Heritage, culture and artistic reciprocity: Remediating the mythical

This chapter discusses initial findings from research into the heritage culture of British folk-tales and how such material can be made relevant to contemporary audiences via artistic remediation. Given that the specificity of artistic production has long been acknowledged, the paper considers the artists as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 1984) - actors occupying the conceptual space between production and consumption - in an artistic process which mediates between professional(ised) and everyday heritage consumption. The chapter focuses on the processes and pressures involved with practice-based research and collaboration with different kinds of performers, in a project which actively places composition in its social context through involving audiences and the commercial arts sector in a process designed to remediate heritage culture. Research data offer reflective analysis of the self-conceptualisation of artists working as both performer and researcher within the project, and their negotiations of agency, autonomy and ‘creative reciprocity’ within a collaborative process.