ASSEMBLING THE FESTIVAL

Organizing the cooperation of twenty-four nations to sponsor and send representative artistic productions to Britain required nine years of effort and revealed the difficulties of postimperial accord as well as a commitment to it. In the mid-twentieth century, the Commonwealth transformed from an “Anglo-Saxon Club” to a multiracial association through the membership of former colonies upon their independence.Footnote ¹³ While no official census existed, over 700 million people inhabited the Commonwealth in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁴ In addition to individual relationships, the Commonwealth encompassed intergovernmental negotiations and networks of voluntary organizations. Every Commonwealth gathering, whether of heads of state, athletes, or artists, provided an opportunity to represent the Commonwealth as multiracial and equitable, but a series of crises tested this ideal and brought to wider attention the difficulties of reconciling political independence and a Commonwealth identity. In many histories of decolonization, the Suez Crisis marks the end of empire. If we are to consider postimperial reengagement, however, the situation in South Africa is more telling of the challenges of Commonwealth cooperation. In 1960, the brutal actions of the South African government in response to protests in Sharpesville demonstrated a lack of regard for consultation with their Commonwealth peers.Footnote ¹⁵ Condemning the South African government's domestic policy violated the principle of autonomy enshrined in the Balfour Declaration and confirmed by British politician Leo Amery's claim that the Commonwealth offered former colonies “independence plus.”Footnote ¹⁶ The criticism by Commonwealth governments and publics, even without formal censure, caused South Africa to leave the Commonwealth, yet its departure did not mean the end of tensions between the Commonwealth's egalitarian ideals and the legacy of imperial power and racism. These moments where conflict made cooperation impossible have caused pessimists to agree with Enoch Powell in calling the Commonwealth a “gigantic farce.”Footnote ¹⁷ The Festival Society and its professional director, Ian Hunter, organized the Commonwealth Arts Festival in response to tensions between the nations of the former British Empire and in service of repairing their relationships. The festival translated the political ideal of “independence plus” into cultural performance.

In planning the Commonwealth Arts Festival, Ian Hunter wanted to produce a global event, attracting worldwide attention and comment like the Edinburgh Festival, which he had previously managed.Footnote ¹⁸ The idea for the festival was born from the Suez Crisis, and a Festival Society was formed in 1960. From the beginning, Hunter insisted that the festival should be an outstanding artistic event first and foremost. The membership of the festival's advisory council, chaired by the Duke of Edinburgh, brought together artists and patrons such as Sir Laurence Olivier and Lord Harewood and political figures from across the party political spectrum.Footnote ¹⁹ Unlike the membership of the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Commonwealth Institute, membership in the festival's advisory council reflected artistic and social standing rather than imperial connections. And yet, the Commonwealth was to be the unifying principle for the disparate art forms brought together in the festival. Initially, Hunter imagined that the inaugural festival would take place in a former colony, but after discussion with Australian, Canadian, and Indian leaders, he decided to stage the festival in Britain to attract the international attention he desired.Footnote ²⁰ Hunter declared to the press, “One could simply bring Commonwealth groups to London . . . but this would not add up to a world event. It would be worthy, but parochial.”Footnote ²¹ The Festival's larger significance was explained in an early brochure:

The Commonwealth Arts Festival would present not only high-quality artistic productions but also an optimistic vision of mutual appreciation as an example to the world.Footnote ²³

Hunter's grand vision exposed the parochialism of the London County Council (LCC), the ambivalence with which the domestic British state confronted the idea of the Commonwealth, and the ignorance on the part of officials of the reality of Commonwealth citizens settled in Britain. The LCC held plans for an arts festival to celebrate the completion of the South Bank, a project begun for the Festival of Britain in 1951 but delayed by budgetary limitations. As Becky Conekin argues, in 1951 the buildings of the South Bank represented the Labour Party's hopes for a unified national body facing a bright future. In that festival, attention to domestic social democracy muted the importance of the empire, but of course the two were deeply entwined.Footnote ²⁴ When the Commonwealth Arts Festival Society approached the LCC in 1960 with the proposal that London should be the center of the Arts Festival (as it was, so the Festival Society claimed, the center of the Commonwealth), the council perceived an opportunity to repurpose its planned South Bank inauguration festivities in an international direction. However, as an organizing principle, the Commonwealth held no particular attachment.Footnote ²⁵ The Festival Society selected the other host cities of the festival—Liverpool, Cardiff, and Glasgow—for their Commonwealth connections as port cities, with little consideration of the Commonwealth migrants already settled there. By the time the festival opened five years later, the status of Commonwealth citizens in Britain had raised a national discussion.Footnote ²⁶ But in 1960, municipal councils made no connection between the Commonwealth Arts Festival and the thousands of West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis, and other Commonwealth citizens settled in Britain.

Like the LCC, the UK government thought little of Commonwealth citizens settled in Britain when assessing the Festival Society's proposals. While the LCC embraced the internationalism of the festival, the government was more wary, but ultimately believed the festival could heal relationships with newly independent former colonies, relationships tested by violent and protracted decolonization.Footnote ²⁷ On the first request for sponsorship by the Festival Society, the Conservative MacMillan government hesitated to commit to an official position when the Commonwealth itself was a fragile proposition. For advice regarding the festival's success, the government turned to the British Council, an independent, government-funded organization that exported British culture throughout the world. Many within the British Council's offices in London doubted the festival's benefits would justify the expenses.Footnote ²⁸ However, British Council officers stationed throughout the Commonwealth responded optimistically about the reception the festival would garner in their localities. The British Council specialized in the export of British culture to the rest of the world, and its officers based outside of Britain welcomed a reciprocal cultural exchange for its potential to improve the standing of the organization.Footnote ²⁹ A sense of a varied and multisited Commonwealth audience response shaped planning for the festival from its beginnings.

This sense of an expansive and diverse Commonwealth became a reality to Hunter when in 1964 he embarked on a world tour to raise enthusiasm for the festival. Indeed, the UK government refused to sponsor the festival without proof of “sufficient support” from the other nations of the Commonwealth. Hunter traveled independently of the British government, but nevertheless he required the aid of British diplomats to host him and establish introductions with officials and arts organizers in each Commonwealth country. His independence undermined a sense of authority on the part of British officials, producing frustration at the High Commission in Pakistan and embarrassment in Trinidad.Footnote ³⁰ Hunter maintained his distance from the British government to assert the festival's status as an unofficial production, but many governments, especially in newly independent Africa, cooperated cautiously. Tense negotiations over independence settlements in Kenya, doubts as to Zanzibar's participation in the Commonwealth, and skepticism concerning the quality of Ugandan performers strained British High Commission interactions with their counterparts in East Africa.Footnote ³¹ In London, an official from the Sierra Leone High Commission accused the Festival Society of excluding that country for political purposes, mistakenly believing that the Commonwealth Relations Office directed the festival.Footnote ³² Investigation revealed miscommunication between Freetown and their High Commission in London, and the Festival Society resolved the complaint and secured Sierra Leone's participation. Nigerian authorities voiced similar skepticism regarding Hunter and the festival, and the British High Commission in Lagos recognized the festival's potential for creating strained official relationships between the two countries.Footnote ³³ The Nigerian government was not only wary of participating in a British propaganda exercise but also feared the possible influence of the United States in the festival. This hesitancy reflected the incursions of American enterprise in the area and also the fragile position of nonalignment during the Cold War.Footnote ³⁴

The ambivalent position of the festival as both an independent production and a sponsored project of the British state produced anxiety and confusion, but ultimately, Hunter succeeded in gaining the support of Commonwealth governments. Reports from High Commissions and British Council offices described Ian Hunter as a “tireless” campaigner.Footnote ³⁵ In each country he visited, newspapers reported on his visit and delighted in the admiration Hunter showed for their art forms.Footnote ³⁶ He persuaded Kenya, Uganda, and newly formed Tanzania to send performers, and the question of participation was soon eclipsed by concern to send appropriate and worthy national representatives to Britain.

On Hunter's return to London, the Commonwealth Relations Office acknowledged that he had garnered “sufficient support” to warrant its sponsorship and committed to funding the festival.Footnote ³⁷ The sufficient support of the Commonwealth, however, soon encountered the insufficient funds of the newly elected Labour government. The financial structure of the festival required the British government to contribute funds toward venue rentals, advertising, and associated costs of staging a festival. The Commonwealth Relations Office and municipal authorities would also sponsor the transportation and accommodation within Britain of the twelve hundred performers traveling to participate.Footnote ³⁸ The exuberance with which the Commonwealth met the call for performers worried officials in London concerned with the costs of supporting the national delegations. The Festival Society requested a further increase in support from the UK government to prevent the embarrassment of asking Commonwealth governments to reduce the size of their contingents.Footnote ³⁹ The new Labour secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, Arthur Bottomley, and Jennie Lee, special minister for art and a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, both supported the Festival Society's request. Lee wrote, “This Festival is a unique event, and the response from other Commonwealth Governments has shown how important it is that it should succeed. I am sure that even in our present financial difficulties, we should do everything we can to ensure its success.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Unfortunately for the Festival Society, the chancellor of the exchequer, James Callaghan, refused the second request for an increase, and the Commonwealth Relations Office sent inquiries to British High Commissions, asking which nations might be approached to reduce their numbers and prevent a potentially “financially embarrassing” situation.Footnote ⁴¹ Without the financial resources, the government would begin negotiations to reduce the numbers of performers.

The negotiations between the Festival Society and the Commonwealth Relations Office over which governments could be approached to reduce their numbers revealed the enduring legacy of imperial aesthetic hierarchies and the extent to which national publics scrutinized the festival. The Festival Society displayed no concern over the large orchestras, choirs, and ballet companies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Rather, officials attempted to decrease the numbers of performers from nations that initially committed to smaller contingents. In Kampala, where negotiations had been strained on Hunter's visit, a British High Commission officer believed it was “politically embarrassing at this stage to ask Uganda to cut down after so much effort has gone into exhorting them to participate.”Footnote ⁴² Likewise, British officials in five other countries reported a reduction in numbers was too “embarrassing” to be mentioned to their counterparts.Footnote ⁴³ Only in Trinidad and Tobago did a British official agree to discuss the matter. Caught between the UK government's request and pressure from the public in Trinidad, where the festival was national news, Robert Montano, chairman of the Trinidad Festival Committee, refused to reduce his delegation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Reporters hounded Montano, demanding explanation for the committee's exclusion of local Calypsonians from the Trinidadian contingent. Exigencies of cost and planning had led to the invitation of London-based Calypso artists to perform in an exhibition of Carnival costumes at the Commonwealth Institute, not as part of the Great Dance Gala, the centerpiece of the festival. The press in Trinidad implied the Festival Society in Britain had dictated Montano's choice of performers, much to the embarrassment of Montano, Hunter, and the British government. Montano issued a clarification in the Trinidadian press and wrote letters to Hunter and the Commonwealth Relations Office apologizing for the newspapers' misrepresentation of his comments.Footnote ⁴⁵ Ultimately, the furor on the part of the Trinidadian public required that the British government bear the costs of the enthusiastic contingent.

The British government's attempt to reduce the number of artists echoed its attempts in the summer of 1965 to curtail migration from the Commonwealth. The incident in Trinidad came amid heightened tension after the Labour government's July 1965 White Paper initiated a quota system limiting the numbers of people admitted into the United Kingdom from the Commonwealth. The 1948 British Nationality Act had created Commonwealth Citizen and British Subject as a status that extended to all in the British Empire and Commonwealth. This expansive category of citizenship allowed Britain to portray itself as the head of the Commonwealth in the face of exclusionary national citizenship laws passed in Canada and Australia. The egalitarian ideal of the law, however, met widespread racism, because the presence of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain led to public demands and government action to restrict immigration.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the introduction of quotas on migration, people in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth decried the White Paper as racist, privileging the mobility of white Australians, Canadians, and Maltese at the expense of West Indians, Africans, and South Asians.Footnote ⁴⁷ The White Paper incensed Trinidadian writers Derek Walcott and Eric Roach, who boycotted the festival. Walcott exclaimed, “The shocking policy on Commonwealth migrants which was adopted by the British Government, and which came after my invitation is difficult to reconcile with the Festival.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The public censure of British policy in Trinidad did not deter a British Information Service officer from warning his counterpart at the Commonwealth Relations Office that West Indian artists might use the occasion of the Arts Festival to “take advantage of their temporary admission” to search for work while in Britain.Footnote ⁴⁹ This officer, like many Britons, did not see Trinidadians as compatriots, equal citizens of the Commonwealth.

The restriction placed on Commonwealth citizenship in the months before the festival revealed the limits of the Commonwealth as a political unit. National considerations—financial, political, legal, and cultural—constrained the egalitarian vision of the Commonwealth. Planning the festival actualized relations between national governments, and it also brought a Commonwealth public into being. The unofficial status of the festival allowed for a dispersal of responsibility for choosing cultural productions: neither the Commonwealth Arts Festival Society nor the British government desired that responsibility for fear of the negative reactions, in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. Instead, national governments selected representative performers. The participation of Commonwealth nations could not be taken for granted, not least of all for reasons of cost. These nations embraced the festival, not out of affection for a familial sense of Commonwealth obligation, but because the festival provided a stage to claim legitimacy for artistic cultures considered primitive or dismissed entirely during the years of empire. Crafting national identities, however, proved more difficult than might have been imagined during the years of nationalist struggle against colonial rule.

PERFORMING NATIONAL CULTURES

The Commonwealth did not sustain a uniform identity among its constituents. Instead, it provided the context for the circulation of postimperial national identities, created dialectically in relation to the cultural politics of the late empire. In earlier imperial exhibitions, British officials organized the displays of the subject empire, reinforcing a hierarchy of progress and modernity with Britain at the apex.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even while affirming British modernity and advancement, these exhibitions also formed a structure for creating national identities within the framework of cooperative empire.Footnote ⁵¹ As a celebration of successful decolonization, the Festival Society explicitly proposed “difference,” “contrast,” and “diversity” as themes for the Commonwealth Arts Festival. The organizers promoted cultural diversity as a bulwark against the increasing “uniformity of material existence” and in service of “breaking down . . . ignorance and skepticism” among British audiences.Footnote ⁵² This insistence on diversity made the festival a forum for assembling postimperial identities and created an opportunity for postcolonial governments to promote their nations on an international stage. In presenting the national cultures of the Commonwealth as equal, the festival proposed a decolonization of taste, a decentering of imperial aesthetic hierarchies to accommodate and celebrate the diversity of the Commonwealth. While India, Sierra Leone, Australia, and New Zealand represented their national cultures as homogenous and traditional, for some countries, namely, Nigeria and Canada, the cost of disregarding internal diversity was too high.

India serves as a good example for understanding the ways nations worked through the cultural negotiations of the imperial past to create postcolonial national identities. For the Indian government, the particular issue at stake in presenting a national culture at the Commonwealth Arts Festival involved reconciling an ancient heritage with a modern sensibility, particularly in the service of attracting tourism. The Indian government invested in the production of a coherent and marketable national identity, and these efforts reflected a longer history of cultural encounter that created Indian cultural forms as different from European ones. Sonically, in the colonial era, British listeners of Indian music fell into two camps: those who clung to Western norms and dismissed the various musical traditions of the subcontinent as displeasing, and those Britons who appreciated Indian music but assessed it based on their perception of a pure Indian authenticity, challenging hybrid musical forms and instruments.Footnote ⁵³ Both modes of encounter reified boundaries between European and Indian aesthetic styles and operated in the construction of authentic traditions. Turning to visual art in the era of independence, the nationalist struggle in India saw the extensive use of visual imagery to mobilize millions of people against British rule. Gandhi used the spinning wheel and khadi, locally produced cloth, to represent Indians as self-sustaining and self-governed; Abanindranath Tagore drew on the figure of Bharat Mata, Mother India. These symbols, rather than returns to authentic traditions, were deeply imbricated in the politics of their time.Footnote ⁵⁴ The production of Indian national culture minimized internal diversity—religious, linguistic, and cultural—in service of independence. India, and the other nations of the Commonwealth, similarly responded to the political exigencies of the 1960s to assemble the artists and cultural productions for the festival, constrained by this longer vexed history of authenticity and heritage.

The Indian government cultivated a specific image of India for European and increasingly North American audiences, refusing passports for artists it deemed unworthy, unsuitable, or unrepresentative.Footnote ⁵⁵ Days before the Commonwealth Arts Festival began, the government of Maharashtra seized the passports of actors leaving the country to perform Pratap Sharma's play about prostitution in Bombay, A Touch of Brightness.Footnote ⁵⁶ Critiques of the Indian government's censorship appeared in American newspapers, echoing earlier imperial scandals centered on representations of social conditions.Footnote ⁵⁷

Instead of contemporary social drama, the Indian government sponsored classical forms that were already familiar to audiences in Britain. In 1963, Hindustani vocalist Ali Akbar Khan and bharata natyam dancer Balasaraswati drew acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival, their popularity requiring extra shows to be added to the schedule.Footnote ⁵⁸ Drawing from this success, the Indian government searched for a balance between authenticity in an Indian idiom and broader appeal; it wished to present art forms British audiences would find understandable, but also new and exciting. In promotional materials, the Indian government presented a coherent and pure India both rooted in tradition and yet innovative and extraordinary. The official guide to Indian arts at the festival raised the issue of the “primitive” by briefly mentioning an exhibition of folk art, but the book celebrated the sophistication of classical forms. The text highlighted the musicians' training and their adherence to tradition. It also included an explanation of the basics of Indian music, raga (the “melody form”) and tala (rhythmic cycle), as well as descriptions of the instruments used. The depictions of the artists and the music emphasized ancient continuities of practice, the intellectualism of the music, and its spiritual possibilities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Within India, the state legitimated Hindustani and Carnatic music as important components of a new, national culture through All-India Radio and Doordharshan, the new state television channel.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Commonwealth Arts Festival afforded the Indian government an opportunity to export that national culture to global audiences.

The Indian contribution also included six documentaries produced by the Indian Ministry of Information, including two highlighting the twin valleys of Northern Punjab and Kashmir, “the tourist's paradise.”Footnote ⁶¹ The production of these tourist films and the decision to show them in London must be read as political acts, because Northern Punjab and Kashmir were the primary sites of conflict in the Second Indo-Pakistan War that began in the week before the festival. India's attempts to retain control over the state of Kashmir, contrary to the demands of the predominantly Muslim population, provoked an international outcry, not least of all in London, and not least of all as an indictment of the Commonwealth's ability to promote peace between its members.Footnote ⁶² The inclusion of these films can be read as part of a broader Indian investment in minimizing the politics of the past—and the present—in favor of timeless beauty.

The Indian government's participation in the festival coincided with a larger effort to attract increased foreign tourism.Footnote ⁶³ The government of India formed the India Tourism Development Corporation in 1966 and reorganized the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation in these years as an independent cabinet-level department. Air India sponsored the festival's official publications and advertised in The Times of London during the festival; it even sponsored a contest with an all-expenses paid holiday in India as a prize for two lucky festival attendees.Footnote ⁶⁴ The booklet produced by the government of India as well as these advertisements reassured British viewers of the accessibility and familiarity of “modern India”—the materials stressed the historic relationships between India and Britain and emphasized that the majority of visitors to India were from the Commonwealth. These materials could not resist, however, calling India “the oldest” part of the Commonwealth, raising the spirit of national competition that characterized many reports of the festival. Like the government of India, the governments of Sierra Leone and Trinidad and Tobago embraced the Commonwealth Arts Festival as a stage to attract international tourism and foreign investment.Footnote ⁶⁵

India sponsored a large contingent in the interests of showing the breadth of artistic traditions that spoke to an ancient past. For the smaller nations of the Commonwealth, travel costs prevented their governments from sponsoring large contingents, and one group of performers served as the nation's sole representatives. Sierra Leone represented itself as a traditional culture through sponsorship of the National Dance Troupe. Before they arrived in Britain, the troupe members caused a scandal when stories, and more sensationally, photographs, circulated in newspapers throughout Britain in the summer of 1965. Called the “Bare-bosoms Controversy” by the Yorkshire Post, the scandal centered on the prospect of female members of the troupe dancing bare-breasted on a stage erected below Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1961, a Pathé newsreel celebrated those dances as “the essential Africa” parading for “Mrs. Queen” on her visit to mark Sierra Leone's independence. However, the potential performance raised ire on its migration to Britain because Britons rejected the propriety of Sierra Leonean custom on their shores.Footnote ⁶⁷ The organizers of the festival and John Akar, the group's director, welcomed the attention. Akar seized the opportunity to confront Western tastes, posturing to the British press that the girls would not dance at all if they had to modify their costumes. The Glasgow Festival Committee refused to let the troupe perform as they chose for an audience of school children, a committee member stating, “[T]he culture of the dancers was all right and proper in Sierra Leone but was not a culture of the northern hemisphere.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The festival's main sponsor, the British government, received angry letters from outraged citizens, and one letter writer demanded, “Is this what we fought for? I consider this to be an insult to the very Brave gentleman on the top of the column.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Nelson, it seems, did not die and have his body preserved in a vat of brandy to suffer the indignity of bare bosoms. The female dancers did not perform in Trafalgar Square, but the Lord Chamberlain approved the entire troupe for the Great Dance Gala at Albert Hall, and the BBC broadcast their performance throughout the United Kingdom.

When reporters questioned John Akar about the complaints, he made the distinction between a “strip-tease” and the “culture” that the dance represented. He added, “[W]e dance exposed not because we want to shock audiences. It is not a new fad like topless bathing suits but an inseparable part of our cultural heritage. Whether it is a good or bad thing is really in the mind.” When asked how the dancers felt about the controversy, he claimed they had not been informed, but assumed “they would be very amused.”Footnote ⁷⁰ However unaware the dancers may have been, Akar consciously tussled with British norms. The British High Commission in Freetown reported that the Sierra Leonean press delighted in the scandal, and an officer added, “It has been tactfully forgotten that in Freetown the dancers concerned danced for half of their programme covered up (admittedly to the detriment to [sic] their dance).”Footnote ⁷¹

Akar's statements served not only to defend Sierra Leonean culture but also to advance the new nation's economic interests. In addition to his position as director of the Dance Troupe, Akar was also secretary of the Hotels and Tourist Board in the Sierra Leone government. He brought the dance troupe to the 1964 World's Fair in New York, similarly posturing to audiences and garnering a great deal of attention. In London, he organized a performance and reception ahead of the festival for “press representatives, distinguished Sierra Leoneans, and British Commercial friends of Sierra Leone.” In the Freetown Daily Mail, Dicor, a multinational diamond corporation, celebrated the dancers in a supplement to the newspaper that explicitly connected Sierra Leone's economic development to the success of the dancers in Britain.Footnote ⁷² Sponsoring the dancers in London allowed Dicor to equate its commercial activities in Sierra Leone with the well-being of the new nation. The culture of Sierra Leone could be mobilized not only for national ends but for commercial ones as well.

In demanding acceptance for the dancers' cultural values, Akar both naturalized those values and explicitly raised the tacit aim of the festival. The decolonization of taste proposed by the Commonwealth Arts Festival required British audiences accept the dancers' choice of costume, but in this instance it also essentialized Sierra Leonean culture. This was the challenge for all of the nations of the Commonwealth as they defined themselves against the culture of Imperial Britishness, which had subordinated cultural forms to a hierarchy of aesthetic value. Many in Britain welcomed the opportunities for mutual appreciation promised by the festival and responded enthusiastically to the Sierra Leonean performers. One of the British folk dancers participating in the Great Dance Gala stated, “[O]f course I'm for the Commonwealth: one can get to learn from them, and believe me, they've got a lot to teach us: well, certainly in dancing—look at that. I could no more do those steps than fly to the moon.”Footnote ⁷³ Another commentator looked beyond their dance steps: B. A. Farrell, writing to the British government in support of the Sierra Leoneans, declared they could communicate “sanity about the body” to the British public and that the decision to ban them from Trafalgar Square produced a “small little victory for the unsavory alliance between nervous prudery and the commercialisers of eroticism.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Farrell rejected the portrayal of the troupe in the British press, which reduced the dancers to the fact of their lack of clothes and barely commented on their performance. Both he and the folk dancer, while appreciating aspects of the Sierra Leoneans, resorted to a binary view of the world, separating their values from our values. The presentation of national cultures at the Commonwealth Arts Festival confronted difference while affirming cultural essentialisms.

The other nations of the Commonwealth experienced similar yet distinctly inflected struggles to project their postcolonial identities. Whereas in India and Sierra Leone, governments emphasized forms that looked to a past before the colonial era, in settler colonial New Zealand and Australia, the governments excluded indigenous citizens in their national presentations. Instead, they sponsored artistic groups that reinforced the European heritage of those nations. Despite the expectations of the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, and in the face of Hunter's encouragement to select Maori performers, the government of New Zealand chose the Christchurch Harmonic Choir, a group that shouldered the responsibility of financing its trip to Britain.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Australia, the government sponsored the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Ballet Company. Prime Minister Robert Menzies enthusiastically supported the Arts Festival and hoped that it would improve the image of Australia in Britain and attract a “better class of immigrants.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While the New Commonwealth desired temporary tourists, Australia sought to continue the ethnic ties that bound it to Britain by attracting the right kind of permanent residents, those who would appreciate the symphonies and ballet companies of the antipodes.

While the governments of the Old Dominions sponsored cultural forms that invoked cultural connections to Britain, these choices also produced anxiety concerning the reception of their artists in the metropole. The British Council representative based in Sydney observed the Australian public's lack of information about the festival, the slights and bruises to the egos of prominent Australian musicians, composers, and conductors, and the criticisms of Britain raised through these discussions.Footnote ⁷⁷ He worried that the quality of the Sydney Orchestra would not meet London standards, causing a backlash in Australia when British reviewers maligned their performances. His London-based supervisor encouraged this anxious official to stop fretting because, “neither you nor we have to concern ourselves with what is an Australian and Commonwealth (but not British!) jamboree.”Footnote ⁷⁸ These grumbles speak to the importance placed on the reception of Australian arts in Britain. Travel agents advertised special world tours to watch the Australian Ballet Company's debut at Covent Garden, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported on British reviews and audience reactions to Australian performers.Footnote ⁷⁹ Although Commonwealth governments selected cultural representatives based on perceived responses from British audiences, the audience at home mattered, too. With newspapers and broadcasters throughout the Commonwealth reporting on the festival, national prestige was at stake in Britain.

Despite internal fissures and anxieties, the delegations of artists from India, Sierra Leone, New Zealand, and Australia reflected government investment to represent these nations as homogenous. For many nations of the Commonwealth, this was not politically possible. Perhaps more so than other nations, the ethnic diversity of Nigeria and Canada presented problems for those governments to represent their national cultures adequately. In Nigeria, ethnic and regional jealousies were aired during the public consultation over which performers to send to Britain, recapitulating colonial-era conflicts and foreshadowing the Biafran War that would erupt only two years later.Footnote ⁸⁰ The National Theatre in London initiated a crisis when, having independently read Wole Soyinka's play The Lion and the Jewel, it asked Hunter for permission to present that play as part of the festival. Consequently, the Nigerian committee accused Hunter (and American interests) of dictating which acts would be included in the festival. The National Theatre would not consent to presenting a play without script approval, and the Nigerian Committee could not appear to have allowed festival organizers to choose Nigeria's theatrical representative. Yet they could not arbitrarily choose their representative art forms either. In order to demonstrate to the Nigerian public that their artists deserved participation in the festival, subcommittees held competitions in each of the four regions to choose representatives who would travel to Lagos to compete for a place in the Nigerian delegation. Nigerian officials carefully selected performers to ensure equal representation among ethnic groups in Nigeria. Because of the delay in making a final decision, festival materials labeled the performers generically, such as “Nigerian Folk Opera” instead of the specific troupe's name.Footnote ⁸¹ Because of the contentious nature of the selection process, the National Theatre did not stage The Lion and the Jewel, a play about the struggle between tradition and modernity. Instead, another Soyinka play, The Road, a meditation on Nigeria's future, premiered at the Theatre Royal, Stratford. The anxieties surrounding the performance of Soyinka's plays at the Commonwealth Arts Festival demonstrate not only the difficulties of cultivating national identity for a culturally diverse country but also the uneasy attempt to move on from the colonial past experienced by many of the nations of the Commonwealth.

It was not only in postcolonial Africa that a nation experienced internal difficulties concerning national culture. The festival provided Canada a global stage to represent its national identity, to reject British imperial heritage in favor of multiculturalism. In Canada, a growing separatist movement in Québec, made most public in the attacks by the Front de Libération du Québec, brought greater scrutiny to the selection process for the Commonwealth Arts Festival. Provincial ministers in Québec demanded that Hunter deal directly with them, insisting that they would pay for their own artists and send them independently of the federal government.Footnote ⁸² Hunter demurred, seeking advice from Ottawa and ultimately including the provincial authorities on all official communications. After deliberations, the Canadian government proudly sent, in the words of one official, “[the] greatest attempt ever made by any one country to present their arts in United Kingdom.”Footnote ⁸³ Because Canadian culture could not be easily reduced to a unitary representative, the Canadian government made sure to represent each of the cultures of Canada.

Like the Australian Ballet Company and the Sydney Symphony, the internationalism of Canadian arts organizations looked to Europe, and also to the United States, reflecting a broader “continentalism” in Canadian national identity.Footnote ⁸⁴ Together, the Canadian contingent presented an inchoate mix of European, indigenous, and frontier tropes. The Winnipeg Ballet performed a piece inspired by US President John F. Kennedy's death, The Beggar's Opera, Hungarian dances, and also “Les Whoops-de-doo,” inspired by western myths and the aesthetics of the hoe-down.Footnote ⁸⁵ To the annoyance of some British critics, Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde of Montreal staged two plays in French, Molière's L'Ecole des Femmes and a new dramatic musical Klondyke.Footnote ⁸⁶ Based on the Gold Rush of the late nineteenth century, Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde presented the latter story as a distinctly Canadian one, with men battling nature and each other to find gold.Footnote ⁸⁷ Les Feux-Follets also told the story of Canada as a frontier nation, through “Canadian Mosaic,” an interconnected tableau of songs, dances, and aestheticized rituals representing the culture of the First Nations as well as the story of the westward expansion of European Canadians. Among their tableaux, Les Feux-Follets staged an “Eskimo Walrus Hunt,” a “Hamatsa Ritual,” and a Nova Scotian “Milling Frolic.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In response to the shifting conversations surrounding national identity in Canada, Les Feux-Follets attempted to make every cultural inheritance available to each citizen, regardless of family history. While many British reviewers found the performance entertaining, Herbert Whitaker of the Globe and Mail found “Canadian Mosaic” “embarrassing,” particularly when considered alongside the “genuine rituals” presented in the festival.Footnote ⁸⁹ Whitaker believed the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the films of Norman McLaren, and the Canadian art objects included in the Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition were better representatives of Canada. He knew they were good; Les Feux-Follets, in contrast, presented the multicultural nation as naïve and “unauthentic.”

The presentation of Canada at the Commonwealth Arts Festival reified the Anglo-French divide as the major problem to be overcome through the project of Canadian multiculturalism. This occurred through emphasis on European rather than British cultural traditions and with multiple presentations of the shared Anglo-French project of western expansion. Canada's presentation also affirmed the availability of First Nations and Inuit artistic production for white appropriation and excluded Canada's European immigrants and “visible minorities,” those Canadians with Asian and African ancestors, from the performance of Canadian nationalism. The Commonwealth Arts Festival occurred in a moment when, as Jose E. Igartua argues, Canadian national identity transformed from one based in ethnicity (British or French heritage) to one based in rights, allowing for state-sponsored multiculturalism that would be enshrined in law in 1971.Footnote ⁹⁰ The presentation of multicultural Canada at the Commonwealth Arts Festival solved the Anglo-French challenge to a unified Canadian identity, but it offered cultural appropriations without regard to the imperial histories of power and dispossession that characterize settler colonialism.Footnote ⁹¹

For all the nations of the Commonwealth, the legacy of imperial culture and contemporary political and economic contexts shaped national presentations at the Commonwealth Arts Festival. India and Sierra Leone defined themselves through their difference from Britain by investing certain artistic forms as traditional and authentic in the interests of attracting tourism and commercial investment. New Zealand and Australia maintained cultural ties to Britain, choosing continuities of performance traditions that looked to European high cultural forms. Nigeria and Canada struggled to accommodate cultural diversity, and more than the other nations, the process of selecting national representatives for the festival created conversations within those countries of what their postimperial national identities would be.

The festival provided autonomy for governments to sponsor representative artistic practices. They did so with an eye toward the domestic impact of their choices and also to arouse international interest. The gaze of the metropole continued to mediate the presentations of national culture at the Commonwealth Arts Festival as a variety of actors anticipated British responses to their artists and national audiences reveled in their representatives' receptions in the former imperial center. While in earlier displays, Britain sat at the apex of empire, in the festival, Britain served as the facilitator of and the audience for the diverse cultural productions of the Commonwealth. Commonwealth multiculturalism promised unity in diversity, but it continued to privilege the place of Britain in “our family of nations.”

RECKONING WITH DIVERSITY

The Commonwealth Arts Festival promised more than the cultural productions of twenty-four nations; it aimed to demonstrate to the world democratic mutual appreciation. Press coverage throughout the Commonwealth focused on the critical reception of national representatives at the festival. In Britain, however, the festival produced reconsideration of the role of Britain in the Commonwealth and the viability of the Commonwealth project. The description of British objects at the Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition in the London program booklet unintentionally revealed the dual nature of Britain's role: the exhibition's curator called Britain a “sister” in one sentence and a “parent” in another.Footnote ⁹² As one nation among many, Britain presented a subdued array of art objects and performances, but as a collector and connoisseur of Commonwealth culture, Britain's patronage made the Commonwealth Arts Festival possible. The centrality of the monarchy, the appreciation of British collecting practices, the airing of imperial nostalgia, and the celebration of British taste in appreciating the diverse artistic forms and practices of other cultures contributed to Britain's reengagement with the Commonwealth at the festival.

As scholars have argued, the monarchy served a crucial role in the creation of imperial Britishness, creating an equality of subjecthood as people throughout the empire participated in coronation and jubilee spectacles.Footnote ⁹³ The Commonwealth Arts Festival brought the durbar home, enjoying the official patronage of Elizabeth II and the active participation of the Duke of Edinburgh, who served as chairman of the advisory committee of the festival and, in a sense, as the exemplary Commonwealth Briton. His primary role involved chairmanship of meetings of Commonwealth High Commission officers in London to encourage their cooperation. As he told them:

The duke emphasized the role of Britons as facilitators of Commonwealth diversity and underscored that the aim of the festival was to promote the essential unity of “our family of nations.”

The duke desired a role in the Commonwealth; however, the nature of that role aroused scrutiny. In the summer of 1965, Prince Philip suggested that majority rule in Rhodesia was not a good idea if it produced violence and disorder. His comments provoked criticism in Britain and in the Commonwealth that he had overstepped his role and invoked comparison to his predecessor Prince Albert.Footnote ⁹⁵ Like the Great Exhibition a century earlier, the Commonwealth Arts Festival presented a more palatable role for a prince consort.Footnote ⁹⁶ Prince Philip officially opened the festival and spent the first day visiting various sites of the festival. Following the opening ceremony, an interfaith service in St. Mary-Le-Bow in the East End celebrated the similar purposes of the religions represented in the Commonwealth. After a luncheon hosted by the mayor of London, the duke's schedule included trips to the Royal Academy to tour Treasures of the Commonwealth, to the Commonwealth Institute to see carnival costumes from Trinidad, and finally, a trip to the Albert Hall to see the opening night of the Great Dance Gala.Footnote ⁹⁷ Over the next few days he would travel to the other cities taking part in the festival as well. The queen attended a few performances, but perhaps her loan of art objects to Treasures constituted her greatest contribution to the festival. The royal presence at the festival spoke to continuities of association and remade the ties between the sovereign and an expansive sense of her people.

While the duke and the queen participated in a two-way process of legitimation with the participants in the festival that spoke to a longer history of the monarchy's role in empire, changing political circumstances demanded new modes of encounter. The Commonwealth Arts Festival thus participated in a broader process of “fracturing imperial forms of looking and representation.” As Anandi Ramamurti and Simon Faulkner argue, this transitional era produced new ways of expressing the political desires of former colonial subjects, but it also demanded that Britons both learn to see differently and participate on new terms.Footnote ⁹⁸ The old and the new met at the Commonwealth Arts Festival, allowing for a reengagement with an association rooted in an imperial past, but promising an equitable future.

The reengagement of Britain with the Commonwealth demanded a reconsideration of what forms of art represented British cultural identity and how Britain could acknowledge her new place in the Commonwealth as one among equals. The London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra created programs of exclusively English composers for concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. The BBC Concert Orchestra, however, included works by the Nigerian composer Fela Sowande.Footnote ⁹⁹ In addition to classical music, the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, brought together “[a]n Evening of Popular British Music” at Royal Festival Hall that included Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Kinks, the Moody Blues, Manfred Mann and others. Other than these showcase concerts, British artists were blended into other events, such as the Great Dance Gala in which the “somewhat decorous (and tremendously neat, clean and decent)” members of the English Folk Dance and the Song Society performed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While London could claim to be a national city, presenting British as well as English cultural performance, the other host cities of the festival celebrated local culture. In addition to performances from the other nations of the Commonwealth, Liverpool showcased the city's orchestra, choir, and reparatory theatre; Glasgow hosted a Gaelic concert, Scottish poetry readings, and exhibitions of Scottish crafts; and Cardiff presented the Welsh Theatre Company, the Welsh Male Voice Choir, and the Welsh National Opera Company.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nominally British, these three nations displayed their representative cultures only within their boundaries.

While these performances celebrated domestic British artistic forms, it was imperial collecting practices that were celebrated at the Royal Academy. A focal point for criticism about the festival, the Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition challenged viewers to take a new look at the visual culture of the Commonwealth. Perhaps more than any other single part of the festival, Treasures made tangible the fracturing of imperial aesthetic hierarchies. In contrasting different art forms and cultures, the placement of these objects within Burlington House both called into question the historical prejudices of that institution and made Commonwealth objects acceptable to British art audiences. Many remarked on the incompatibility between the artworks and the setting. One critic wrote, “The Academy has been transformed: by . . . the objects themselves, many of which in the last century wouldn't have been allowed within miles of any self-respecting art gallery. We know better now. With a ‘[r]eceptacle made from camels’ intestines from Lahore' resting within his sacred precincts, Sir Joshua must be turning in his grave.”Footnote ¹⁰² While this writer celebrated the exhibition for the challenge it presented to established aesthetic hierarchies, there were many others who shared the imagined disapprobation of the celebrated founder of the Royal Academy. Treasures of the Commonwealth baffled British critics: it represented fantastic objects culled from the empire to some viewers, disorder to some viewers, and the transformation of cultural values to others.

Treasures of the Commonwealth brought together objects from twenty-two countries. While reviewers of the festival musical and dance performances predominantly critiqued those works on their own terms, without regard to their inclusion in the festival, reviewers of Treasures queried the assemblage of objects as a whole, and as a metonym for the Commonwealth. Without a clear rationale for consumption beyond the Commonwealth, viewers produced their own connections. Frank Whitford, expecting European masterpieces from collections in Ottawa and Canberra, shared with his readers the surprise and delight the exhibition elicited, and marveled that the exhibition really was about the Commonwealth.Footnote ¹⁰³ To Whitford, the exhibition broadened the category “treasures” by including objects produced outside of Europe.

The organizers divided Treasures by country, and within national galleries, objects represented the diversity of cultural forms within each nation. The exhibition proposed consideration of each treasure as an individual object, as representative of a nation, and all together as a microcosm of Commonwealth creativity. Curator Wyndham Gooden intended to bring objects from the Commonwealth to Britain for the exhibition. However, costs of shipping and insurance proved prohibitively expensive, and the organizers turned to collections in Britain.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ British officials in Nigeria worried that provenance could become a political issue, but Commonwealth governments consented to the display of objects from British collections, with only the Canadian government sponsoring the shipment of objects from the National Gallery in Ottawa.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Commonwealth governments selected their representative performers, but the objects exhibited in Treasures from the Commonwealth represented British collecting practices more so than the nations they nominally designated. The exhibition celebrated the tastes of earlier Britons and inspired a new generation to reassess the collections of British museums. One reviewer reported “shock” on learning London museums loaned the majority of objects on display and believed this represented a deliberate choice by the exhibition's organizers: “The compilers have concentrated, for the most part, on items which relate to the days when Empire-builders were amusing themselves collecting tribal masks and sketching exotic views. Its [sic] easier to think of Empire as a unifying theme than Commonwealth when member states can be sworn enemies of one another.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For this British reviewer, a benign empire provided a coherence that the belligerent Commonwealth could not.

The particular pattern of British collecting during empire shaped the perception of the cultural and artistic diversity represented through the Commonwealth. Because the objects came from British collections, the artworks in Treasures were overwhelmingly historical. More so than the objects themselves, in many instances, the British “discovery” of these objects captivated audiences in Britain. A suit of Mughal elephant armor became one of the most popular objects in the exhibition and a symbol of the festival. Gooden chose the armor from the Royal Armouries for its workmanship and its unique status as the only complete set of elephant armor in the world. The catalog and reviewers celebrated the armor for its associations with the history of the British in India. The exhibition materials claimed Robert Clive won the suit of armor at the battle of Plassey, the beginning of British economic and political control of India.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This provenance was later proved erroneous; Robert Clive's son Edward purchased the armor during his tenure as governor of Madras. In 1965, however, the historical association increased its popular appeal among Britons—nearly every review of the exhibition included its picture or mentioned its story, with many critics recapping the exploits of “Clive of India” on the battlefields of Bengal and describing the “sweet visions of empire” invoked by the elephant armor.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While the text accompanying the armor explicitly referenced the history of colonial conquest, the descriptions of other objects were not nearly as forthcoming about the fraught relationships of the past. Another popularly referenced object was a fourteenth-century English ewer “found” in the collection of the Asantehane. Neither the catalog nor the reviews mentioned that this “discovery” in 1896 coincided with the seizure of power in the Gold Coast, but the medieval connections that brought the object to West Africa inspired writers to weave narratives about the object's past.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

A saddlecloth “formerly the property of Tipu Sultan and taken at Seringapatam in 1799,” also elicited comment as a “sweet” object of empire.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As the decisive victory that consolidated British rule in southern India, in the exhibition's catalog, “Seringapatam” stood for the most pertinent information necessary to understand this object—that it passed into British hands. In a similar manner the swords and daggers chosen for the Indian gallery were presented to Edward VII when he toured India as Prince of Wales on the occasion of Victoria's coronation as empress. The catalog descriptions included the titles of the Indian princes who had bestowed the ceremonial weapons to the prince as marks of fealty. In a guide to the festival in London, one writer remarked on the “history” that brought these objects into British collections, a convenient way of eliding that word the official publications of the festival avoided: “empire.” The exhibition organizers included these swords as examples of fine craftsmanship, a theme that they hoped would unite the disparate objects on view.

In addition to objects, the Indian exhibition also included seven paintings by contemporary Indian artists: three paintings by George Chinnery and four watercolors by Thomas and William Daniell, the uncle and nephew who spent eight years in India traveling and sketching at the end of the eighteenth century. The Daniells' work came to define the look of India for well over a century; in fact, a reviewer for The Times called the paintings a “topographical background” for the exhibition.Footnote ¹¹¹ Art historians have made apparent the specific ideologies that produced British imperial landscapes, but in 1965, those politics of vision were invisible to the viewers of Treasures of the Commonwealth.Footnote ¹¹² Overall, the tone of the Indian section of Treasures captured a familiar exotic—a historic India, mediated by British patronage and collecting practices, an India that played extremely well with the British art public and sustained a collective Raj nostalgia.Footnote ¹¹³

The presentation of these Indian objects offered the comfort of nostalgia and recast the collections of British museums as archives of empire. However, some reviewers believed the exhibition as a whole failed as an art historical exercise and derided the exhibition as a “jumble,” a “cabinet of curiosities,” the casual displays at a provincial museum, or a “glorious hodgepodge.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ To these exhibition goers, the diversity of the objects overwhelmed any thematic organization, and while the exhibition piqued interest for the objects it brought to light, it proved a disappointment for its lack of coherence. One critic translated a disdain for the exhibition to the larger Commonwealth by imagining “the Commonwealth Man”: “What one wonders, would he be like—an abrasive grammar-school type who had got to the top, wore a digger hat, and spoke Babu English?” This reviewer rejected the idea that these disparate attributes could form a unity. This same critic declared he would rather have “one good Turner” than all of these objects put together.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In their reviews, these critical writers could not accept the new ways of looking proposed by the exhibition and wished for a return to the aesthetic certainties of the past.

The choice of representative objects for Britain intrigued everyone who reviewed Treasures. Most of the thirty-seven “British” objects on display were musical instruments, metalwork, and stained glass, to represent traditions of craftsmanship. They were also, almost entirely, “English.” Only one object was listed in the catalog as “Welsh,” and none at all represented Scotland. The selection confounded reviewers, not because of concern for national representativeness, but rather because of a desire for a more resounding display of British excellence. A reclining sculpture by Henry Moore, the iconic modern British artist, constituted the one unquestioned British treasure in the exhibition. Reviewers extolled the sculpture as sufficiently carrying “the whole burden of the Mother Country's prestige,” but the choice to present a new “Reclining Figure” made of wood was at odds with the majority of the sculptor's output at the time, which consisted of large, public metal works.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The choice reinforced the “reticent” image of Britain cultivated by the exhibition's organizers, which some reviewers believed was an appropriate representation of British national character and suitably modest as befitted the host country of the festival.Footnote ¹¹⁷ However, Frederick Laws of the Guardian wrote, “[T]he best ancient loot is unbeatable,” contrasting the glory of plunder with the “fatuous” display of British objects.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A writer in the Sunday Times asked, “Does our own English room exemplify, all too literally, the twilight of Imperialism? Possibly: but what matters is the fantastic diversity of the objects from overseas and the liberal sense in which the word ‘treasure’ has been interpreted.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This review reveals the ambivalences of the presentation of Britain at the Festival. The British display may have been subdued, but the Henry Moore figure reigned in the center of a central rotunda of masterpieces, one for each of the continents represented in the exhibition. The Moore figure, like the imagined British audiences of the festival, possessed the privileged point of view, and this critic, like others of the festival, congratulated himself for appreciating what he surveyed.

Alongside those views that spoke to an imperial gaze, the Treasures exhibition also made visible the “imperialist conditions of possibility” that delineated modern from primitive art. Henry Moore emerged as a modernist star in the interwar era and represents a broader engagement with primitivism by European modernist artists. Describing his artistic practice, he stated, “I thought that the Greek and Renaissance were the enemy, and that one had to throw all that over and start again from the beginning of primitive art.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Moore betrayed the confusion of time and space that the artist Susan Hiller has interrogated as one of the founding myths of the modernist appropriation of non-European art.Footnote ¹²¹ In providing the opportunity to appreciate both a Kwakiutl Thunderbird and a Henry Moore sculpture as Commonwealth treasures, the exhibition prompted one of its most passionate supporters to claim that Treasures “reminds us how ridiculous is the term ‘primitive’ in art—a word which conceals centuries of cultural tradition.”Footnote ¹²² In promising formal equality, the Commonwealth as context made these juxtapositions and considerations imaginable, and in some instances, returned history to those objects for which it had formerly been denied.

The assembly of these artistic forms provoked consideration of the framework by which all of these objects could be appreciated together. The catalog forward described Treasures as “a continual challenge to provinciality: we must think out, all over again, one after another of our prejudices.” In thinking through the connections between the disparate objects displayed in Treasures, several reviewers urged their audiences to throw out their expectations of logic or preconceptions of art to embrace the pleasures of the show. They asked the audiences to see the show as a collage, or as Edward Lucie-Smith suggested, an environment.Footnote ¹²³ Like these midcentury art practices, the assemblage of the disparate objects in Treasures conveyed a sense of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As an assemblage, this gathering of “rich, rare, and beautiful” objects brought to light the processes that connected and differentiated them.Footnote ¹²⁴ Alongside the imperial history and nostalgia exhibited in Treasures was the possibility of aesthetic equality. In the context of the Commonwealth, the two were only thinkable together.

COMMONWEALTH MULTICULTURALISM AND POSTIMPERIAL REENGAGEMENT

Contrary to the hopes and expectations of Ian Hunter and those who participated in the first, a second Commonwealth Arts Festival did not materialize. The 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival represents a unique moment in the transition from empire to Commonwealth. By creating an international stage for the performance of postimperial community, the festival inspired wide participation despite the caution of Commonwealth governments, the restrictions of finance, and criticisms of the Commonwealth's limitations. The festival was organized by a not-for-profit society and not only depended upon the sponsorship of the British state, municipal councils in Britain, and Commonwealth governments but also required the efforts of the twelve hundred artists and numerous art organizers who assembled in Britain for three weeks in 1965.

The festival was a singular event, but it also provides a window onto the wider transformations of the Commonwealth during the years of decolonization. The festival's decentered organizational structure presaged the transfer of administrative authority for Commonwealth coordination from the Commonwealth Relations Office of the British government to the Commonwealth Secretariat. Formed in 1965, the Secretariat was an independent administrative body jointly sponsored by Commonwealth governments. One of the first public engagements of the new secretary-general, Canadian Arnold Smith, was a visit to the Commonwealth Arts Festival.Footnote ¹²⁵

The Commonwealth Arts Festival assembled the nations of the Commonwealth to perform their postimperial association. Staging difference in the era of decolonization required distinct national cultures, and the governments of the Commonwealth complied. The Indian and Sierra Leonean governments represented their nations as homogenous, highlighting artistic forms that rejected European traditions. For Australia and New Zealand, claiming European heritage trumped expectations in the metropole that indigenous cultures would command an important place in those national presentations. For Nigeria and Canada, internal diversity provoked political crises, and national publics closely watched the selection of representative performers and art objects. While the Indian government chose to sponsor art forms that invoked a sense of timeless tradition, many other national delegations explicitly engaged with the question of postimperial national identity. The celebration of cultural difference between nations mirrored the political distinctions made through the restriction of migration within the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth as framework allowed for these multiple actors to pursue their varied interests through the festival.

The Arts Festival mobilized a Commonwealth public attuned to the reception in the metropole of their artistic representatives, but this Commonwealth sentiment was mediated by national standing. The Arts Festival commanded daily press attention, in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. The BBC Home Service broadcast daily coverage of the festival, including a “Desert Island Discs” interview with Ian Hunter, whose eight selections consisted of European classical and popular artists rather than any of the Commonwealth art forms presented through the festival.Footnote ¹²⁶ On television, 15 million viewers in Britain watched the Associated Television production “The Commonwealth Entertains.” Globally, the BBC World Service produced 160 programs for distribution. The Australian Broadcast Corporation and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation each produced television programs of its nation's artists, in addition to television and film produced by the UK government's Ministry of Information and newsreel companies for worldwide distribution.Footnote ¹²⁷ The British Council officer in Sydney need not have worried about Australian reactions to the festival—the Sydney Morning Herald reported the glowing reviews by British critics of the Australian Ballet Company's debut at Covent Garden.Footnote ¹²⁸ Similar reports, though not of the Australian Ballet Company, appeared in newspapers throughout the Commonwealth, highlighting the reception in Britain of national artists, but not necessarily artists from other Commonwealth nations. Media reportage of the festival contributed to the consolidation of national identity within the framework of the Commonwealth.

While the festival promised equality between nations, Britain continued to assume a privileged place in the Commonwealth family of nations. Most national publics in the Commonwealth focused their attention on the fortunes of their artistic representatives in the metropole, but in Britain, coverage of the festival revealed ambivalence toward the decolonization of taste proposed by the festival. British artists and exhibition organizers responded to the demand for an equitable framework for cultural diversity by reticently presenting British artistic forms and celebrating historic British collecting practices as evidence of appreciation for Commonwealth arts. British critics displayed a variety of reactions to the diversity presented through the festival. Disgust, chauvinism, nostalgia, admiration, and wonder characterized critical reception of individual performances and festival productions that brought multiple Commonwealth art forms together. Dance troupes from Australia and Canada performed solo shows during the festival, while the Great Dance Gala brought together dancers from Dominica, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Trinidad, Uganda, and the United Kingdom for short programs, and concluded with a finale that brought all of the performers together in a Commonwealth “jump-up.” This distinction between performances based in European high culture and the folk dances of the Gala reinforced the divide between the “Old Dominions” and the “New Commonwealth” at the festival. This distinction would also manifest itself in the increasingly restrictive British citizenship laws that tied Commonwealth citizenship to family heritage in Britain not birth in the empire. The festival promoted equality for diverse cultural forms, but it did not promise equivalence.

The Great Dance Gala, however, was well received in Britain, and the embrace of difference was deeply entwined with imperial nostalgia. The “Bare-bosoms” controversy did not keep patrons away, and this highly popular event sold out a run of shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London before touring throughout Britain. The BBC aired a live performance watched by an audience of six and a half million viewers.Footnote ¹²⁹ The diversity of dances startled audiences and provoked self-reflection and criticism of Britain's representatives in the program. Colin MacInnes, an ardent supporter of the festival and the Commonwealth, mocked the Morris dancers, derisively calling them civil servants to mark the banality of their performance. Like the Canadian reviewer who was embarrassed by the appropriations of indigenous culture presented in “Canadian Mosaic,” MacInnes similarly rejected the inauthenticity of the culture performed by the English Folk Dance and Song Society. He contrasted the English performers with the dancers from Sierra Leone. He said of the Sierra Leoneans, “How beautifully song, percussion and dancing, and men, women and children, moved and filled out the vast space with a sense of abundant life and mystery which could remind us that ‘primitive’ cultures are in fact so sophisticated yet close to realities which we—and our sweet folk dancers—have so largely lost!”Footnote ¹³⁰ MacInnes criticized the category “primitive,” yet he yearned for the vitality displayed by the Sierra Leoneans, a verve destroyed in Britain by industrialization and its attendant social transformation. MacInnes and other British viewers of the festival celebrated difference, but that difference reified cultural boundaries and salved the wounds of modernity through recourse to the consumption of others' cultures. Meanwhile, the performance of Sierra Leonean culture served the interests of attracting foreign investment, linking the production of cultural difference to the expansion of capitalist modernity in the era of decolonization.

The contradictions of the Commonwealth could not be resolved through the festival, but the festival did consolidate the idiom of postimperial association—multiculturalism. As a transnational formation, the Commonwealth was more than an arena for realizing the policy objectives of British politicians and Whitehall mandarins. By acknowledging and fostering the interests of former colonies, the Commonwealth did not transcend the nation-state but further entrenched its borders. The Commonwealth was a political and economic association; however, it was through cultural performance that it importantly affected postimperial reengagement. Like the imperial spectacles of earlier eras, the festival responded to contemporary political needs and helped to define a sense of the Commonwealth's people and their terms of participation with each other and as a whole.Footnote ¹³¹ The festival remade the relationships of empire through the idiom of multiculturalism, which emphasized diversity, equality, and mutuality. Multiculturalism, as a postimperial formation, was not a break with the past but rather deeply shaped by it.