Space & Culture

City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City, Michael McKinnie, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007

Shakespeare suggested that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, but what is the relationship between world and stage? What is the use of spaces for culture, and of culture for spaces? What relationships play out between city spaces and theatre stages?

These questions have largely been ignored in studies of Canadian theatre, which is more often analyzed for its aesthetic and nationalistic qualities rather than its physical resources and spatial development. In response to this bias, Michael McKinnie takes a materialist approach to studying Toronto’s theatre scene and, with an attention to both material and immaterial factors, demonstrates “the way in which the city comes to be conceived and represented as theatrical, while, at the same time, theatre comes to be conceived and represented as urban”(p. 20). This dialectic of city and theatre is intertwined with issues of legitimacy, preferred spatializations, and competing aims.

Starting from the Canadian centennial year 1967, McKinnie paints a picture of the place of theatre within Toronto’s urban development by following the cases of several Toronto theatre companies. He describes how the demise of manufacturing in downtown Toronto created opportunities for theatre and entertainment businesses to claim both physical spaces in the city and roles as civilizing forces. Using public funds available for commemorating the centennial and the preservation of historic buildings, as well as spatializations that represented theatre “as a healthy activity that required protection from an unsavoury neighbourhood that had become a ‘slum’” (p. 66), theatre companies contributed to their own physical resources while also supporting images of the urban downtown as an ‘idealized public sphere’, the seat of ‘capitalist urban development’, a root for feelings of ‘civic well-being’, and a legitimate space for leisure. The city of Toronto needed theatres to legitimate the downtown as a unique civic space, just as theatre companies needed physical buildings to legitimate their existence.

Though McKinnie makes only cursory nods to theories of space, his investigation of the particular dialectical relationships between Toronto spaces and cultural institutions proves fascinating. Whereas in the past, Theatre Passe Muraille used the ownership of space as an instrument of labour to create opportunities for renovation (see recent developments), Toronto Workshop Productions let their focus on discourses of ‘home’ as a symbolic resource guide renovations that were not financially sustainable, and which ultimately led to their demise. Such cases illustrate that though the ‘cultural equity’ of owning space contributes to the perceived maturity and legitimacy of theatre organizations, the market demands of participating in real estate can provide a considerable point of conflict with artistic and sentimental values.

In the end, McKinnie’s argument for the importance of city spaces to representations of theatre is more convincing that his argument for the utility of theatre to Toronto as a city. His analysis does not adequately address how the idea of Toronto as a city stage plays out beyond localized discourses. Theatre, after all, provides symbolic and economic value to Toronto not only within the context of local populations, but also within global flows of advertising media and tourism dollars. Without reference to these discourses, the claim to Toronto as a city stage remains weak.

Studying only well-known theatres in Toronto also leaves McKinnie unable to comment upon how the relationship between city and stage plays out in smaller not-for-profit theatres that do not have the resources to claim city spaces or significantly contribute to spatializations of the city as stage. The primarily positive relationship McKinnie identifies between civic discourses and theatres would likely be challenged were these groups included, as smaller companies are more likely to voice critiques and themes that do not reinforce accepted ideals of the public sphere. A darker question lurks then, of how the legitimizing dialectic of city spaces and theatre stages reinforces stratification within cultural organizations and normalizes exclusionary social relations. Despite the significant contributions of this work to discussions of space and culture, the issues of what theatre and city spaces could and should be remain noticeably unaddressed.

Reviewed by: Allison Hui, Lancaster University, UK

- Ondine

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Art & design, Book reviews, Cities & urbanism. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.