Dear Judie and Richard,
I am shocked to hear that the Arts Council is considering such a drastic assault on the future of CPR. A "project" based funding policy would eviscerate the carefully constructed and maintained administrative and creative teamwork that goes to produce the most challenging, exploratory and nourishing theatre programs in the English-speaking world. Leading theatre-makers come from all over the globe to participate in CPR.
Giving Voice has been consistently on my calendar since it started and every festival stretches and enriches me. My knowledge and understanding of my own work ripens within the global field that CPR has cultivated with unsparing dedication. Nowhere else (and I live in New York City, a global hub if ever there was one) can I experience within one week the creme-de-la-creme of voices, voice-work, singing, vocal theatre forms from Poland, Spain, India, Bulgaria, Korea, Russia....and on and on. To maintain these kinds of international contacts so that programs can be built each year with compatible or contrasting building blocks that make an excitingly new experience for participants, takes seasoned and imaginative theatre practitioners. It is not only vision and missionary zeal that are essential for making these things happen, it's unending follow-through, and the intellectual edge that knows the comparative values of what is going on in theatre around the world. Richard Gough, Judie Christie and Joan Mills have encyclopaedic knowledge of the cutting-edge of emerging theatre, classic theatre, ethnic theatre and voice in theatre. This compendium of knowledge has been painstakingly and lovingly accumulated over many years, and I know that in my own field it has contributed to the exploration of new frontiers in voice training by every teacher and voice practitioner who has attended a festival.
CPR sets our work in a universal context and our artistry takes deeper root and branches out more surely because of what we find with this remarkable group of researchers and facilitators in Aberystwyth.
It would be a terrible blow to the theatre at large if CPR's wings were clipped.
With hope that the Arts Council of Wales will reconsider this proposed funding cut, which must have been based on a faulty analysis of the crucial work being done by CPR.
Most sincerely,
Kristin Linklater,
Professor of Theatre Arts School of the Arts Columbia University New York City.
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