#Eyecareconference.
Recently Wales Council for The Blind and UCAN Productions entered into a partnership agreement to collaborate on establishing Regional Groups of young adults with sight loss, to influence design and delivery and help achieve citizen centred services. As UCAN is a performance arts company, the UCAN Team created two performance sketches, ‘What Can Rehabilitation do for me?’ and ‘Employment’. RNIB Cymru tweeted
Ever wondered what it’s like living with sight loss? The first of the short films made by Jake Sawyers and Ben Richards are now live.
We asked Visually Impaired young people how they get around.
Jake Sawyer and Ben Richards have been busy creating a series of short films for the #Future Insight Project, which is a five year Big Lottery in partnership with RNIB Cymru, Guide Dogs and Vision Support. Both Ben and Jake interviewed visually impaired young people across South East Wales on a number of topics and the results were amazing! All to be revealed very soon. If you have a visual impairment and are between 14 and 25 and want to get involved, email info@ucanproductions.org
UCAN Direct, a directing programme for emerging visually impaired and blind young artists
and facilitated by UCAN Productions Creative Learning Director, Dinos Aristidou, culminated in a wonderful performance at the G39 studio in Cardiff on August 12th.
Over ten sessions, the young directors looked at staging, ensemble building, rehearsing, developing material, directing, movement and voice. They created, wrote and directed the piece examining what everyone of us should be entitled to and what we shouldn’t have to put up with.
Though they were all performing, they also took responsibility for the direction of one particular performer, as well as collectively directing the whole piece. We have also had the privilege of working with two fabulous young musicians who created the music for the piece in collaboration with the group.
This particular work was conceived as part performance, part installation, appropriate to the space and it’s function as a gallery. The performance was very much a memory piece about a class of children whose lives take them, as adults, to different unexpected places. Their childhoods, seemingly full of promise and hope, often hiding the reality of their complicated lives which shape the adults they become.
Drama workshops and the final conference of the VISION Erasmus Plus Project were held in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria in the first week of August. The UCAN Team were reunited with their project partners from Italy, Bulgaria and Luxembourg in a sharing and celebration event to promote the success of all the young visually impaired young people who took part in the project.
Chloe-Ann Wills said ‘It was brilliant to meet so many new people and learn so many new things. I thought it was amazing to see everyone with different visual impairments working together, having fun and learning about the culture’.
Speaking about the workshops earlier in the year Hannah Mathews said ‘It was amazing to work with so many different practitioners who teach in very different ways. Interacting with everyone daily was amazing and the week was just fantastic overall’.
DanielIe Brewster, Student at Royal National College for the Blind Hereford said ‘I met some fantastic people in Palermo, some British, some Italian and some Bulgarian. It was a truly fantastic opportunity and I’m so grateful for everything. I learnt so much to do with culture, lifestyle and theatre’
More details about the project can be found here http://vision-erasmusplus.eu/
