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

Underpinning research

Everyone in NYCD identifies either / and as  learning-disabled, / neuro divergent.  The creative process  foregrounds their identification, disrupting

theatrical norms through a radical Crip, queer, collaborative and feminist approach across her solo work, mentoring, consultancy, teaching,

writing and directing.

 

Practice-based research in the form of theatre- making complemented by writing, grounded in the ethic of care and collaboration, to bring the lived experience of disabled artists to the centre. These innovations led to new training pedagogies and creative opportunities for emancipatory self-representation. The research was conducted in partnership with disabled artists, co-constructing radically political questions about continued exclusion and discriminatory assumptions around binaries of ‘ability/disability’.

 

NYCD’s work is driven by a central research enquiry framed by the following questions:

 

1. How can Crip and queer performance create an accessible aesthetic to engage

the wider public / audiences in active considerations of their own lives?

 

2. How can theatre-making processes be deployed to enable, include,

champion, and celebrate neuro-diverse and learning-disabled artists as equals and as leaders in the industry and in training?

 

3. How can Crip theatre implicate audiences in challenging ongoing

discrimination experienced by learning-disabled people?

 

Through close engagement with Emancipatory Disability Research and the Political-Relational Model of disability (Kafer 2013), Terret PaR foregrounds learning disability or Crip aesthetics and re-affirms the performer as creator and leader in authoring performance. The politics of disability arts lies at the heart of the practice-as-research: the practice is about visibility of agency and understanding the systems that reinforce discrimination.

 

The primary work constituting this research includes co-created theatre productions, articles and chapters, reports for the industry, training, consultation, national and international presentations, with key partnerships and collaborations with the Disability Arts organisation Access All Areas, The British Council and The Live Art Development Agency.

 

A core company of artists (Not Your Circus Dog Collective), directed by Terret, developed through iterative process Not F**kin’ Sorry! , a punk Crip queer theatre production drawing on the company’s lived experiences of disability discrimination. Bringing artists whose work usually falls outside dominant cultural markets to high profile stages (The Royal Court, Soho Theatre, South Bank Centre), challenges venues and audiences in their understanding of whose stories are told, and on which stages they are permitted.

 

This work  demonstrates the potential of University research applied to the field of professional performing arts with radical activist intent. The methods and practices in performance forms resonates nationally and internationally through

collaborations across the sector.