An Olympian UCAN Perform Festival

UCAN Productions held their annual UCAN Perform Festival, kindly hosted by the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay on Tuesday 17 July 2012.

Over 100 people attended with children travelling from all over Wales to be a part of the Festival and over 20 volunteers came along to help.  You will see from some of the photos below the children and young people enjoying themselves in some of the workshops the UCAN Trainers ran throughout the day, there was Drama and Percussion, Jewellery making, Ukulele and a Circus workshop. Paddy The Clown put on a wonderful, funny performance over lunch on the Glanfa Stage for all to enjoy.

The centre piece of this year’s Festival however was the Breaking the Wall performance which was held in the Weston Studio.  This was a culmination of an extraordinary Cultural Olympiad Journey2009 when UCAN Productions Junior Chairman, Lloyd Coleman, who was 17 years old at the time, was asked to write a large-scale orchestral work in celebration of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The resulting work, Breaking the Wall, was performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in March 2012.

Using this inspirational score and narrative, UCAN Productions, under the direction of Artistic Director Bernard Latham, has created a dramatic representation of the story of Pheidippides, which was performed by highly talented blind and partially sighted young people from across Wales.

Lloyd has been the Junior Chairman of UCAN Productions since its launch in 2005 and is currently studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music.    As a young man who has both visual and hearing impairments, Lloyd continues to inspire us all.

Breaking the Wall is part of the ‘Whose Flame is it Anyway?’, a project led by Disability Arts Cymru, which is part of Power of the Flame, a distinctive and unique contribution from Wales to the Cultural Olympiad, led by the Arts Council of Wales.

Thanks go to our funders for helping us hold the UCAN Festival:

Reach The Heights, European Social Fund, Welsh Government, Arts Council of Wales, Legal & General and The Legacy Trust Lottery