Co-performing tourism places: The “Pink Night” festival

• Applies an ecological perspective to performativity in tourism studies.
• Contradicts understandings of host-guest interactions in previous studies.
• Proposes that tourists and residents co-perform (and coalesce) with the place.
• Enhances the understanding of performativity as a novel theoretical approach in tourism.
• Views tourism places as an “inclusive ecology” of intertwined performances.

This paper adopts an ecological perspective to analyze the practices and processes inherent in encounters between residents and tourists. The study contributes to the literature on performance and performativity, seen as a novel theoretical approach in tourism studies, by proposing the concept of performative field, which enables a holistic and ecological consideration of the performances and relationships in tourism. This is in contrast with the binary logic emerging from the available studies, where confrontation between “hosts” and “guests” as two well-distinguished performative forces appears to be the norm. The study draws on non-representational theories and illustrates its arguments through an investigation of the “Pink Night” (La Notte Rosa), an annual festival staged along the Romagna coastal region – a most renowned Italian mass-tourism destination.