Peter Holland - Acting Dean, University of Notre Dame

Dear Judie,

I am astonished and appalled to learn that the Arts Council of Wales has cut the revenue funding for the Centre for Performance Research. The CPR is not only the Welsh centre for the investigation, production and teaching of innovative performance and theatre work, it is also the UK hub for performance research, recognised throughout the world for the high quality of its work and the exciting way in which it acts as a focus for a vast network of performance activity and training within Wales, within Europe and across the globe. It is ridiculous to think that work like this can be accomplished through project funding for it is precisely the continuity that enables the long-term planning out of which its activities grow. A project-funded CPR would be merely the palest shadow of its brilliant current form.

For years now, many of us, as academics working in the sphere of theatre and performance, have come to rely on CPR to tell us what is happening and to bring us the best of that work as performance and as workshop opportunities as well as conferences, talks, and a myriad of other kinds of work central to our culture. It has performed a vital function, as the beating heart and distribution system, for scholars and critics as well as all kinds of theatre workers and performance makers. CPR has identified Wales as a place with a vibrant culture of performance and a commitment to its dissemination, analysis and transmission, as a country to which the whole anglophone world can turn for something as exciting and productive and essential as the best locations in Europe can provide.

I will do whatever I can do to help you encourage the ACW to reverse this decision, so contrary to all its previous praise for CPR's activities and so short-sighted. Ventures like CPR take many years to build and only seconds to destroy.

With my strongest possible support,
Yours ever,
Peter Holland

Acting Dean, The Graduate School,McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies,
Department of Film, Television and Theatre,University of Notre Dame;
President, The Shakespeare Association of America.