West End Players CIC

West End Players CIC creates opportunities for people to take part in, make and lead performing arts in Morecambe. We work across community and professional practice rather than treating them as separate worlds. Someone might first come through the door as an audience member, then try a workshop, volunteer, perform, make a show, organise an event or eventually create opportunities for somebody else.

Our different projects are deliberately connected. The Playhouse provides a year-round home; regular nights provide places to try things; artist-development work helps people make new work; and our festivals give that work a public platform alongside experienced visiting artists.

The Morecambe Model

Together, this ecology of activity forms what we call the Morecambe Model: a participation-led approach developed through nearly ten years of practice in Morecambe.

The basic idea is simple: give people an accessible way in, make the next opportunity visible, and provide the spaces, support and relationships that allow them to move forward when they are ready.

1. Audience
2. Participant
3. Performer
4. Practitioner
5. Producer / Organiser
6. Community Leader
7. Mentor

It is not a compulsory or linear journey. People can enter at different points, stop where they are happy, move backwards and forwards, or take a completely different route. What matters is that there is a visible next rung for somebody who wants it.

That is why we do not measure success only by how many people attend an event. We are interested in what happens next: who comes back, who tries something new, who makes work, who develops a practice, who takes responsibility, and who begins creating opportunities for other people.

The festivals are therefore not the end of the process. They are catalysts within a year-round ecology. A small room can be a rehearsal space, a first stage, a meeting place, a testing ground or the beginning of a new project. Over time, repeated opportunities can turn participation into confidence, confidence into agency, and individual activity into new cultural capacity.

A central part of our work is supporting emerging artists and people who may face barriers to taking part in cultural life or developing creative practice. Those barriers can include cost, geography, lack of local opportunities, confidence, networks, formal training routes or simply not knowing where to begin.

Our response is practical: places to meet, rehearse and perform; opportunities to test ideas; peer and practitioner support; public platforms; volunteering and production experience; and routes into greater creative and organisational responsibility.

Since the artist-development strand began with Fringe taster workshops in 2018 and developed from 2019 onwards, more than 40 people have made more than 60 shows through this practice. For some that has led towards professional work and touring; for others the achievement is making something for the first time, performing to friends and family, finding a voice, or gaining the confidence to create the next thing.

This holding page will be replaced by a full website bringing these projects, opportunities, stories and resources together in one place. The aim is not to create one large central organisation that controls everything. It is to make the ecology easier to see and easier to enter, with more people able to make work, take responsibility and create opportunities of their own.