The Stratford Anomaly and Canadian Cultural Clusters

Abstract

This article examines the anomalous status of Stratford, Ontario, as the city with the highest percentage of arts-related employment per capita in Canada and as the home of North America’s largest classical theatre, the Stratford Festival (SF). The authors assert that this small city’s diverse cultural achievements are not accidents of history, as they are typically portrayed in theatre and cultural criticism, but rather effects of a civic tradition that connects citizenship to cultural infrastructure in the interest of developing an amenity-rich city. To illustrate this point, the authors review the literature on cultural clusters as it pertains to small cities, show how Stratford differs from the statistical norms, then demonstrate how Stratford’s history of financial, political and social investment in cultural infrastructure undergirded the founding of the SF in 1953. This infrastructure, which dates back to the 1850s, is largely overlooked in academic criticism on the SF because critics depend on founder Tom Patterson’s portrait of the SF in First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (1987, reissued 1999) as the origin, not the outgrowth, of Stratford’s cultural economy. In contrast to Patterson’s argument, which gets reiterated in academic and popular publications about Stratford, this article maintains that Stratford’s thriving cultural economy is not the product of a single institution or individual genius, but rather the outgrowth of an interconnected ecology of cultural agents, materials, influences, traditions and modes of communication.