Dr Heike Roms - Aberystwyth University

Dear Judie and Richard,

WITHDRAWAL OF FUNDING

I am writing in support of your appeal to the Arts Council of Wales to reinstate your annual revenue grant.

As a lecturer in Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University and Course Convenor of the MA Practising Performance I am particularly concerned about the impact the withdrawal of your grant will have on providing young Wales-based artists professional support for their work and a viable perspective after graduation.

In the past, when there were a significant number of publicly funded performance companies working in Wales, emerging performance artists would have developed their skills and experiences by doing a kind of performance apprenticeship with one of these – as, for example, now celebrated Welsh artists such as Eddie Ladd or Marc Rees did with Brith Gof in the 1990s. Today, when there are few revenue-funded performance companies left, the role of advanced training opportunities and performance placements is increasing in importance. The time between leaving university and working as an established artist is here crucial – emerging artists need opportunities to advance their skills and to develop their own practice.

The CPR with its publicly funded workshop and training programme and its Associated Artists scheme has been providing an essential service in this regard. Two of their current associated artists, Gareth Llyr Evans and Louise Ritchie, are graduates from our MA scheme, and their association with CPR and the access it gives them to a professional and non-institutional training provision has played a large role in persuading them to stay in West Wales after their studies and make a valuable artistic contribution to the community there. Furthermore, the CPR’s new performance space, the Foundry studio, has recently allowed the organisation to invite innovative medium-scale performance work for which there is currently no other space in Ceredigion. This programme offers young artists (as well as the general public) the chance to see a wide variety of high-quality work whilst they are forming their tastes and their own artistic styles. CPR’s international perspective thereby allows these young artists to learn from and aspire to examples of the best performance practice in the world.

There is today a very worrying lack of a younger generation of performance makers creating work in Wales. I fear that the withdrawal of funding to CPR, which will force it to abandon its public programme of training and performance, will further reduce the already limited opportunities that younger artists have in Wales to develop their own artistic practice.

I therefore urge the Arts Council of Wales to reconsider its decision and reinstate the revenue grant to the Centre for Performance Research.
Yours sincerely,



Dr Heike Roms