Nostrils At The Ready!

What – UCAN Create Masterclass Three

Practitioner – Odette Toilette – Purveyor of Olfactory Adventures http://www.odettetoilette.com/

When – Friday 26th of February

Time – 17:00 – 19:30

Where – The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Castle Grounds, Cathays Park, Cardiff.This Masterclass will introduce you to the world of scents and how you can use them in your creative projects, including theatre and music productions. From scent-based storytelling, to turning a sound into a smell, or a scent back into song lyrics, you’ll get to play with lots of different ideas to use in your work. Come prepared to sniff lots of interesting and unusual aromas.Lizzie Ostrom is a lifelong scent fan, who in 2010 (under the name Odette Toilette) began hosting events for people to play with their sense of smell, from sniffable history tours to recreations of ancient aromatic rituals, Japanese incense ceremonies and scent speakeasies uncovering illicit perfumes. She’s worked with many museums, galleries and brands including the V&A, The National Gallery, The Royal Observatory Greenwich and The British Museum. In 2015 she was on the team creating Tate Sensorium from creative studio Flying Object, which invited visitors to experience artworks with all their senses. Her first book,Perfume: A Century of Scents, is out now with Hutchinson.

Sounds like something you’d be interested in? To book a free space at this unique event  contact either Megan@ucanproductions.org or Mared@ucanproductions.org or call 02920870554

UCAN Create Master Class 2

Mathilde Lopez

On Friday evening the 29th of January UCAN Create ran the Second Master Class, this time with practitioner Mathilde Lopez. UCAN Create is all about creating, producing and showcasing your own work. It gives young people the opportunity to learn a new skill, work with some amazing people and create something new and unique.

Unique would definitely be one word I’d use to describe the experience of the workshop. From listening to Mathilde describe the work she’d previously done to represent pink through movement, we had the opportunity to discover how creatively she works. I found the session really interesting and thought provoking, as it made me start thinking about how I could work with space and text in a new way.

We began the workshop listening to Mathilde describing her previous work, which I think everyone would agree I could have happily done all evening. It was really intriguing to hear her explain that one of the things she does is to read the play or text in its entirety and to note down the first words that came to her before beginning to work on it.  

However, we quickly moved on to getting up and being creative ourselves. We got an insight in how Mathilde would utilize the space for a performance and through an exercise she explained and demonstrated how to work with and against space.  This then led into an exercise where we were asked to portray whatever colour was shouted out through movement and sound. We explored pink, yellow, black and even silver.

We then began to do a similar exercise but using words, by adding an action in order to change the tone of voice and over-exaggerate the meaning, which allowed us to explore new ways of combating text. This then led onto a series of exercises, while using an excerpt from one of Caryl Churchill’s works, Mathilde demonstrated how utilizing punctuation by replacing commas and question marks with an action or sound can be very effective. This adds dimension and purpose, making it a powerful piece to watch and listen to. Taking what we’d just learnt, in groups we developed this concept further.

After the workshop the general feedback was extremely positive.  Considering everyone was quite nervous and unsure what to expect at the beginning, we’re very proud of everyone for taking part and for giving everything a go.  Amy and Hannah explain this perfectly:

“Mathilde’s workshop was a real eye opener as it allowed me to approach text differently.  I enjoyed the completely different directorial style as it pushed me but also gave me a lot more confidence.” Amy. 17

“When the workshop with Mathilde first started I was a bit uncomfortable with the activities we were asked to do, she has a very strong personality and it wasn’t a style of directing I had worked with before.  When I looked around and saw how ridiculous everyone else was being I soon relaxed and got into things.  It turned out to be really enjoyable.  It was great to learn how you can put movement with words and how the slight change can impact the flow you want the words to have.  I would definitely like to do another workshop with her, she’s a brilliant woman and after I got comfortable I really enjoyable the workshop.” Hannah, 20

After the first two master classes being such a success we can’t wait to get stuck in to the next one.

UCAN Create Master Class 1

Fun, fast paced and engaging are just a few words that come to mind to describe UCAN Create’s first masterclass with yello brick.  http://yellobrick.co.uk/#stage-section

On Friday December the 4th UCAN Productions and yello brick hosted their first UCAN Create masterclass at the Cardiff University, School of Optometry and Vision Sciences.  UCAN Create is all about creating, producing and showcasing your own work.  It gives young people the opportunity to learn a new skill, work with some amazing people and create something new and unique.

The first session was run by yello brick.  We were taken on a crash course in game creation for theatre and unusual spaces.  Having the opportunity to work with UCAN members and a new group of participants was an exciting experience.   The first introduction into street gaming involved using dried spaghetti.  They made us play a game as a way of explaining the different parts of game creation, everyone found this really effective. Everyone was stood in a circle, joined to the people either side by a piece of spaghetti.  The aim of the game was to be the last pair standing with an unbroken piece of spaghetti.  They used this practical approach as an effective way of showing how the formula can work to create the basis of a very simple game and then built upon to create something more complex. We learnt that a game can be broken up into 4 simple parts.

We were then split into groups and given half and hour where we had to choose blind a genre, location and tech.  It was the group’s responsibility to choose the mechanic to create a game to share with the whole group at the end.  One group random selection were Zombies (genre), Castle(location) and Ribbon (tech).  With these three parts they created a game of Zombie Tag.  Another group choose sci-fi(genre), a bridge(location) and counters(tech), which they used to create a collection game.  Players had to collect the corresponding chips, which created a shape that then gave a code word.  This code word would get you across a bridge to a safe land.  Players only had 5 minutes to find the chips and only three pairs out of 6 could cross.

As an entire group we got to play each other’s games and then give each other feedback.  It was a great experience to see how quickly everyone had created such simple but effective funs games, which we all enjoyed playing.  This class truly gave us enough knowledge to go away and start creating our own games.  Maybe this is an idea for the next UCAN festival?  Who knows!?  

This masterclass was a great start to the UCAN Create project and we’re all very excited about the next upcoming sessions.

Megan and Mared

BIG THANK YOU MotoNovo Finance

Delighted to say that we have received an incredibly kind donation of £1000 from MotoNovo Finance! This money will be invaluable in helping us with the transport costs that UCAN Productions needs to make sure we can include as many people as possible. We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who contributed, and a special thanks to Assistant Office Manager Lorna for delivering this very big cheque!

THANK YOU OPSOC

You’d think that the students studying here at Cardiff University’s Optometry would have enough work on their plates to get on with, but throughout the year Laura Preece and Jemima Morgan have been putting on countless fundraisers to raise money for UCAN on behalf of OPSOC (The Optometry Students’ Society). They made and sold pancakes, organised a raffle at the University Black Tie Event, The Eye Ball, and sold tickets to an evening of cosmetics shopping. We couldn’t believe it when they came by the office with a cheque of £855! We are humbled by their efforts and wish them all the best in their final year of university – THANK YOU FROM EVERYONE AT UCAN!