Barbara Cavanagh

Dear Judie and Richard,

I want to express, most strongly, my dismay that the Arts Council of Wales is planning to completely remove its financial support from the Centre for Performance Research. As an international bookseller specialising in performance arts I have known and admired your work for some thirty years, since you first started building your library at Cardiff Laboratory Theatre as a scholarly and stimulating background and springboard for all that you have achieved.

The late John Cavanagh and I have watched and appreciated as you have gone from strength to strength, culminating in your being invited to base yourselves at the University of Aberystwyth. Here, you seem to have matured in a most exciting way, continuing to engage with performance worldwide, and attracting many practitioners to Wales and Aberystwyth and new theatre students to the University of Aberystwyth. The University obviously appreciates your total commitment and contribution to the cultural life of both university and town, rewarding you with a splendid new building and handsome performance spaces.

I do realise, however, that the team you have built up cannot exist without some outside grants, and know that the financing you received from the Arts Council of Wales is essential to maintaining this team. I understand that there is talk of your being financed for particular projects, but know that it is virtually impossible to engender creative work in this way. There needs to be a reliable source of funding to enable one idea or project to lead to another; we all know that very few projects arrive as complete entities – they require a certain amount of time and imagination to come to fruition, and this naturally means financing a team which can make things happen and eventually result in an innovative, stimulating programmes and performances. It is what makes CPR internationally renowned for its ground-breaking work.

It is also the reason that John Cavanagh chose to deposit his international theatre library at CPR, for the purpose of professional and scholarly research into past, present and future performances. It is quite unusual to find a theatre department which has such a remarkable library, and there is strong reason to believe that it will attract other complementary collections to be deposited there, building an unrivalled bank of knowledge both for CPR, the University of Aberystwyth and to be shared worldwide by means of the internet and many plans for future publications.

It seems shameful that this relatively small annual grant should be withdrawn, endangering work and experimentation that has taken so many years to build. We are told that decentralisation is present-day policy, and it is hard to think of a place less central geographically in the British Isles, but more central philosophically in the world of international performance art and performance research.

I most sincerely hope that the Welsh Arts Council will not only reconsider its decision to withdraw the present grant, but pledge a new grant for at least ten years to enable CPR’s remarkable work to continue to flourish.

Yours sincerely,
Barbara Cavanagh