The Split Britches Trajectory

Split Britches creates collaborative, devised, text centred, theatre-based performance work. It focuses on issues of sexuality, gender, and gender representation, and relies on the appropriation of and intervention into popular culture. It originates from desire: the desire to make the invisible visible and to challenge the conventions, not only of traditional theatre and dominant culture but the conventions of political, social and aesthetic sub-cultures. We define ourselves, singly and collectively, as independent performance artists who use live presence, multiple art disciplines, popular culture, and any means imagined or necessary to communicate complicated ideas, to skew long-held beliefs and to challenge social and theatrical norms. Our purpose has been to keep a sense of humor, to love words and paint new pictures, to remain the outlaw, to question ‘normal’, to work within the margins of the margins and to perform our hearts desire.

Our process was born out of the experimental theatre of the 60’s and 70’s and the accompanying political movements (anti-war, feminism, queer). Through the influence of groups like the Open Theatre, the Performance Group and Living Theatre we were able to abandon theatre as an interpretive art form and at the same time appropriate theatrical conventions in order to make original work that reflected our political and social views. Two of the three of us (Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver) were involved in mid-70’s feminism (Spiderwoman Theater), where the process focused on collective devising and use of personal story as political text. We embraced the principles of feminism but resisted the dogma. We resisted expectations and limitations of both mainstream and movement and performed our most eccentric and problematic fantasies. In the 1980, when we formed Split Britches (with Deb Margolin), our work was rooted in the queer community but was less about ‘coming out’ and more about dressing up, asking questions and exploring relations between women and between women and their worlds. Combining this with what we had learned with Spiderwoman and the work Peggy had done with the theatrical drag group Hot Peaches, we began to develop what Sue Ellen Case called a ‘butch femme aesthetic’ and created work that subverted notions of gender and identity through appropriation of popular culture. Split Britches was growing up alongside the New York Downtown performance art scene of the 80’s and was influenced by a growing number of cross-disciplinary practitioners in visual art and post-modern dance. The effects of Reaganomics pushed us out of theatres and into living rooms, galleries and storefronts. We started WOW Theater in a storefront in 1983 that became home for Split Britches and a host of other wayward girls (Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Lisa Kron). By this time we had developed a process and aesthetic that carried us through the 90’s and moved us from performing in trio (Deb, Lois and Peggy) to working in duo (Lois, Peggy), to touring solo and collaborating with other artists (Holly Hughes, Bloolips, Gay Sweatshop, Stacy Makishi, Reno). In the meantime, we had our own history and our own theories (Feminist and Queer), and had attracted enough academic critique to become questions on a test. This opened doors to university venues, university teaching, and artist residencies.

Teaching has always been a partner to our performing. Community workshops with Spiderwoman (1975-80), the Working Girls School Of Theatre at WOW (1983-87), Queerschool with Gay Sweatshop (1993-94), and artist residencies at Universities in the US and UK not only gave us access to resources like libraries, life stories, rehearsal studios, production teams and Xerox machines but helped us develop big ideas with big diverse groups. We were able to bring our process and aesthetic to the consideration of issues such as race, class, domestic abuse, and human rights. More recently, our continued commitment to teaching and experimenting with performance methodology as a means to address social issues has led us to women’s prisons in Brazil and England with Staging Human Rights (Peoples Palace Projects), to an artist residency in Taipei, exploring representations of gender and sexuality in Taiwan (Women Theatre Festival), and to involvement in projects and interventions that look at the intersection of performance and human rights (PSi12: Performing Rights, www.performingrightslibrary.org). Deb is now a professor in the Theatre Studies Department at Yale and Lois is Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary University of London. Peggy teaches independently and conducts residences on solo performance and creating collaboration (SUNY Oswego, in collaboration with Safe House).

And touring was our survival. We understood the necessity of touring early in our careers with Spiderwoman and Hot Peaches. Like our vaudevillian ancestors, if we were going to work, we had to travel. But we were also lured by the romance of being vagabonds on the road. In the 1980’s we joined the circus of alternative performers that toured Europe, England and Scandinavia playing festivals of women, fools and fringe. Since then, increased queer visibility, university touring, more small performance venues in the US, and careful development of transnational collaborations have enabled us to both bring the work home (Austin, Seattle, Miami Minneapolis, LA, Phoenix) and take it far away (New Zealand, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires).

Now, in the new millennium, our work has been published (Split Britches: Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice, 1997) webbed (www.splitbritches.com) and archived (http://hemi.nyu.edu/archive/hidvl/Index.html). And we’re still at it: still making work, still travelling, sometimes together but often apart, still looking for ways to intervene, to communicate, to stay in the present tense. Over these last thirty years, students, audience members and friends have often asked us, ‘Where do you want to be in the next five or ten years?’ This question implies some sort of upward journey toward a goal, an objective, a conclusion. But like our work, our trajectory is not such a direct path to the top of a mountain, or even a plateau. It is a dirt road that winds around the hills and through the valleys. So when people ask where we want to be in the future we always say, ‘We just want to stay on the road.’