UCAN help Students explore practicalities of life on Mars at science event.

For the second year, the UCAN team were delighted to work with Yellobrick, a marketing agency who specialise in immersive and engaging experiences. Five of our core UCAN team supported the day by becoming special agents and helping with the production management.

On the day, over 200 local Year 8 students explored the practicalities of humans living on Mars for a science event at Cardiff University.

The event, entitled, STEM Live!, was successfully held for the first time in 2015. It encourages students to explore a theme, using their understanding of science and engineering. It also aims to introduce students to a wide range of science careers open to them before they make their GCSE choices.

At this year’s event, students investigated the science around an evacuation of Earth for habitation on Mars. Staff from the Schools of Engineering, Bio-sciences, Physics, Computer Science, Earth, Architecture, Chemistry, and Mathematics, led students in a number of different hands-on activities, ranging from designing rockets to transporting humans to Mars, exploring living conditions and issues of temperature and energy, and farming on the planet.

UCAN perform at The Annual Wales Eye Care Conference.

#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

#futureinsight

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.  

Coming soon to a computer near you !

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 (very well!)

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.