DIT 2026: Jo Hellier – Birth the Musical

What

Birth the Musical is a three-day workshop for pregnant people and people who have recently given birth to explore the weird and world-bending metamorphosis into parenthood.

Through conversation, writing, improvisation and vocal experiments, we’ll process the physical sensation and phenomenon of pregnancy and create compositions and performance scores. These will then be structured into a short, funny, beautiful ‘scratch musical’ at the end, performed for our own pleasure rather than a public view (friends and family welcome).

Mainstream heteronormative narratives around pregnancy can feel restrictive and alienating particularly to queer people. Jo experienced pregnancy as a transformation, but not just from person to parent, it felt far more complex and strange. Existing as two people in one body for a time, then splitting gorily into two: pregnancy is body horror, love story and identity crisis all rolled into nine months and a birth. 

We’ll discuss the social conditioning around pregnancy and birth – the ‘rules’, advice and culture that shape how we are expected to experience and perform it. We’ll unpick those cultural scripts and see what happens when we write (or sing) our own.

You don’t have to identify as queer to join this workshop, but we will be exploring how we reclaim birth as a creative, queer and profoundly transformative experience.

The workshop will offer participants a creative space to process pregnancy and birth collaboratively. It will introduce experimental vocal practices and embodied techniques for collective composition.

As a group we will develop new ideas and material for Birth the Musical, which is an ongoing project about the queer experience of pregnancy and birth (started when Jo was pregnant two years ago). She wants to make this work with other birthers and explore if working in this way could become part of the work’s future. 

Jo will be pregnant again whilst running this workshop – bringing an urgency to exploring this live, with peers from the inside out.

Where

Activities will take place in person  at Lowry, Pier 8, The Quays, M50 3AZ Salford.

When

• Wednesday 8 April, daytime (10am–4.30pm)
• Thursday 9 April, daytime (10am–4.30pm)
• Friday 10 April, daytime (10am–4.30pm, sharing from 3pm)

Who

Artists/practitioners who are pregnant or have recently been pregnant (within around 1 years postpartum). 

We are quite flexible with this criteria, so if you feel like this work really resonates with you, but fall outside of the 1 year postpartum threshold and within 3 years, please still apply!