Dr Dragan Klaic - Visiting Professor, Central European University, Budapest

Dear Colleagues,

What is going on in the UK: some epidemics, some serious decease, some dangerous virus??? After a series of mind-boggling, irrational and unjustifiable funding/defunding decisions announced by the ACE, now comes ACW with a menace to defund CPR. Really?

First of all, I am shocked to see that a remarkable institution such as CPR has enjoyed a miserable public support of 118.000 pounds by the ACW so far. That is all? This is some sort of Moldavian/Albanian level of support for a rich, productive, original and extremely engaged performance arts organization that has consistently been a beacon of experimentation, reflection, cooperation and innovation. In a normal European country one would expect that CPR would have 3-5 times more subsidy, that would be normal, not exceptional. In this perspective ACW decision is ridiculous and absurd.

If ACW is not structurally to subsidize CPR any longer --- whom else, what else are they to subsidize???. Who is the icon of the performance arts in Wales, who has made Wales a familiar spot for the performance artists and theoreticians across Europe and the World? Who is setting the standards in the performance arts excellence in Wales? CPR and no one else. Certainly not the Millenium Center in Cardiff with its gigantic and quickly accumulated deficit and plastic buckets I photographed a few months ago in the lobby catching up a dripping rain from the ceiling of this 'emblematic' architecture, showing the sad outcome of politically inspired cultural investment. Is Wales to become a cultural subject to respect and explore with one or 2 national theaters, in Welsh and in English? But that is silly and childish and anachronistic in thinking. Everyone knows that a response to the uniforming pressures of globalization is not to reinvent the 19c model of national theater (a double miss in Wales!) but to fund small, flexible, dynamic and adventurous cultural organizations that are global players.

What is Wales to be proud of in performance arts if its defunds CPR and switch it to project funding?Get real, dear ACW bureaucrats.. wake up.. Without structural subsidy for CPR you ll be depriving yourself of credibility, moreover, you’ll enter the curricula of cultural policy teaching across Europe as a blatant negative example to be pointed out in its silliness and destructive impact in endless seminars. What a way to earn European glory! Or is there a hand break at your reach? I hope so.

Kind regards
Dr Dragan Klaic
Visiting Professor, Central European University, Budapest
Permanent Fellow, Felix Meritis, Amsterdam