Abstract

This study uses the case of the Banff School for the Arts Related to the Theatre (1933) to observe ways in which the institution as a location of performance practice and as a repository of (selected) knowledge can work to foster and assemble a national cultural identity. During the 1930s, several cultural institutions with national mandates were arriving on the scene; meanwhile Canadian artists were being heralded as representatives of a national cultural heritage. This time period seemed to bring in a shift in the perception of the role of the cultural producer as pedagogue and expressive agent of a widespread identity. The Banff School began as a summer school for theatre, where leaders of Alberta's rural communities could be taught in standards of appreciation and taste, and where Canadian plays were prepared in a school of theatre that was distinctly Canadian. The School, as a site of education, cultural practice, and community builder, is constantly negotiating between its mandates of regional attention and builder of a national sense of citizenship, and its own identity as a model of international influences. And yet, the story being told here is more consistent than contradictory with the stories of other national cultural institutions of this time because it is part of a grander narrative: a forming landscape of Canadian cultural identity.