Robert Persson, Vancouver

When I stayed in Cardiff last year during a visit from my home near Vancouver BC, I made a point of traveling to Aberystwyth and visiting the CPR.

In my opinion, what passes for radical interdisciplinary performance in and around Vancouver is profoundly impoverished. I believe there are a number of reasons for this. One is Vancouver's relative geographical isolation. Another is the transient nature of its demographic; people want quick fixes. A third is the lack of communication between the performance disciplines of theatre, dance and performance art, which leads to self-indulgence on all sides; it seems that there is much less willingness to question the fundamental nature of performance. A fourth (and I admit this is a highly subjective opinion) is that the funding bodies lack a strategy to encourage new forms and instead simply continue to fund flagship companies that went stale a long time ago.

The CPR connects Wales, which has a distinct cultural identity and stability of its own to the world. It feeds the kind of diligent, long-term creative processes that people such as Gordana Vnuk and André Stitt have identified as belonging to peripheral regions of the UK or Europe, as opposed to metropolises such as London or Berlin. It encourages communication and cross-fertilisation between disciplines.

While there is of course nothing wrong with directing considerable resources to "flagship" projects, there is great risk that these projects will grow stale if no attention is paid to the cultural environment in which they grow. This is why the CPR, along with other initiatives such as those of Chapter Arts Centre to encourage new small-scale performance from local artists, is so important.

Robert Persson, Vancouver