CPR Collections

About Us

CPR Collections is an international theatre and performance repository which selects, catalogues, stores and permanently preserves materials for the use and benefit of present and future generations of scholars, theatre practitioners, and the public in Wales and beyond.

OPENING HOURS

Term Time

Monday ---------- CLOSED
Tuesday ---- 9:30 - 13:00 ---- 14:00 - 17:30
Wednesday ---- 9:30 - 13:00 ---- 14:00 - 17:30
Thursday ----- 9:30 - 13:00 ---- 14:00 - 17:30
Friday ------------ CLOSED

We can be found on the top floor of the Parry Williams Building on Penglais Campus.

We are adding our books to the Aberystwyth University online library system and have subscribed to The National Archives Standards for Record Repositories which require us to adher to our new collection and appraisal policy, obtain professional archivist advice, and guarantee public accessibility. We welcome any comments and suggestions about this process and about any of the collections described below.

Copies of our Collection Policy, International Theatre Collection Finding Aid, Newsletters and the catalogue for the Richard Gough Poster Collection can be downloaded from related links section to the right of this page.

For enquiries please call Amy Staniforth on (01970) 622024 or e-mail mws@aber.ac.uk 

The Collections

Resource Centre:

The printed collection in CPR’s Resource Centre, on loan from Professor Richard Gough, contains 8,000 monographs and journals specializing in contemporary visual and experimental performance; the traditional, ‘classical’ and folk culture of Asia, Africa and the Americas (especially India, China, Japan and Indonesia) as well as twentieth century theatre, dance, Live Art and performance (especially from Europe, the Americas and Australasia but also including Asia and Africa).

There is also a wide-range of audio-visual material representing instrumental and vocal music from world cultures and documenting the work of contemporary theatre groups and practitioners.

In addition to the already well used Resource Centre we have:

International Theatre Collection:

This collection, donated by lifetime collector John Cavanagh, consists of 22,000 books, monographs and journals as well as posters, prints and theatre ephemera. The collection has a strong emphasis on musical theatre and includes a wide range of material on world theatre by international authors, in their original language, covering historic and contemporary theatre.

It also includes journals, artefacts, books, graphics, paintings, images, programmes and ephemera and greatly expands CPR's current holdings in the visual, scenographic and musical (music theatre to opera) dimensions of theatre and performance particularly. The holdings on theatre in production and theatre history generally - and specifically those on European theatre and dance from the 16th to 20th Century - are significant.

Performance Research Archive:

Performance Research is a specialist journal published four times a year which aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance. Interdisciplinary in vision and international in scope its emphasis is on contemporary performance within changing world cultures.

The Performance Research archive consists of all the papers, images, and correspondence it has received and generated since the journal was conceptualised in 1993—with the first issue out in April 1995—but also benefits from the extensive research and specialist conversations generated by its themed issues such as On Blackness/Diaspora and Performance and the Archive, for example.

Cardiff Laboratory Theatre/CPR Archive:

Going back to 1974, this collection consists of the documentation and production and design notes for all of CPR’s productions including those performed under t he organisation’s previous name: Cardiff Laboratory Theatre. There are 500 audio-visual tapes documenting the proceedings of the many seminal festivals, workshops, lectures and conferences organized by CPR.

There is also, however, the documentation of the research undertaken by CPR into the themes and subjects around which it organised programmes, workshops and performances. This material takes the form of project files which indicate both project development and collaboration and correspondence with leading artists, practitioners and scholars from around the world.

GIVING VOICE Archive:

Giving Voice brings together those who have an interest in the voice but who will not necessarily meet in the course of their practice: academics and practitioners; performers from a variety of disciplines; teachers of spoken voice and singing teachers; those with an experimental interest and those who favour traditional methodology; those from the world of medical knowledge of the vocal mechanism and those interested in the spiritual dimensions and healing properties of voice work.

There have been ten GIVING VOICE festivals since 1990 and the archive documents each; from the planning, research and development stages to film and audio and paper records of the talks, workshops and performances. As an archive this material provides a vital record of the often ephemeral experiences and discussions that have been key to performance practice.

We are in the process of cataloguing the Giving Voice Festival archive and the catalogue for festivals 1 & 2 can be found in the right hand links on this page. More festivals will be added as we progress!