Liselle Terret

Liselle Terret’s work as a performance artist and director foregrounds her identification as neuro-divergent, disrupting theatrical norms through a radical Crip, queer, collaborative and feminist approach across her solo work (as Doris La Trine), mentoring, consultancy, teaching, writing and directing. Her research and its impacts are intertwined and cumulative. Practice-based research in the form of theatre-making is complemented by writing grounded in the same ethic of care and collaboration, to bring the lived experience of learning disabled and autistic artists to the centre for emancipatory self-representation. Liselle’s Practice as Research is conducted collaboratively with disabled and neuro-divergent artists, co-constructing radical and political questions about continued exclusion and discriminatory assumptions around binaries of ‘ability/disability’. In 2019 she won UEL’s ACI Impactful Research Award and 2018 the CELT Teaching and Learning Award for Enhancing First Year Experience.

Liselle is Senior Lecturer and Co-Programme Leader BA (hons) Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance, that combines socially-engaged performance practice with contemporary theatre as well as the processes, ethics and politics of making performance for and with specific audiences, often in the margins.  UELMakeTheChangeMiaCunningham

Prior to teaching at UEL Liselle worked at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama where she co- founded with Access All Areas, the Diploma in Performance Making for adults with Learning Disabilities & Autism that won the Guardian University Award for Student Diversity and Widening Participation in 2015. Liselle has also worked at Coventry University, Brunel University and NYU. She originally began as a Drama Teacher, before working at Half Moon Young People’s Theatre and the Unicorn Theatre as well as freelancing and working internationally.

Liselle is a neuro-divergent performance artist and director of Not Your Circus Dog Collective (2018), a subversive crip queer learning disabled and neuro-divergent performance company. Her most recent work is, Not F**kin’ Sorry! (2019) has been performed at Soho Theatre. She also makes feminist crip performance as Doris La Trine, re-performing mis-understandings & discrimination surrounding eating disorders. In 2018, she curated and hosted Wickedly Wild Women Cabaret for WoW Women of the World at Southbank Centre, & for Royal CourtTheatre co-curated Take-Up Space Cabaret. Liselle presents and publishes on Restaging Disability as well as documenting her practice as archival websites and presenting conference papers on this work nationally and internationally.

Terret’s solo performances as alter-ego Doris La Trine involve making, performing and directing feminist, crip & queer performance art(for which she has coined the term LiPSiCk Queer Feminist Neo-Burlesque). Between 2005 and 2019 public performances featuring Doris La Trine’s autobiographical show Flushed  have toured to venues including for Duckie’s, Café De Paris, The Chelsea Theatre with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens, Limerick Arts Festival, The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, WoW Festival, Southbank Centre, Take up Space  Cabaret at the Royal Court Theatre, DaDa Festival, The Sisterhood, Shangri-La, Glastonbury Festival, and Word Of Warning, Domestic and Haphazard.

Duckie’s, Simon Casson says of Doris La Trine (2017):
Liselle's work is filthy, dirty, shameful, all too personal and at the same time - glorious. Grotesque, powerful, political. A detailed, delicate piece"


A range of research publications engage critically with Terret’s creative practices (as Doris La Trine), including:

• Commane, G. (2020) Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity, Bloomsbury Academic, London.
  
  
• Nally, C (2013) Cross Dressing & Grrrly: Twenty-First Century Burlesque in Nally, C. & Smith, A. Naked Exhibitionism Gendered Performance and Public Exposure, Bloomsbury, London;
  
  
• Pearlman, L (2016) Le Vrai Spectacle: ‘Queering the French, Frenching the Queer’. In: Campbell A., Farrier S. (eds) Queer Dramaturgies: Contemporary Performance InterActions, Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411846_3

Access All Areas (Liselle Terret project partner),   Arts Council England Elevate Grant, (Sep 2016 to Jan 2019) GBP 139,128

Liselle Terret, Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants, (Soho Theatre for July 2019 to Nov 2019) GBP 20,579, plus GBP 10,000 Access to Work.

Teaching:

• Applied & Socially Engaged Theatre & Performance
• Feminist Crip Performance
• Restaging Learning Disability & Neuro-Divergence
  
• Ensemble and Solo Devising: Processes and Practices
• Drama In Education

 

Programme Leadership:

• Co-Programme Leader for BA (hons) Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance
• Professional Partnerships