Włodzimierz Staniewski - Director of Centre for Theatre Practice “Gardzienice”

To whom it may concern

I hereby express my deep disappointment and protestation, that such a noble cultural institution as Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth has difficulties with continuing their activity.

CPR delivers innovation, experimentation and process, and offers access at all levels to innovative training programmes and approaches to making theatre alongside programmes of high quality presentations and performances from around the world that pursue ideals of accessibility without artistic compromise.

CPR supports the Arts Council’s aspiration to redress years of under-funding to the independent theatre sector, to revitalise it in order to face the challenges – and opportunities - ahead. Despite the richness and diversity of work and practice that has long been a strength of theatre in Wales, funding policy and decisions over the last decade, playing to safety through a concentration of resources privileging the mainstream, the ‘establishment’ and the highly-visible, have helped create a fragile and fragmented theatre ecology in Wales; CPR has no wish to propagate the climate of competition for limited resources that has existed for so long, and indeed welcomes the funding uplifts to fellow artists and companies that can allow for their future development and growth.

A revitalised theatre culture emerges out of a confluence of different ideas and influences across disciplines and sectors. As a meeting place, for ideas, exchange and discovery, CPR has consistently pursued and promoted this idea of collaboration and confluence, of dialogue and engagement - across borders, between cultures and between disciplines.

I think that the international theatre community will be impoverished if CPR disappears from the map of the most important cultural institutions in Europe.

Włodzimierz Staniewski
Director of Centre for Theatre Practice “Gardzienice”, Poland