Rebecca Schneider - Brown University, USA

To Whom it May Concern,

I write both passionately and with utmost reason to argue for the importance of CPR for our global communities of theatre studies, theatre practice, theatre knowledge, theatre and performance history, and the future of the fields of theatre studies, ritual studies, and performance studies. It is impossible to underestimate the contribution of CPR to theatre research in both practice realms and scholarship realms and, most poignantly, the fruitful places those realms overlap. The loss of CPR would spell an incredible embarrassment and shortsightedness on the part of those in position to make such decisions for the future of theatre and performance studies in global and interdisciplinary perspective.

CPR has contributed in far-reaching ways to the promotion and dissemination of one of the most powerful interdisciplinary movements of our time: Performance Studies. In the United States, where I am privileged to teach at an ivy league institution with a highly successful graduate program, all of my colleagues and graduate students hold CPR in the highest esteem and look to the journal and the programming of this institution (workshops, think tanks, performances, conferences, books, archives) for guidance about the future of the fields they touch. What are those fields? Amazingly, CRP has had effect in practice, theory, and historiography of theatre, ritual, art, and performance. That is a claim that, with the exception of New York University's Department of Performance Studies and Northwestern's Department of Performance Studies in the U.S., virtually no other programs can claim. In fact, even NYU and Northwestern have not, in my opinion, wedded as effectively both practice and theory. The program in Wales defies expectation -- repeatedly. The studies in voice, the studies in modes of performance, the studies in experimental forms, in everyday life performance, in ritual theory, in historiography, and in the intersections of performance and philosophy have been consistently and bravely explored cutting edge possibilities, setting standards and defining new avenues of inquiry with alarming consistency.

The journal Performance Research is only one arm of this program's significant outreach. CPR's presence at conferences around the world and their promotion of (and impact on) scholarship and innovative performance techniques have also had wide effect. It has repeatedly amazed me how a program in such a remote locale can so consistently cause such a buzz and garner such focused respect and attention. Perhaps this has gone unnoticed by those "on the ground" in the U.K.? This fact amazes me. In the U.S., I have taught at Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, and now Brown University, and I have placed PhD students at Harvard and Yale, Northwestern and Princeton University (among others) and, without exception, each of those students has come through the ranks knowing that the Centre for Performance Research is a model to emulate. To lose that model would be an indescribable loss.

I am more than willing, as Chair of the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance at Brown University and Director of Graduate Studies for the Brown/Trinity Consortium, to speak whenever and wherever required on behalf of the merits of the founders and participants of the Centre for Performance Research. Certainly I myself, as a scholar and practitioner, would be impoverished of mind and spirit without the contributions of these forward-thinking, brave and gentle scholars, artists, and experimentalists. Every effort should be made to think with extreme caution about abandoning the efforts of those who make the future possible. CPR have been "those who make the future possible" to an entire generation of theatre scholars and practitioners in Performance Studies. This movement is taking off (like a rocket) in the United States. From our perspective, now is the time to support CPR, now more than ever.

Please contact me for any further questions. I am more than willing to expand upon my opinions on this matter.

Sincerely,


Rebecca Schneider
Chair, Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance
Director of Graduate Studies for Brown/Trinity Consortium
Faculty Affiliate in Modern Culture and Media
Brown University
Providence
USA