Global Cultural Tourism at Canada’s Stratford Festival

This chapter examines British director Leon Rubin’s 2003 The Adventures of Pericles at Ontario’s Stratford Festival and analyses its overtly intercultural scenography. The reading is grounded in an analysis of the festival’s vision of itself as a tourist destination that offers a special ‘Stratford experience’. It is argued that the festival’s identity is at once very local and international and the implications of this bifurcated identity are considered through a series of interrelated questions. What is the nature of Rubin’s borrowings from Asian performance traditions, such as Balinese trance rituals? How does the festival portray such borrowings in its publicity material? What kinds of ideas do reviewers circulate about these productions? If, in the early years of the millennium, the festival looked to a British director to purvey ‘Asian’ spectacle to a relatively international audience, what role did Canada, as a nation state, play in sustaining Stratford’s tourist ‘experience’?