Prof Baz Kershaw - University of Warwick

Dear Colleagues

This is to add my voice to the many you must have received already in protest against the ACW's move to switch CPR to project funding status. It seems to indicate a severe misjudgement about the role of top-quality twenty-first century cultural research organizations in developing and sustaining the highest standards of innovation in cosmopolitan theatre and performance systems - and what those systems in the main might promise for the future.

Since the 1990s their role has become phenomenally more important as international cultural exchange has grown more significant in a profoundly destabilized world. Increasingly even politicians and diplomats have realized that the creativity of cultures is potentially an essential key to the resolution of global ills, so it is very disappointing indeed when organizations such as ACW seem to work against this trend for the sake of small savings.

CPR has been a leader in the international theatre/performance networks in promoting the positive and pragmatic uses of creative research for furthering a human ecology that can potentially benefit everyone. It has also served as an impressive reminder that partnerships and collaborations between innovative creative individuals/organizations and universities in Wales, Scotland, England and elsewhere are extremely important to high quality research that can very significantly contribute to essential struggles for equality, justice, freedom and peace internationally.

I urge ACW to reconsider its decision to change the funding status of CPR. If one judges the cost-benefits of such organizations against both their symbolic and actual value in attempts to reverse the desperation of world futures faced by children and young people everywhere now, then their necessity surely should become more manifest among even the most myopic of mandarins and the hardest hearted hate-makers within the citadels of violence. Of course, this may read like a ridiculous rhetoric on a sunny Sabbath as spring approaches the mountains and vales of Wales. But to sense even the smallest grain of truth in it might generate antidotes to hope as a pathological affliction in these frightening times.

Baz Kershaw

Prof Baz Kershaw

Professor of Performance
School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick