Canada's Stratford Festival 1953--1967 : Hegemony, commodity, institution

This thesis undertakes a critique of Canada's Stratford Festival as an institutional site of theatre production in the years 1953 through 1967. I propose to identify the major recurring "statements" of the institutional discourse; those statements which were circulated through various printed documents, including commentaries on the Festival and its work and the Festival's public relations material. The exercise of critique reveals that the Festival discourse became a hegemonic discourse, circulating a set of normative and prescriptive understandings as to what should constitute theatre and culture for Canada. The ideology dominating the discourse was that identified by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno by the term the "culture industry." This ideology allowed for the autonomy of the Festival's productions to be eliminated, such that they functioned as commodities in which all capacity for critique has been abrogated.It will be shown that the Festival discourse privileged an aesthetic of spectacle and effect throughout these years, an aesthetic which implied a concept of cultural experiences as passive spectatorship and the easy consumption of effects; in short as commodity. In conjunction with this aesthetic, the discourse registered a concept of culture as affirmative--as an experience which affirms existing social relations in offering an apparent, if false, resolution or catharsis of conflict and of social inequality. When the Festival was identified as proof of Canada's cultural maturity and the focus of the nation's "life of the mind" these values were established as the nation's dominant cultural values. Moreover, this discursive portrayal of the Festival established it as Canada's foremost cultural commodity. And so the discourse simultaneously conveyed a concept of culture and of the Festival as commodities.By the 1960's the Festival was being identified as not simply a leading voice in Canadian culture, but as the institution on which the development of Canadian culture depended, thereby positioning the Festival as hegemonic. The Festival discourse thus articulated the Festival's central duality, its capacity to function as both cultural commodity and authority. The position of the Festival and its discourse as cultural authority ensured that it was the Festival concept of affirmative culture, marked by the displacement of the political, philosophical and existential role of culture, which dominated the discourse on theatre and the wider discourse of Canadian culture. In this respect the Festival failed to offer an active-critical experience which would counter the tendency towards the ethos of spectatorship and passivity which followed from the developing mass media