Whitman, the central character in the play, says, “You know Howl was written in 1955. That’s … and I still see it today, still hear it, the things Ginsberg was … howling about. It’s still so heart-achingly present for us. It’s 1969.” Given the events in our world today, the irony of this staggers me. In 1969, I was in my sophomore year at the National Theatre School of Canada, “Wide-eyed and full of hope.” (Whitman again.) The utopian politics of Rochdale were my politics and served to shape all the years of my life, up to and including today. 

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Rochdale College (a free university) began in 1965 in a group of five houses known as the Campus Co-op Residence, which was on the margins of the University of Toronto’s grounds.
 

The college was named for Rochdale, a small textile manufacturing town in the northeast of England. The co-operative movement is said to have started there in 1844 when a group of individuals, The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, pooled their resources in an attempt to gain some small control of their economic lives in the face of the industrial revolution and its growing economic/capitalist power systems. They devised a set of principles called the Rochdale Principles, a set of principles of co-operation that still provide the foundation on which co-ops around the world operate to this day.

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In 1968, a block long 18-storey concrete tower at 341 Bloor St. West opened in an unfinished state as an ambitious experiment in co-operative living and alternate education. It started as an idyllic sanctuary away from capitalism, the bastions of institutional thought, and the systems of dominant culture.

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Rochdale began as an anti-authoritarian political mecca where people keen on love, peace, and the prospect of a higher consciousness swarmed to join the counterculture and the burgeoning grassroots civil rights movements. It became an epicentre for the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, the Black Power Movement, the rising of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Movement (Nishnawbe Institute)under the leadership of Wilfred Pelletier, and held Red, White, and Black (a counselling body for American draft dodgers and deserters). Its leaders and organizers were passionately engaged and committed to the ambitious undertaking to form a radical participatory democracy through co-operative living and learning.

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The backdrop is the Vietnam War, the recent deaths of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, the rise of the Black Panther movement, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the election of Nixon, Trudeau senior in the Prime Ministers’ office, and the rise of the FLQ and the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange.

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‘Liberation’ was a key word, and ‘free’ was to be applied to all things: Free Love, Free Thought, Free Speech, Free Education, Free Health Care, Free Day Care, Free Choice (particularly as concerning the female body), and Free Food. Free the People from Nukes and War.

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