Adventures in the Culture Trade: The Stratford Festival 1991

Following the Arts Adventures in the Culture Trade: The Stratford Festival 1991 In the trilateral free-trade negotiations now in progress, Canada takes a different position from the other two parties about "culture."While the Americans want cultural commodities on the table and the Mexicans have no special interest in differentiating them, our negotiators insist that cultural traffic be controlled. The"culture" in question is conceived as something separate from industrial, commercial and financial organization, from agriculture and professional practice. What the Canadian negotiators have chiefly in mind are publishing, broadcasting and the performing arts, which Canadian public policy has long regarded as essential to the nurture ofa postcolonial nationhood. But we may be mistaken as to the possibility ofeffective protection for these supposed instrumentsofcultural formation . More fundamentally, the assumption that North American national boundaries can be made conformable with cultural distinctiveness may also be ill-founded - even absurd in the context offree trade. Invisible linguistic, religious and ethnic lines ofdemarcation can be effective cultural frontiers and may even trace themselves on the ground. But despite the large Hispanic concentration, the Frenchand otherconsiderable linguistic communities ; and despite the strength, coherence and articulateness ofthe Roman Catholicand otherChristiandenominations, ofthe Jewish and other religious communities; and despite the desire for national independence among Quebecers and Natives, it appears selfevident that the overall evolution of North American culture must be toward whatever political, linguistic, religious, and physical environments best meet the requirements of its financial and industrial corporations. Though the mapping ofnon-territorial, isoimperial features has yet to displace the conventional cartography of political geography, the latter stands almost fully revealed as an aggregate of historicized 146 fictions that have enabled the exploitationof resources and persons. The idea of"globalization " (by which is meant a universal commodification ) begins the conventionalization ofthe new extra-constitutionalorder, though many politicians, whose own commodification is instrumental to the rest, maintain their market price by notional demarcations and modifications ofthe fictive geopolitical playing surface. In North America, as elsewhere, the politicians are kept busier, have more opportunities to seize and to lose, as the incongruities ofpolitical geography with the actual dynamics of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other non-commercial affiliations become more evident. Many such affiliative communities are attempting to establish themselves as self-determining and basic political entities and are thus acting as catalysts for the dissolution oftheold political units into the new, global ones. Inthis process - but one cannot say it is a high priority frictions between the gross cultural determinisms ofan economic order and the more narrowly-defined and ambivalentones ofthe "culture industries" have to be smoothedout. They will be, no doubt, in the North American free trade talks, which will have consequences for the Stratford Festival. The birth ofthe Stratford Shakespearean (as it was) Festival was awkwardly timed, falling as it did midway between the Massey Commission's report on"National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences"and the foundation of the Canada Council. In the years ofthe lusty and government-sponsored cultural nationalism with which the Festival's infancy coincided, it was regarded not only with pride but also with ambivalence or even scorn. The development of a large, highly competent professional apparatus in the service ofEngland's national poet, importing directors and stars, was hardly consistent with the nationalism of the day. But a small body of local enthusiasts attracted a much larger and quite powerful community of patrons, one with cultural affiliations - owed largely to the loving labours ofAmerican teachers - to Shakespeare, to his language and to his culture. The (North-) Americanness of the project usefully offset its Englishness, but it was the tremendous success ofthe Festival as Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 26. No. 4 (Hiver 1991-92 Winter) a creator of local employment, trade and tourism that made it irresistible. Given the kind of institution Stratford is and given its role and dependencies, ithas had to trim its sails to the prevailing breezes and has sometimes been quite tempest-lost. Still, for the next leg itcan expect the cultural trade winds to follow free. There is, of course, a recession to be weathered but at the moment of Canadian fragmentation and North American re-consolidation, a cultural focus such...