Yvon Bonenfant - Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts, University of Winchester

Dear Arts Council of Wales:

RE: Centre for Performance Research


Having just returned from Giving Voice 10, the international voice festival run by CPR, I feel compelled to express my opinion about the threatened defunding of the Centre for Performance Research by the Arts Council of Wales.

This festival is unique not only in the UK but in the world. It brings together workshops, presentations, and a wide variety of performances from across the worlds of music and theatre in a way that is representative of the practical nature of the CPR’s commitment to developing new art and allying this with relating that art to the work of the ‘past masters’ of the field.

Nowhere else on Earth could one hear Fatima Miranda, doing her avant-garde, theatrical, highly musically refined and visually vibrant pieces; Christian Wolz, a pioneering German artist working with extended voice and technology, and a wide variety of intercultural voice practices and experimental music theatre, and then be able to take workshops in these and many other techniques, all within one week.

This is special. It is original. It is practical. It allies thinking with doing, and embodied reflection with creative practice. It is what a centre for performance research funded by an arts council should be about – bringing otherwise rare and difficult to access performance practices to a constituency hungry to enrich their own artistic practices with this wide variety of cutting-edge and underexposed work.

The workshops, dissemination practices, and dialogue the CPR provides for artists and audience are important. They occupy a special place on the international performance scene. I hope you see fit to continue supporting this idiosyncratic and necessary star in the constellation of performance today.

Yours sincerely,



Yvon Bonenfant
Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts
University of Winchester