Award- winning Crip Queer Punk Cabaret-Theatre Not Your Circus Dog Collective! ​

Liselle Terret’s practice research centres on the award-winning Not F**kin’ Sorry! (NFS!), a crip-queer cabaret theatre production co-created with learning-disabled, autistic and neurodivergent artists. Building on work submitted to REF 2021, the project has been substantially redeveloped (2021–2026) through Arts Council England funded touring, dramaturgical revision, and its translation into film, screenings, publications, and participatory training contexts, extending its reach nationally and internationally. 

The research investigates how performance form, aesthetics and participatory dramaturgy can intervene in dominant disability discourses. While disability performance has often prioritised representation, NFS! makes an original contribution by positioning co-produced, crip-led practice as both method and epistemology. Drawing on crip & neuro-queer theory, inclusive research and implication theory, it develops a distinct aesthetic combining cabaret, satire, testimony and direct audience address to produce ‘implicated spectatorship’, positioning audiences as ethically and politically accountable. 

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Methodologically, the project operates as rigorous practice-as-research, where iterative cycles of making, touring, filming and facilitation generate and analyse knowledge. Co-creation with learning-disabled and neurodivergent artists as co-researchers embeds access, authorship and ethics within the formal structure, advancing inclusive research towards shared knowledge production. Post-2021 redevelopment responds to COVID-19 and shifting socio-political contexts, (incl. (care, austerity (incl. disability benefit-cuts), the assisted dying bill), evidencing conceptual depth and responsiveness. 

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Outputs include national tours (Soho Theatre, Southbank Centre, Contact Theatre and other regional venues), a professionally filmed iteration, and international presentations, workshops and conference dissemination (including Canada, Singapore, South Korea and Europe). Crucially, the research extends into the co-design and embedding of permanent training programmes with partners including Salutem Care & Education, Stay Safe East, End Violence Against Women, Generate UK, RIX, Disability Rights UK, NIHR, Aashna Counselling & Psychotherapy, and teacher education contexts. These frameworks translate practice into sustained institutional change, forming replicable CPD models across health, social care, education and the creative industries. These function as sites of enquiry, generating qualitative data through audience interaction, dialogue and creative response, informing iterative refinement. 

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The research demonstrates internationally recognised originality, significance and rigour in reconfiguring performance as a co-produced, anti-ableist methodology, evidencing how aesthetic strategies generate cultural, epistemic and institutional change.