Calling all Women and female identifying creatives
20 Minute Musicals is an innovative creative development programme supporting women and female-identifying artists, writers, composers, musicians and multidisciplinary creatives in Wales who are keen to explore and develop their work in musical theatre and music theatre.
THE PROJECT
20 Minute Musicals is a space for women to create, collaborate and be heard.
Three partnerships will be established (6 creatives), with each creative receiving £1,000 to support the delivery of their commission, mentorship, and professional development.
For this iteration of 20 Minute Musicals, Leeway and Porter’s will work alongside women who have experienced homelessness, creating a safe, supportive and respectful space in which their stories, experiences and perspectives can be heard and valued.
Through the creative process, artists will work alongside women with lived experience to explore how their stories and experiences can be transformed into original musical theatre, ensuring that their voices remain at the heart of the work. We are committed to sharing these stories authentically, sensitively and with care, recognising that every experience is personal and that participants should have agency over how their stories are represented.
This is not about speaking for women who have experienced homelessness, but about creating the conditions for their voices to be heard, their experiences valued and their stories explored on their own terms. We want to move beyond stereotypes and assumptions around homelessness and create work that reflects the complexity, individuality, humour, strength, challenges and humanity within women’s lived experiences.
The 20-minute format offers a particularly exciting creative challenge. It is long enough to develop character, story, music and atmosphere, while remaining short enough to encourage experimentation and bold ideas. The pieces can become a concentrated exploration of a story, a musical world, a social or cultural question, or simply an opportunity to try something that might not otherwise have a place within a traditional development process.
Through the partnership between Leeway and Porter’s, 20 Minute Musicals will provide a creative playground where artists and women with lived experience can meet, collaborate and discover new ways of telling stories through music and theatre.
As part of your creative journey, you’ll receive personalised mentorship and access to an exclusive masterclass.
Timeline:
•November 31st at 5pm: Deadline for applications: Please submit a CV or a little about yourself and a few samples of your work or links to your work by emailing leewayprods@gmail.com
- January 9 & 10, 2027: Weekend 1 of mentorship/collaborations
- January 23 & 24, 2027: Weekend 2 of mentorship/collaborations
- Week of February 8th, 2027: Rehearsal week
- February 13th, 2027: Performance/Sharing of work at Porter’s
The project has grown from a desire to create meaningful opportunities for women and female-identifying artists to experiment, collaborate and develop their practice within the musical theatre form. Building on the foundations of Leeway’s original 10 Minute Musicals programme, 20 Minute Musicals offers artists the space, time and creative freedom to take their ideas further, developing short-form musical theatre pieces of up to 20 minutes.
This new iteration of the programme is being delivered through a partnership between Leeway and Porter’s, bringing together our shared commitment to developing new voices, creating opportunities for artists and using theatre as a space for connection, exploration and storytelling. Together, we want to create a supportive creative environment where artists can take risks, experiment and develop new work while building meaningful relationships with women whose lived experiences are at the heart of this project.
At the heart of the programme is a commitment to amplifying female voices and creating space for women’s stories, perspectives, experiences, languages and cultures. We are interested in what happens when female creatives from different disciplines, backgrounds and generations come together to challenge the traditional ways in which musical theatre is created.
Creative participants can include composers, playwrights, librettists, lyricists, poets, musicians, singers, performers, beat-boxers, rappers, sound artists and other multidisciplinary practitioners. We welcome artists working across genres, musical styles, languages and forms, encouraging them to bring their own artistic identity and creative practice into the process.
