearly on the Big Chill website:
Why is having a treatment integral to the Big Chill festival
experience? A small treatment can have mammoth effect.
One person’s positivity, one persons light then pervades
the festival, just like a chain reaction, the light travels from
person to person, sharing the potential to open, to be honest
and to love. Merging with the Big Chill celebration, this
intercourse of energy creates a Collective Bliss-State.
(www. bigchill.net/story.html?id=546)
others (because massage might or might not impact upon
this), or the ways in which our bodies present themselves to
the world (in ways we don’t necessarily know, or are not
wholly aware of). In opening up the specifically embodied
aspects of wellness tourism, this paper doesn’t offer a
prescriptive sense of how to achieve wellness, but rather
suggests that wellness is located within the economy of
experience that the festival, and more specifically, the Body
and Soul area of the festival offers.
Endnotes
1.
See Parr’s progress report for a much more detailed
and nuanced discussion of the ways in which
geographers are moving to interrogate the ways in
which bodies are constructed and experienced relative
to the biomedical model of the body.
2.
Although Glastonbury in particular has changed since
the annual erection of a fence designed to stop people
jumping over it.
3.
Created in the 1880’s by General Pitt Rivers as pleasure
grounds for ‘public enlightenment and entertainment’
(www.larmertreegardens.co.uk/the-garden.htm)
4.
Such as Bestival on the Isle of Wight, and Electric Picnic
near Dublin. These festivals are modelled to a certain
extent upon the Big Chill. See www.realease.co.uk for
more details about the company.
5.
Douglas is referring to a character and scene from the
Star Wars films here.
6.
Of course, it is important to note that these sensations
might not always be pleasurable; the pressure might
be too hard, or might stir up difficult emotions or
feelings, or the recipient may just not like the experience
of being touched and moved in those kinds of ways.
However, this paper focuses specifically on the
experiences of wellness in accordance with this themed
issue.
This suggests that bodies that have been opened up to
the experiences of wellness offered by the Body and Soul
area can shape the grammars and conduct of other festival
bodies that they cross paths with. An area for fruitful further
investigation then might trace the potential for ‘wider
wellnesses’ and the ways in which these wellness
experiences leak out of the Body and Soul area, whether in
terms of conscious decisions to act in a certain way towards
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to all my interviewees. Also to Nik
whose companionship at the festival was essential. And to
the two anonymous reviewers, and JD Dewsbury and Keith Bassett for their helpful and insightful comments. All errors
remaining are mine. The research was funded by ESRC studentship number PTA030200200388.
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Submitted: July 25, 2005
Accepted: November 15, 2005.
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