Prof. Alan Read - King's College London

Dear Richard and Judie,

I am writing to you directly concerning the imminent threat to your funding as I do not know Peter Tyndall or other members of the ACW executive committee. It may appear circuitous to direct a message to you regarding your fate when it would more appropriately be read directly by those in a position to reconsider this recommendation. I hope that I can contribute to the debate as an outsider without being discourteous to those who commit themselves to difficult decisions and administration of this kind with a much fuller knowledge of the financial pressures and continuing commitments than I can hope to have.

I agree with Christopher Frayling, for once, from the Arts Council of England, when he refers recently to not being swayed by the volume of protest from your English counterpart cuttees. I am diametrically opposed to a banal principle of tax-generated arts funding for all until someone convinces me of the genuine worth of arts practice over palliative care. I agree with recent Arts Council (Wales and England) attempts to clarify their strategic mission and to risk general arts ire for specific gain on behalf of innovation and internationalism. This is why I wholly supported the 100% increase in the revenue funding of Shunt Theatre Cooperative in London and was ambivalent about the claims made by the Northcott Theatre as to their continued significance. I am quite able to make distinctions between these contributions to the field as I have professionally committed myself over three decades to supporting the definition and discussion of the grounds on which such decisions can be made in the daily lives of my students and professional colleagues.

The recommendation as regards the Centre for Performance Research is therefore more than of academic interest to me and the field I participate in. The field I operate in is one that considers the broad spectrum approach to performance, researched and practiced, cultivated and curated through CPR as critical to the future of theatre, the arts and interdisciplinary research cultures. Centres of research more commonly rearrange the furniture of their own fields, CPR reaches well beyond this parochialism and commits itself to effecting a wider world of creative work. Whether it has been in Mainz or Minneapolis, Amsterdam or New Amsterdam (NY), Dartington or Denmark (2008) I have never heard CPR referenced without the qualifier Wales attached. I think Raymond Williams was referencing a Welsh historian colleague when he asked the question "When was Wales?". The phrase is a limpid one suggesting that places might subside into history without care and attention. Wales for me, and thousands of other scholar, practitioner, artist, academic, public fellow-travellers was experienced most directly through the generosity of spirit, the innovative flair and the precise research agenda of CPR. Whether it was tourism or cooking, anthropology or politics my sense of Wales was partly experienced through the lens of CPR leaving me with the impression of a curious culture, an outward looking nation and a profoundly advanced social enterprise. I was not alone. My colleagues within the leading academic institutions in North America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe were simply jealous of what had been achieved on behalf of performance and by CPR. I hope this sheer envy is made manifest in the communications that will greet this recommendation. It would be a timely transgression of a commandment.

I cannot comment on the relative claims being made on the £118,000 resources that would be diverted from these initiatives if CPR were to lose its revenue subsidy. I would presume and expect life to be hell in the offices of ACW as year on year attempts to process the flurry of multiple project grant proposals from CPR would eclipse the memory of a time when revenue funding provided, in one easy to process package, deserved security for true risk takers who understood the merit of future-planning. I would be happy to hear that £118,000 had been added to the palliative care programme for the elderly of Aberystwyth. But in the absence of that reassurance I would hope there may be room yet for reappraisal in the spirit of ACW's own planned review of the sector.

Protests on behalf of the arts are over-rated. There are other pressing urgencies to which we should be directing our attention. In the meantime, and with due respect, an inflationary increase is the only adjustment that should be made to CPR's grant allocation in 2008-9.

With regards

Alan

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Alan Read
Professor of Theatre
King's College London