Mark McCutcheon:
Shakespearean
Adaptation and Cultural Capital in Toronto's Party
Scene
This
paper investigates the tensions between cultural and "subcultural"
capital in Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare by creative
practitioners
operating outside traditional theatre venues and institutions. The
adaptation
of popular Shakespearean texts at nightclubs and "raves" dramatises
disjunctions between "high" and "low" cultural forms. I
juxtapose two case studies: a Canada Day "rave" adaptation of A
Midsummer Night's Dream in 2000; and, in 2002, another adaptation
of the
same play at the nightclub This Is London. I then analyse these
adaptations
according to contrasting arguments by Daniel Fischlin, Michael Bristol,
and
Richard Burt on whether and how the adaptation of Shakespeare
represents a
"low" cultural form's bid for "high" cultural legitimacy,
particularly in the context of nation-building. The reflexive frame for
this
discussion reviews my own dance-oriented Shakespearean adaptation in
2001 as an
explicit legitimating of the "low" cultural form of DJ performance as
knowledge production. For the case studies in question, Shakespearean
adaptation articulates a bid for cultural capital with a performance
tactic for
evading governmental strategies of "diversity management," understood
here, following Kipfer and Keil, as the hegemonic criminalisation of
youth and
leisure.