Greg Cullen - playwright and director, Wales

Dear CPR,

It was only a year ago that the composer Jak Poore, choreographer Phil Williams and I were trying to create a massive sequence of movement to accompany the first movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. If that sounds very high brow, it was to be performed by forty young people as part of a National Youth Theatre of Wales's production of "An Informer's Duty". We were struggling to conceptualise when I remembered a lecture given at a CPR conference many years ago about chaos and order. About how revolutions are chaotic and freeform, whilst very soon afterwards the societies they give rise to become disciplined into authoritarian straight lines. The relationship between chaos and order, freedom and repression became our signature for the piece. It evolved into many variants but that was the holding idea that gave it form.

I can think of no better reason for keeping CPR. It is the only forum in Wales to give that depth of insight, theory and reflection upon practice that many years later can fuel a piece of theatre and inspire many, many people.

CPRs effect may be difficult to quantify, even to describe, but then Art is like that isn't it? To outsiders it may seem a tad cultist in its intensity of language and specificity of thought, but we practiconers, we who make theory into practice, need to be fed new ideas, no matter how alien, rarefied and obscure they may seem to some at the time. It would be an ironic shame is the sometime chaotic, revolutionary and freeform thinking of CPR were to be replaced with straight lines and orthodoxy described to us, or even dictated to us, from above .

Greg Cullen, playwright and director, Wales