What is Fun Size Jazz?
Fun-Size Jazz!, developed in partnership with The Ark Children's Cultural Centre, is a performance and career developmental opportunity for Irish jazz and improvised music professionals to create work for young audiences, and develop their craft in this regard by learning how to devise material for, and working with, young audiences.
Why we are doing it
We want to equip artists with additional skills to increase the scope of future work. Developing work for new audiences across film, theatre, and even the gaming industry, increases your professional range as an artist. Specifically, there is a large market for work geared towards young audiences and we want to equip artists with the tools to develop in this regard. We also want to keep developing our fruitful partnership with The Ark which has yielded 3 strong projects to date.
What it means for you
This is an opportunity to try new things with your music; devising work for and performing for young audiences presents different challenges for you as an artist. By taking part in Fun-Size Jazz! you will get direct experience in this area and also a new perspective on developing this type of work, broadening your skillset and generating new employment opportunities.
How to get involved
We will announce details of the next opportunity to engage with Fun-Size Jazz! in 2022. Register your interest then to be part of our learning team and to participate in our scratch performances in late 2022. You can email hello@improvisedmusic.ie with enquiries, including the subject line Fun Size Jazz.
What we are unable to do
This is principally a development project and, as such, needs to be a small cohort of musicians to be most effective. Because of this, there are limited spaces available. In 2019, we piloted this project with The Ark in Dublin and in 2022 we want to provide this opportunity elsewhere in Ireland. Consequently in 2022 we will be looking for artists based outside of Dublin.
Our goals
We believe we will have been successful in 2022 if we have enabled between 12 and 15 musicians to develop work in this important area, developed their skillset and have coached them through their implementation of scratch performances for young audiences.