The BIG BANG Project (EU)

BIG BANG is a network of adventurous international music festivals for young audiences with festivals taking place annually in 11 cities across Europe from 2019 -2023 including Dublin. The BIG BANG project is dedicated to music for young audiences aiming to enrich and broaden the quality of music currently on offer to children in Europe. All of the festivals present an exciting mix of high quality music performances across musical genre within a programme of international and local musicians.

Across the 4 years of the funding, the BIG BANG partners will present a combined total of 44 festivals for children in 11 European cities in 9 European countries, inviting artists from all over Europe and thereby influencing the development, the creation and the programming of music performance in each country. This will open doors for musicians from Ireland to other BIG BANG Festivals across Europe as well as giving The Ark the exciting opportunity to programme international musicians of the highest quality to children in Ireland.

BIG BANG project was initiated by lead partner Zonzo Compagnie (Belgium) who are an award-winning production company that specialise in creating exciting and stimulating music performances and projects for children. BIG BANG was awarded with the European EFFE (Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe) award in 2015.

Professional music performance specifically for children remains an underdeveloped area and The Ark is really excited to be a part of this project as it will help us take new strides forward in helping to develop the sector for musicians and music in Ireland.

The first BIG BANG Dublin! festival will take place from 5-7 April 2019. The full programme will be announced in early 2019.

Partners:

• Lead partner: Zonzo Compagnie, Antwerp, Belgium
• Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), Lisbon, Portugal
• The Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), Belgium
• The Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece
• Opéra de Rouen Normandie, France
• Eesti Kontsert, Tallinn, Estonia
• Instituto de la Cultura Y De Las Artes De Sevilla, Spain
• Opera de Lille, France
• Wilminktheater, The Netherlands
• The Espoo Cultural Centre, Helsinki, Finland
• The Ark Children’s Cultural Centre, Dublin, Ireland
• Project Media partner: MotorMusic (BE) is a company that specializes in the recording (audio/video) of musical productions will capture the Big Bang festivals across Europe.

And associate partner National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

BIG BANG is supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union