Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Like many organisations in Wales, we are excitedly preparing to celebrate the 2014 centenary of Dylan Thomas’ birth. At UCAN our offering to the celebrations has a unique and international approach, which will soon become apparent in our next big project: Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. We would like to thank The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship, Wales Arts International and The Arts Council of Wales for supporting this exciting new collaboration. For the project we will be co-creating a radio play of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, developed with audio description embedded within the text with our American partners Revels and Perkins Radio. Visually impaired young people from Wales and America will feature in the lead roles and create the accompanying music. We will also be staging live performances of our adaption in South East Wales. This project is funded by The Arts Council of Wales and it was made possible by a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, which was awarded to UCAN’s Co-founder and Development Director Jane Latham in 2012. The fellowship enabled Jane to visit America and discover opportunities for UCAN members and develop new and lasting links with American organisations that support blind and partially sighted young people. To read more about the fellowship please click here. Jane was accompanied by her husband; UCAN’s Co-founder and Artistic Director Bernard Latham. With the support of Wales Arts International, Bernard traveled to America to build relationships with other arts organisation to initiate future collaborative projects. Jane said “We are delighted with the outcome of our visit to America and are very much looking forward to working with our American partners. We feel we have made real progress in developing links between the visually impaired communities here in Wales and in America and hope this will be the beginning of long and meaningful partnerships.” To find out about the official Dylan Thomas 100 festival, please go to their website: http://www.dt100.info/