The vast stage in Sophiensæle set and ready for our performances of Unsightly Drag and Friends as part of Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer festival in 2022. Bright rainbow lights shine down and through atmospheric mist, illuminating a smaller platform stage in the large space. On the platform stage are two speakers in the lower corners and a single stool with stage detritus on top of it (probably a headmic and gaffer tape) placed centre. Behind the stool, dark curtains part to create an entrance bathed in blue.
“I thought [the] training was great. I’ve been to a lot of different sessions over the years but this was by far the most interesting, easiest to follow and most inclusive.”
what do we do?
We do a bit of everything! Training, consulting, workshops, advising, access audits, writing, researching, hosting, producing, artist development, key note speeches, performing, directing, access dramaturgy, mentoring, advocacy…
Quiplash works at the intersection of disability, LGBTQ+ identities and community, creating welcoming spaces and creative work where people come together, build skills and form stronger relationships.
“Thank you SO much Quiplash, your training was led with so much care, detail, humor and generosity. I leave feeling motivated [and] hopeful.”
By fostering connections and relationships in the LGBTQ+ disabled community, we support people to reach their potential, reduce isolation, raise disability awareness, and encourage long-term collaboration between and improvement within communities and the cultural spaces that matter to them.
We support individuals, spaces, projects, shows, organisations, companies etc to become more inclusive and accessible, making people feel welcome, connected, and able to take part fully in professional, community and cultural life.
our projects
Quiplash National Events Programme
Last updated 01/10/2025
We are actively fundraising for this project. If you would like to sponsor a session, contribute funding, partner with us or otherwise get involved, please get in touch. We are especially interested in hearing from other DPOs and LGBTQ+ organisations in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
We are fundraising to deliver a programme of workshops, events and activities to benefit LGBTQ+ disabled people. These sessions aim to improve advocacy skills, share specialist knowledge, reduce isolation, provide more access skills and create and strengthen communities and networks of LGBTQ+ disabled people across the UK.
These types of workshops are normally financially inaccessible for freelancers and low/no income earners, so working with partners, will deliver the sessions in a range of locations in the UK and online for low or no cost to the participant.
We used our wonderfully engaged and dedicated instagram followers to help us choose which sessions to focus on. These will be:
LGBTQ+ Disabled workers education and networking is a full day session which tackles loneliness and isolation, provides space to share experiences, builds supportive peer networks, and shares access information on advocacy and disability justice.
Access Support skills training is a full day workshop offering practical skills on how to support disabled people, including a general understanding of practical access support, especially for community and cultural spaces.
For participants these sessions can open new career and income pathways and strengthen community networks at a time when disability benefits are at risk, the cost of living is rising, and according to multiple studies chronic loneliness is high in both disability and LGBTQ+ communities.
We will use data and feedback from sessions to identify where our work is most impactful and design a rolling annual training, events and activites offer.
Fundraising efforts
National Lottery Awards for All – Community Fund up to £20k. Submitted 28/08/2025
Zurich Diversity & Inclusion Awards up to £10k. Submitted 23/09/2025
Confirmed Partners
Sheffield City Council, National Association of Disabled Staff Networks, Derby Theatre, The Lowry, QAF Community Space, and Raze Collective.
our shows
Tito Bone, a slim white drag king with a brown and grey mullet and a teal glitter beard is on a black stage lit with teal lights. They are wearing a sparkly silver suit, singing into a mic and holding their rainbow mobility cane out towards the audience.
“Tito’s use of musical talent and comic timing to slice through the ableist society we live in is glorious!”
An Evening with Tito Bone:
The World is Burning so Please Come to my Drag Show
An Evening with Tito Bone is a 60-minute performance featuring blind non-binary bisexual drag king Tito Bone, who blends glitter-beard glamour, songs, dad-dancing, and enchanting storytelling into a playful experience.
The show invites audiences to ‘smell the world through their nose’ while diving into moments of queer pride, joy, tenderness, laughter, and irresistible ‘ohhhh sexy!’ magic.
Out of the Box festival at Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland, 2025
Queer Festival 2025 at Theatre Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany, 2025
The Battersea Arts Centre, London, UK (sharing), 2025
Utopia Theatre, Sheffield, UK (sharing), 2025
Junges Schauspielhaus, Bochum, Germany (family friendly), 2024
Queer Festival 2023 at Theatre Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany (early development) 2023
Four clowns mid performance in a large black box theatre. From left to right is Ella the Great, a light skinned black person wearing a red hat, Amelia, a white person wearing pink hat, and Al, a white small fat person wearing a black hat with a large blue feather on the side. Joel’s head pokes out sideways between the group, they’re a white person with a lovely brown beard wearing a black hat.
Unsightly Circus (R&D)
A performance research project as part of Barbican Open Labs, 2023. We spent a week with some incredible clowns, trying our unsightly formula on a new project – this time we wanted to see how clowning and integrated audio description interacted with each other. We spent time learning clowning fundamentals and developing some ideas of what a Quiplash clown show might feel like.
So far what we know is that it’s funny, very chill and confusing in the best ways. We have plans to continue to develop this show further. If you are interested in helping us do so, please get in touch!
Ebony Rose Dark covered from head to toe in a stretchy pink bag is performing on a black stage that is lit with teal and full of moody smoke. Though ebony is mostly featureless in the bag, it is clear that they are standing and raising their arms towards the sky, head tilted back. We can see the contours of their chest and arms as well as a small point where the bag pushes into their chin.
Unsightly Drag and Friends
AKA Unsightly Cabaret
A cabaret with a difference, featuring disabled and neurodivergent performers who exist across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. You will be in for a fun filled evening where our drag kings, queens and things sing, dance and lip-sync their way into your hearts, all while wearing large amounts of glitter.
The show blends drag, comedy, music, dance, integrated audio description and relaxed performance into a joyous, boundary-pushing evening.
Unsightly Drag and Friends, Gessnerallee, Zurich, 2024
Mighty Hoopla, London, UK, 2024
Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer festival, Sophiensæle, Berlin, 2022
Unsightly Drag
Quiplash’s first project.
Unsightly Drag was a performance research project to uncover the ways integrated audio description and drag can inform and challenge each other.
We put 7 blind and VI queer performers together with prominent drag performers, AD consultants and access workers for a 2 week R&D. We then created and performed a drag/cabaret show with fully integrated audio description at Bloomsbury Festival 2019.
This piece has since been developed into Unsightly Drag And Friends and Unsightly Cabaret and has been toured nationally and internationally. We have egaged with more queer disabled artists to embed audio description in their work and create unique high-quality cabaret shows with a difference.
Unsightly Drag was created in collaboration with Extant, supported by the National Theatre New Works Department and funded by LADA and Arts Council England.
Bloomsbury Fest 2019
R&D at National Theatre New Works Department.
Performed at Chapel Playhouse.
With support from Extant, Arts Council England, LADA and National Theatre New Works Department.
what our clients say
An orange structure, like an open-ended tent, sits centre stage on a black & white floor. Within the structure sits Krishna Istha, a brown person in their mid 30's wearing green, and a participant, wearing blue. They sit opposite each other and are having a conversation. Above the structure the words 'First Trimester' are projected in yellow.
It feels like our conversations and sessions are always centred around serving the art and making sure that access provision is a part of that.
[We] feel like there is always someone to consult with and ask questions, (paid of course), who understands the constraints of funding & time but is also going to challenge and find solutions to incorporating access provision into the artistic plans.
You make it easy to book sessions with you, and it feels like a warm & encouraging space to be gently challenged or reminded about things we may have overlooked.
Your work is so so good, really exceptional, and thank you so much for the support and help you have given.
– Ruby Glaskin, Producer, First Trimester
A selfie of a group of people. Al (who is taking the photo) and Amelia are towards the front and the Tu crew are behind. Everyone is smiling big and some are throwing up peace signs. The photo is a bit blurry indicating motion - in this case probably laughter.
Quiplash are truly the kindest and most fun people to collaborate with. Getting to learn creative ways to cater to blind and visually impaired people is a privilege we are not taking for granted!
We got to discover that audio description can be fun and witty! At TU we highly recommend inviting Quiplash over to better undnderstand how you could implement better accessibility measures overall.
– Théâtre de l'Usine, Geneva
From left to right: Al, Amelia as Tito Bone, Élaina and Liz stand in a line and smile. Al is in signature clashing patterns, denim and funky glasses, Amelia as Tito has a teal glitter beard, shiny sequinned suit and rainbow cane, Elaina is in a rainbow coloured suit and black shirt, Liz is in full denim with brown boots. Behind them is a white couch and white curtains with blue and pink lights shining through them.
A logo, orange words on a white background. in big letters accross the top are the letters w a a rc. In smaller letters underneath, Wellcome Ant-Ablieist Research Cultures.
Quiplash have a strong vision and are extremely responsive and easy to work with. Their knowledge of both institutional structures and disability arts give them a unique insight into how access can be creative and disrupt traditional EDI in a generative and innovative way.
Quiplash provided engaging Access First training to our research team and we successfully produced two outreach events together that have been very favourably reviewed by attendees and disabled people's organisations. Their Access First training has changed the way I approach my daily work.
– Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture, University of Sheffield
Image of two aerial performers in a black and white costumes that looks like space suits. They are tangled together and tumbling through mid air, held up by harnesses and surrounded by shoots of rainbow light. It looks as though we are seeing them through a prism. The background is a deep black.
Amelia Lander-Cavallo was an inspiration to work with on our project.
[Their] honest, incisive and forthright observations challenged and helped us to realise our aspirations to make our work more accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences in new creative ways. We are incredibly grateful for [their] help and look forward to working with [them] again the future.
– Kate Lawrence of Vertical Dance after working with our co-founder Amelia
Quiplash exists to change the nature
of work for queer disabled people
Two queer blind performers, Ebony (left) and Tito (right) goof off, standing on either side of a wall outside of Sophiensaele, a venue in Berlin they would later be performing in. Ebony is a dark skinned black person wearing a flat cap, red rain coat and black trousers. Tito is a white person with short brown hair and is wearing a colourful dinosaur hoodie, jeans and is sporting a teal glitter beard. Ebony is gleefully waving their mobility cane in the air while Tito clutches theirs in their right hand and gestures to Ebony with the other. The wall they are in front of is full of pink posters that say “queering the Crip Cripping the queer” in big blue letters. On either side of each poster are Ebony and Tito’s faces in full drag.
We work within the principles of disability justice to produce work with radical integrated access at its core, connect communities to knowledge and its roots through partnerships and embedded training. We use this experience to advocate for systemic culture change for disabled and queer people.
We create a culture where queer disabled people and the work they do, are secure and thriving.
our team
Amelia, a slim white person with a brown mullet that has grey flex on the sides and top. They are wearing a black and white long-sleeved shirt and a colourful Kufiya wrapped around their shoulders. They are cupping their hands towards the camera and their mouth is in a tight “hoooo” shape as though they are blowing fairy dust out of their hands and towards an audience that is in front of them (but unseen in the photo). One of these cupped hands delicately balances a microphone which they had been speaking into moments before.
Amelia Lander-Cavallo (they/them)
Co-founder and director
Amelia is a blind and neurodiverse artist, academic, facilitator and theatre practitioner and a co-founder of Quiplash CIC.
They’re an experienced and charismatic facilitator, speaker and host. They develop and deliver the majority of the training, consulting, workshops, etc for Quiplash.
Amelia moved to the UK from New Mexico, USA in 2006 and has worked for around 20 years in the field of performance and audio description (AD), contributing to research and writing, supporting artists and companies to find exciting and creative ways to utilise this access tool. They have their own methodology ‘Queer AD’ which is used by audio describers in projects and theatres across the UK and abroad.
As an academic and researcher, Amelia has written multiple published pieces on AD and access, including recently co-authoring Integrated Access In Live Performance (Routledge, 2022) and contributing a chapter to Drag Vistas and Visions: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 3 Chapter 9. Camp Quips: drag, access and queer crip joy as an act of resistance.
As a host, Amelia also won British Podcast of the Year in 2024 for their audible podcast Press Play, Turn On (NSFW).
Amelia has worked in the UK and internationally as a touring actor-musician, burlesque performer, aerialist and drag king and was even on East Enders for 38 seconds!!
Amelia’s email is amelia@quiplash.co.uk
Al, a ‘small fat’ white person with wavy light brown hair slicked back, and funky rectangular glasses stands outside happily eating an ice cream cone. They are pulling some candy off the top of said ice cream and their mouth is in a happy “Ohhh!” The main colour in this photo is pink - the ice cream is pink, Al’s knitted top (which yes they made themself) is pink, their trousers are pink with black lines all over them. Next to them is a human sized pink teddy bear with a small pink unicorn with silver hooves and horn on one of its shoulders. Behind Al, the teddy and the unicorn are big green plants, some steps and a street with cars parked on the sides.
Al Lander-Cavallo (they/them)
Co-founder and director
Al is a chronically ill and neurodiverse artist, producer, organiser, designer and a co-founder of Quiplash CIC.
After 20 years as a comms professional working across industries and roles in Australia and the UK, Al co-founded Quiplash with Amelia Lander-Cavallo and we registered as a CIC in 2022.
Al is the spreadsheets, logistics, graphic design and systems guy. They do a lot of big thinking and write a lot of emails and do a lot of maths. Occasionally they get to make stuff pretty and design creative projects and play backing guitar.
They also act as Amelia’s primary access support worker accross all aspects of Amelia’s work: from sight reading music and cuing them in, to making sure they don’t get poisoned by food they’re allergic to, down to editing emails and articles, and reading and explaining processes and spreadsheets.
(You can read more about the crucial role of specialised access support work and how it’s at risk here.)
Al’s email is al@quiplash.co.uk
Cynthia is a light skinned black mixed race woman, her braided hair is dark purple, styled in 4 ubuntu knots on top of her head with two side plaits with gold braid cuffs. She is wearing a yellow and purple African print dress and is sat at a black and brown table, on a wooden chair with red velvet in the middle. She is smiling and resting her head on her right hand on her right arm, while her left arm is folded on the table
Cynthia Chika-Franklin (she/they)
Producer and access
Cynthia comes to us at a time when our creative output and fundraising endeavours are growing and GOSH are we glad we have her help. Cynthia joins the team as a producer for our creative projects, marketing, fundraising and access support.
Cynthia is a freelance creative working in Film, TV, Theatre & Events, and is known for her work with companies and collectives such as The Cocoa Butter Club, Black Victorians, Ham It Up Productions, The Black Burlesque Revue (just to name a few) She is also the winner of The Draggies “Behind The Scenes” award for 2025!
Cynthia’s email is producer@quiplash.co.uk
Tito performing in Dortmund, Germany. They are slim and white with a teal glitter beard, wearing a rhinestoned houndstooth coat. The photo is a close up of their face with one hand holding a mic to their lips and the other reaching out towards the audience, palm flat and fingers spread wide.
Tito Bone (they/them)
Tito Bone is your average blind, non-binary, bisexual drag king who just wants you to smell the world through their nose, ya know? They are a true triple threat: they sing, dad dance, and audio describe, all while wearing large amounts of eco glitter.
Tito recently premiered their solo show, An Evening With Tito Bone (AKA The World Is Burning so Please Enjoy My Drag Show) at the Out of the Box Festival at Theatre de L’Usine in Geneva, Switzerland and Queer festival at Schauspiel Dortmund, Germany.
They are also the director and charismatic host of Quiplash’s flagship show Unsightly Drag and Friends, an accessible cabaret evening of all Queer disabled performers. Performances have included Gessnerallee, Zurich (2024), Mighty Hoopla, London (2024), Sophiensæle, Berlin (2022), Bloomsbury Festival, London and online (2019, 2020).
You can book tito by emailing them at kingtitobone@gmail.com or via our contact us form.
contact us
🆘 Do you need Quiplash’s help?
🎭💻 Do you want to work with us or put us on stage?
🤑 Do you want to give us lots of funding?
Use the form below to get in touch with us! You can also email hello@quiplash.co.uk
follow us!
ready? book a consultation!
👍 If you would like to book an hour with us, please use the booking system below ⏬
🔮 For a quote or larger project, please contact us or email us at hello@quiplash.co.uk and we’ll get back to you! 😎