Invitation To Perform At The 'Big Mix' Young People's Music Festival, July 2015
Would young people you work with like to perform at the B Sharp young people's 'Big Mix' open-air music festival by the sea, on the weekend of 4-5 July 2015?
B Sharp would like to expand the performance opportunities for young people in an 'open air festival' setting, and are seeking collaborations with other organisations so that young people they work with can perform at next year’s Big Mix festival in Lyme Regis.
We have run our young people's Big Mix festival for the last two years on a stage that overlooks the seaside and the UNESCO world heritage Jurassic Coast. This year over 1,500 people came to the Big Mix; young people and audiences love it!
Student filmmaker James Philpott captured young people’s feedback in this short video when he documented this year’s July festival. Photos on our Flickr channel.
Young people learn stagecraft, gain performance confidence and have the professional support of Young/Music Leaders, stage manager and sound engineers - a great progression step from what you do together in your workshops and a chance to meet new friends and musicians from different areas and backgrounds.
So far it's been a one day festival and each year features around 20 local young acts that we work with, together with others that made contact in response to our social media posts. A panel of B Sharp young people and Music Leaders select artists through an audition process or listening to music links online. We encourage original material but covers are also welcome. Most of the music is written by the performers.
Infrastructure costs have been supported by small grants from Comic Relief and West Dorset's Rex Trevett trust, and we’ve used some money from our Youth Music ‘Young Music Leader’ project to support the training young people receive as they help develop music for performance, supervise rehersals and put together/deliver the festival. Income has also been generated by food and refreshment sales run by volunteers and a small audience-ticketing fee.
Once the infrastructure is in place, it wouldn’t cost that much more to run a second day of music. We would love to showcase young artists that participate in other Youth Music funded projects, either making a day dedicated to visiting acts or mixing local and visitors over 2 days.
Please let us know if you have young people who would like to perform or if you want to be involved in some way. Any music style is welcome and the stage can accomodate up to around 20 performers, depending on euipment used e.g samba school, singing ensemble etc. In our rurally isolated setting, diversity is very welcome! The festival would be on the weekend of 4-5 July 2015. The Hub youth facility is near the stage and its hall could be used for camping if needed, and safely store instruments/equipment overnight.
With a proper stage that is hired to ensure safety and excellent PA, lighting, technical support, music leadership/mentoring and management, it is a challenge to recover the costs of putting the festival on while making it accessible in a low waged and seasonal economy. In addition to exploring crowd funding as a new funding source, we hope that organisations would be able to contribute to the costs and perhaps help with transport costs to get their young people to Lyme Regis. At the moment we are just seeking indications of interest. How contributing costs are worked out will depend on the response. If interest is high, contributions could be in proportion to the time taken up with organisation's acts or a fixed amount per act. We are open to discussions. It would be great to build on what we have achieved so far and make the Big Mix even more significant as a young people's performance festival, with a focus on their original music, but we need to balance the books.
We welcome comments here or contact ayvinrogers@hotmail.com