DIY: 2019 – Quiplash: Unsightly Drag
Bringing visually impaired queers and drag performers together to share skills and fuck shit up.
Deadline for applications: 2pm, Thursday 4 July
This DIY is supported by National Theatre New Work Studio
Project summary
This will be a DIY that will explore how drag and visual impairment interact. The purpose is to look at how putting access for blind and VI people in to drag performance (for both performers and audience members) will inform and evolve the artform. We will bring queer visually impaired people, audio description experts and established drag artists together to share skills and create new work.
The R&D will focus on teaching blind people to do drag. It will help blind performers find their drag characters and give them skills to develop and perform. It will also focus on how to integrate audio description and access in to their practice from the beginning. The access then becomes a creative tool that is as important as the makeup and costuming.
How to apply
We are looking for four blind and visually impaired people who are anywhere on the LGBTQQIA spectrum, ages 18+.
This will be an exploration of drag, movement, audio description and the queer world.
Previous performance experience (outside of drag) desired but not required.
Dates, times and location
Dates: 27 – 30 August and the possibility of more time in September/October
Location: National Theatre, London
The artists
Amelia Cavallo is a queer blind theatre practitioner and academic. Al Lander is queer non binary artist, organiser and a senior designer working for a national disability organisation.
Quiplash is Amelia and Al’s creative endeavor to create space and inclusion for queer Crip (quip) people, and to explore and expand ideas of queer and Crip in performance and audiences.
This means:
- “fucking with” perceived norms within LGBTQ+ spaces and disability lead spaces in order to facilitate discussion and change.
- Pushing the boundaries of performance in more radical and inclusive ways.
- Facilitating the creation of bespoke access for queer spaces and performance.
- Creating and promoting community based models of access for the queer community
For questions about this DIY, please contact the artists.
Banner image credit:
Image courtesy of the artists
We are looking for a better quality image for this page or to replace it if it's missing.
Part of DIY: 2019
Professional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.
DIY: 2019 – Adam Patterson: Green Screen Charivari
Parading for the right to be unfixed, letting surfaces slip and slide, transgressing horizons, bodies, identities and worlds
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Adriana Disman: The confusing space between
A residential workshop for multi-racial performance people on an island in the English Channel.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Ania Bas & Amy Pennington: Performance for shy people. Playwriting for dyslexics.
Two day experiment at performance production by shy people and performance writing by bad spellers.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Bean & Nicola Woodham: (de)coding performance
Learn to build and program wearable sensors for use in sound based live art.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Beverly Thomas: The Silence
A 4 day residential workshop for artists of Colour to explore silence and revitalize their creativity.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Cade and MacAskill: The Making of Pinocchio
A playfully theatrical DIY for trans, intersex, non-binary and genderqueer artists exploring notions of realness through the desires of a wooden puppet to be “a real boy”.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Call for Participants
Applications are now open for 24 national professional development workshops by artists, for artists
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Call for Proposals
Invitation to propose unusual and exciting artists’ workshops
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Charlie Ashwell & Es Morgan: ANDROGYNY!
A weekend of dance and discussion for anyone interested in thinking about gender through dancing.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Claire MacDonald: Curse Bless me Now
Daring to curse. Blessing when the world is ending.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Daniel Oliver: Scripting Unscriptable Performance
Writing down and getting someone else to perform performances that can not or should not be written down and given to someone else to perform.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Edythe Woolley: SWEAT: the sky leaks I leak
Un-straightening, leaking and oozing towards queer entanglement, through an embodied practice of sweating.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Fox Irving & Eva Peskin: Step One! Sharing
A two-day workshop on the art of sharing in collaborative encounters for artists in the North West.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Jack Tan & Annie Jael Kwan: Potluck Stories
A weekend of intercultural grocery shopping, culinary adventures and sharing stories about ingredients, journeys, migration, nationality and material culture.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Jenny Gaskell: Have you tried screaming your heart out and pretending to be Cher?
Creating a connection practice based on karaoke and daydreaming and oversharing and shared chips
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson: To The Ritual Knowledge Of Remembering
3 day immersive workshop, exploring the body, ancestral memory and the land. To liberate creative actions towards a Decolonised Future.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Liat Rosenthal & Alex Eisenberg: Shiduchs, Shabbes and Shmucks
Exploring artist responses to Jewishness and antisemitism by spending Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest) together.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Oozing Gloop: COMMUCRACY NOW
Creating a revolutionary vanguard that will develop and present a new economy of government; COMMUCRACY.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Phoebe Patey-Ferguson & FK Alexander & Andre Neely: THE CULT
Are you feeling fed up and pissed off? Are you confused and overwhelmed? Are you isolated and unfulfilled? Are you ready to welcome ART into your life? THE CULT WELCOMES YOU.
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Stacy Makishi: Proud Mary!
What’dya get when you cross: Tina Turner, Mary Wollstonecraft and The Virgin Mary? A Proud Mary! The triple-decker-mother of workshops!
Read moreDIY: 2019 – The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein: ’Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’
Reimagining Scale, Ambition and Access for Monsters in Performance, through the lens of Feminist Sci-Fi
Read moreDIY: 2019 – Tim Jeeves & Lena Simic: The Party Calls You
Between climate breakdown, austerity and Brexit, the UK is facing its greatest political crisis in decades. What place is there for artists within the UK’s political institutions?
Read moreDIY: 2019 – VORTESSA (Lady Helena Vortex and Miss Giovanna Maria Casetta): GILF Island
Pack your cases, ready to embark on a Dark Romance of the ageing self, Exploring, releasing and adoring the inner GILF
Read moreAlso
DIY Progression: Artist Borderpanic Compendium (edited by Curious)
Call for submissions from artists living in an emerging UK, a UK on the verge of an EXIT
Read moreDIY: 2016 – James Stenhouse ‘Survival Skills for Artists’
A 3-day expedition to find out what it means to survive as an artist
Read moreDIY Progression: a new project from Daniel Oliver
An intensive residency to exploring dysfunction, neurodivergence, and experimental performance
Read more