Re-imagining Cardiff’s Old Library

The Old Library expresses our commitment to evolving the practices of the performing arts through more informal approaches to performance, and vibrant, more inclusive forms of participation.

Having bid for and been awarded a 99-year lease on this wonderful building, we hope our plans will make a real difference to Cardiff - Cardiff, as a Music City and a city deeply committed to culture, in very challenging times,

The new spaces built at our North Road campus in 2011 transformed the extent to which we’ve been able to connect to the public – as audiences for our creative programme. Where we once had just a few thousand coming to see our work each year, we now record over 55,000 attendances annually.

We know that these experiences can bring tremendous benefits for well-being and creativity, as well as for our students, for whom being immersed in an arts centre is one of the most powerful ways to learn.

The world is changing very fast, and within this the performing arts are, if anything, only becoming more important to well-being, to story-telling and to all voices being heard - to making sense of our lives. 

At the same time our disciplines also need to adapt and evolve in how they connect with people, becoming more flexible and agile in responding to needs. The Old Library asks and empowers us to address these two imperatives together.

It connects us into the very centre of the city, to civic mission and to civic pride, and to that sense that the arts can and should be a part of daily life. 

And it also opens up a vibrant provocation and set of possibilities about how the performing arts now reach and connect with people, inhabit and animate public space, and energise cultural place-making.

So our residency in the Old Library will be different to our work at North Road. 

First we must seek to build on some of the Old Library’s history: it’s original vision that emerged from the extraordinary commercial success of the coal industry in the late 19th century, and sought to give something essential back to the people through a place for the arts and learning in which everyone – young and old - could find creative inspiration and opportunity.

Second, we must lead with the deep need, that we have been responding to in the re-design of our degrees, to reconnect the social and aesthetic parts of artistic practice, connecting our students more profoundly to context and communities, rather than making art in a bubble.

The Old Library brilliantly allows us to realise this, giving us more flexible spaces for informal performance, workshops and other forms of engagement than we have on North Road. As well as the opportunity to collaborate with partners, including those currently resident here, to innovate and stimulate fresh work.

Third, we must use this opportunity to redouble our commitment to Wales’ deep cultural roots, its language and artistic traditions. Remembering not least the rich vein of extraordinary Welsh talent that has come from, and continues to emerge from Wales, nurtured by astonishing community roots, including the eisteddfodau tradition, community choirs, brass bands and youth theatre groups.

As we do this, the Old Library will become a hub to inform and support an evolving network of residencies that we are creating for our students and recent graduates. 

Each of these sees a small group of them partner with a community arts venue, a school, a healthcare setting, a business, for at least a year – co-creating appropriate performance and engagement activities. 

Examples already underway include the Norwegian Church in Cardiff Bay, Pedal Power in Bute Park, and Penarth Pavilion. We aim to extend this network across Wales over the next years.