THE BARD IS BACK: Future festival will make Guelph Shakespeare central

The Ontarion
Arts & Culture
Thursday, September 29, 2005
THE BARD IS BACK: Future festival will make Guelph Shakespeare central.
Written by Meghan Moloney

A public meeting was held at the River Run Centre last Thursday night to discuss a new Shakespeare festival being planned for January to May 2007. The festival will be a joint effort between the University of Guelph, the city's Arts Council, and the Stratford Festival. Rob McKay, the Director of Culture in Guelph, is part of the group responsible for developing a proposal for the festival in conjunction with the university.

"The project is just in its infancy," McKay said in an interview on Friday. "We had an open meeting for representatives from various art groups--we had excellent representation, a lot of enthusiasm, the mayor attended and gave her support, so it all looks great."

The festival will incorporate multiple areas of the community, from the university to local arts groups, and cultural centres, as well as elementary and high schools. It will also include many different types of events and opportunities. According to McKay, the festival "really has a number of facets, it's not strictly the performing arts ... there'll be a gallery exhibit, education programs, we're hoping, for children and even for adults, and then of course the performances." Instead of being a "centrally planned" series of events, McKay is hoping that each participating arts group will "choose a Shakespeare theme" during the specified time period, creating a loose collective of events and performances based around the city of Guelph.

The choice of Guelph as the site for the upcoming festival was an obvious one for the organizers. Not only is the regional arts community influenced by nearly Stratford, Ontario, but as McKay said, "The University of Guelph has a real connection to Shakespeare, in that they run a website which is probably the best and most comprehensive website dedicated to Shakespeare in the world."

The website was created by the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), and is directed by Professor Daniel Fischlin of the School of English and Theatre Studies at the U of G. It includes an online anthology of rare material, focusing on scripts, literary works and other multimedia sources from Canada's cultural history that are related to, or adaptations of, Shakespeare's work. The CASP website was launched over a year ago and has since been hugely successful.

"The background for the idea around the festival originated in the website and the kind of international and national attention it drew when we launched it," said Dr. Fischlin. "The benefits of undertaking such a festival involve creating unexpected convergences of ideas that in turn generate new art, new ways of thinking, and new ways of building the artistic infrastructure in the city."

"Dr. Fischlin also highlights the ways in which the cultural phenomenon known as "the Shakespeare effect" is helping to bring forward different perspectives, including "aboriginal communities and French-Canadian communities, gay, lesbian, and queer communities," and other so-called marginalized groups of society.

The project plans are far from being finalized at this point. McKay said, "We have got some preliminary work done on the business plan and we are in the process of costing it, but nothing's complete in that area yet."