A 2021 Holiday Message from Split Britches, and Looking Ahead to 2022

As we sit in the car for side to side parking, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on our 2021 and look forward to what we have in store for 2022. It seems like there are still lots of unpredictable forces coming our way, but we are slowing down and trying to live more mindfully, feeling extra grateful for the ways we’ve been able to spend our time, what we’ve learned, and the things we have to look forward to.

We are wishing all of you a safe, joyful, and loving holiday season and New Year!

Story 5 from A Two Story House: Take Action to Take Care, a Public Service Announcement

Like so many of you, we feel the crushing weight of our desperate and challenging world right now. But we continue to remind ourselves that we must stay firm in our hope. We must look after ourselves and each other. In advance of the election, we’ve been taking action to take care, and we want to share this strategy with all of you. 

For more information on how to host your own Care Café and ways to get involved in reclaiming the vote, click here.

Story 4 from A Two Story House: Lois's Lexicon for Survival

Hi everyone, this is Lois.

Earlier this month I got to take part in Heart of Glass’s With for About conference, which asked contributors to respond to the additional challenges Covid-19 creates for marginalized people. I was so excited to be part of their lineup, and was blown away by some of the contributions! All the materials from With for About are still available on the conference website or on their YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out!

We’ve talked a bit on this space about how, as an elder, I am in a more vulnerable position during this pandemic than my friends and kin who are younger. Of course I still have many privileges, like the home I have been able to shelter in, but it has left me thinking about ways we can use some of the facets of this time as possible tools for making change. I’m calling it a Lexicon for Survival - or the ABCs for Change.

Story 3 from A Two Story House: Peggy's Story

Hello everybody, it's Peggy here.

In the comments on our other videos we had a lot of people asking about my paintings so I thought I'd share some of them here. The masks have been a really interesting thing for me because we don't know how long they will be relevant, but right now they are a symbol for the ways we care for one another. Time is a strange thing right now.

Story 2 from A Two Story House: Considering Last Gasp

Whether we are sitting in the garden, working in our studio, or uncharacteristically looking up a new recipe for supper, we are still thinking about our work – the work we continue to do, and the work we’ve lost. Especially in the last few weeks we’ve been spending time grieving the cancellation of our show Last Gasp, which was meant to premiere last month at La MaMa ETC in New York City, and next month at the Barbican in London. 

The grief we feel for our show is of course compounded with the larger societal grief  we are all experiencing because of this pandemic. We’re moving through it slowly, just like we are moving through these days of isolation.  We’ve still got a lot of thinking to do about how Last Gasp fits into it all, but talking about it with you is a start:

A Two Story House: Stories from Quarantine

Years ago we found the Tammy Wynette and George Jones song called Two Story House that tickled our fancy and seemed to describe our situation.

We’ve always loved houses, both real and conceptual. For us they are a structure on which to hang our ideas, our desires, our relationships, our art. We shake pieces of our lives out and hang them in different rooms, seeing how something looks in the laundry room versus on the front porch versus in the basement. We’ve also thought a lot about what it is for a building to be a home or a house – how are these concepts different?

 Now, in the midst of a pandemic, we find ourselves self-isolated in an old empty two-story house in London. We are both surprised at our good fortune, and know that we’ve always been lucky fuckers. We’ve been here just over a week in this big house and we are telling ourselves it’s a residency.

This world crisis has left us wanting to do nothing except survive right now. We want to sit down for a bit and not feel compelled into a place of productivity, not feel compelled to instantly translate our lives and work and relationships to the internet. We want to think about what it means to show up when you can’t go out. And we want to invite you to join us in this, holding space for one another to reconsider the homes, both metaphorical and physical, we have built, and how a pandemic changes those structures, shows us where the construction was shoddy and where it was expertly done.

 We’ve decided to consolidate our musings here, in our blog. Over the coming weeks we are going to move through the different rooms of our house, and the different activities we do in this new home, like letting you in on some of the work we had been doing on Last Gasp. We hope you’ll come along - there’s plenty of room!

A little 2018 reflection...

Over the past few years our practice as Split Britches has taken off in ways beyond our wildest fantasies, and we aren’t showing any signs of slowing down! As 2018 draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on one very busy and succesful year for us as a company.

This year saw the premier of our newest work, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), at La MaMa Theater as part of The Public's Under the Radar Festival 2018. We then brought the performance over to the UK where it toured to Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, Wales Millennium Centre, a sell-out week run at the Barbican, and Take Me Somewhere Festival in Glasgow. 

Next up, we dusted off our Retro(per)spectivesuitcases and took our greatest hits medley to Battersea Arts Centre and Copenhagen. And after that full on Spring, we were due for some time off. But it wasn't too long before UXO was back on the road stateside as part of Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon. 

November was a jam-packed month of touring with almost a gig a week in the UK. UXO made it's North of England debut as part of Heart of Glass festival, we returned to Belfast for the first time in 30 years where UXO headlined at Outburst Arts Queer Festival and Retro(per)spectivegraced the smallest stage in the UK, Tom Thumb Theatre. We wrapped up an excellent month and year of touring with a post-Retro(per)spective karaoke party at the Live Art Bistro in Leeds! But we won't share those pictures or videos...

Amongst all of the touring, Lois was awarded WOW Women of the World's award for Fighting the Good Fight, Split Britches were sainted by Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, we took Porch Sittings and Long Tables across the country and beyond, and we cemented a company structure and an ethos of care as a company alongside our two consistent employees Laura and Alex - which was perhaps the biggest success of all! 

So what about next year? 

As we look forward to 2019, it's looking like it will be a fruitful year for old and new creative projects, touring shows we've already made and developing two new solo performances. 

We're in residence at the Guthrie Theatre!

We'll begin the year in Minneapolis at the fantastic Guthrie Theater. We will undertake a 2 week residency to work on our new solo shows, followed by a 2 week presentation 25 January - 10 February 2019 of Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) at their new Dowling Studio. We're a part of their Level Nine Series, Get Used To It: A Celebration of Queer Artistry.We are thrilled to be a part of it and to bring the performance to the midwest. We are also excited to have some dedicated creative space and time on the new work. We can't wait to get there but we'll be wrapping up warm that's for sure! Minneapolis in January, oy! 

Tammy's BACK!

Tammy's back on the YouTube with Tammy's 12 Ways of Christmas. The holidays can be hard for a lot of us - not to mention we've got a new year starting soon! So she's been posting a video every day and talkin' about staying sane in this ol' world! She's got a few more planned and she's got even bigger plans for 2019! So don't forget to subscribe and stay tuned for more. 

Thank you! 

Thanks for a great year of support and for your ongoing commitment to Split Britches. We've got lots lined up for 2019 and we'll keep you all updated in the new year. We're looking forward to many more opportunities for you to join us in the Situation Room, alongside Tammy WhyNot, at a Care Cafe, on the Porch and for a drink! 

We are working towards a more sustainable future as a company by accepting tax deductible donations big and small through Fractured Atlas. We know that these times are tough for everybody, but no matter the amount we always appreciate your donations.

We wish you all a happy and peaceful new year. See you in 2019! 

Love,
Lois and Peggy xx 

Happy Birthday Carson & Tammy!

It’s our fave country gal Tammy WhyNot's 40th birthday today and boy oh boy has she got some exciting plans comin' up this Summer. Tammy’s given us forty years full of flirtin’, flouncin’ and fairy cakes - and we've loved every second of it! 

For her fortieth year she plans to keep on questioning just about everyone she can find about all the things she needs to know, from how to cook a mean pork chop, to getting old and having sex. Tammy's gonna drag out this birthday as long as she can and celebrate all year with loads of new videos and new content, so a great birthday present y'all could give her is to subscribe to her YouTube channel ahead of its upcoming revamp: https://www.youtube.com/TammyWhyNot_MyChannel

But the best gift of all would be to help Tammy's great niece, Carson WhyNot Dare, who shares a birthday with Tammy and is raising money for Planned Parenthood. Please donate what you can here.  

Happy Birthday to Carson and Tammy WhyNot!!! 

Post UK & Ireland touring

We have reached the end of our three months of touring the UK and Ireland and we wanted to take this opportunity to thank every venue and audience for their support for both Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) and Retro(per)spective.

We began at the wonderful Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts where UXO was welcomed to the UK with two sold out performances and lots of politically-charged conversation. Then Wales Millennium Centre, where the Welsh hills and Cardiff Bay provided beautiful scenery and a strong sense of community.

In Ireland we were greeted by the warmth and sunshine at Live Collision Festival and took advantage of the 'Age and Opportunity' of the Bealtaine Festival. We drank enough Guinness to last the rest of the year, walked along the cobble streets with everything crossed for the yes vote, embraced the Galway girls and enjoyed Sligo’s beautiful beaches.

And then there was the Barbican, where old friends and new friends joined us for a sell-out five night run which exceeded all of our hopes and expectations. And we must have had an impact - even on the Barbican buildings and surrounding area - because they discovered an actual WW2 unexploded ordinance in the neighborhood the day we left!

After that we were indeed taken somewhere with Take Me Somewhere Festival in Glasgow! We were transported into the bustling queer community, made new friends with the LipSinkers and caught up with old friends from the Arches days.

And then it was time to park Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) for a short while, and get trendy with our archives, looking back at our greatest hits with Retro(per)spectiveat Battersea Arts Centre in London and at Warehouse9 in Copenhagen. BAC may be a bit far away but we were happy so many of you made the journey to look back at our performance journey! Copenhagen provided an audience made up almost entirely of lesbians over 60 - which was just a dream! A huge thank you to Osborn&Møller for their care, hospitality and beers at Warehouse9. How refreshing it was to see venues with the same DIY, queer ethos as the WOW café existing today. It was the loveliest end to a great three months for us. Plus we had a great swim in the cleanest city sea water in the world!

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Thank you all for your support, encouragement and presence throughout this tour. Now it’s time for a little break! But we’ve got lots lined up for the rest of the year in the US and UK, so please do keep up to date and follow our social media for all the latest news!

Lois wins WOW Women in Creative Industries Award for Fighting the Good Fight!

Lois Weaver and Amy Lamé, photo by Alice Boagey. WOW Women in Creative Industries Awards at Southbank Centre's WOW Women of the World festival, 7-11 March 2018

On 7th March 2018 Lois was awarded WOW Women in Creative Industries Award for Fighting the Good Fight. The Fighting the Good Fight award is 'in recognition of a woman who has demonstrated great tenacity and on-going commitment to excellence within the creative industries'. Lois is honoured to have received the award. 

"I was so sure that I wouldn't win I didn't prepare a speech. What I did manage to say is that those of us who are out there fighting in all of our big and small ways don't often stop to think of it as the 'good fight' and in fact we are extremely privileged to be able to think of our struggles as 'good fights' when so many women are actually fighting for their lives.  

I want to share the award and anything I could with those women everywhere!"