Split Britches was founded in 1980 by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin in New York City.
Since then we've created work out of a feminist, democratic DIY aesthetic, performing our first pieces at the WOW Café in NYC, which we co-founded. From the scrappy, performance-making below the poverty line, downtown NY theatre scene, we've become two of the foremost figures in queer performance art and lesbian identity. Today our work is internationally recognized and has been the recipient of several prestigious grants and awards, including Doris Duke, US Artists, Guggenheim, and the Wellcome Trust.
Our work spans theatre, live-art, solo performance, workshops, digital media, models for public conversation and published texts, and has been presented in a wide range of contexts around the world.
We create new forms by exploiting old conventions. Our work borrows from classical texts and popular myths, but its true sources are the details of everyday life. We use popular culture as a mode of communication, like the vaudevillian comedy double act or the relationships in A Streetcar Named Desire, taking existing forms and cracking them open to queer and personalize them. The work is personal, bordering on the private. It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story. As we've aged, our work has focused on tapping into the unexplored potential in elders and people with disabilities. Our practice has grown to include dialogic engagement methods as an intrinsic part of the creation and presentation of performances.
It is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics – feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone, and lesbian because it takes the presence of a lesbian on stage as a given.
Since our inception, Split Britches have been committed to working with women, women of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. This has manifested nationally (e.g. founding WOW Café in NY; work in domestic abuse safe houses in upstate NY; collaboration with indigenous and mixed communities in MN) and internationally (e.g. working in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK; and at the Taiwan women’s festival). Our accessible yet radical performances and workshops consist of a larger, lifelong project to facilitate communication, wellness, and social change.
Our work has been critically reviewed in publications such as Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Village Voice, the New Statesman and Time Out London and Time Out New York. In addition it has been the subject of critical debate in a range of academic publications including TDR, Drama Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Journal, Women in Performance and by a range of prominent gender, feminist and performance theorists including, Sue Ellen Case, Peggy Phelan, Theresa de Lauretis, Jill Dolan, Alan Sinfield, Elin Diamond, Lynda Hart and Craig Lucas. A collection of seven plays written and performed by the company entitled Split Britches, Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice (1997), edited by Sue Ellen Case and published by Routledge, won the 1997 Lambda Literary Award.
Split Britches has won a total of 4 Village Voice OBIE Awards, a Villager Award, and has been nominated for the Cal Arts Herb Albert award and for Innovative Theatre of the Year award and the GLAAD Media Award. In 2012, the company won the CUNY Edwin Booth Award for contributions to theatre in NYC. In 2014 we were named Hemispheric Institute of Performance Senior Fellows, and in 2017 we won the Innovative Theatre Awards Artistic Achievement Award.
You can hear us talk more about our history, and in particular our shows Retro(per)spective and Ruff, with our good friend Jen Harvie on her podcast Stage Left:
Visit the archive for more information on previous shows.
