Lois Weaver
Lois Weaver is an artist, activist, facilitator, and Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Lois is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Engaging Science Fellow for 2016-19. She was awarded the WOW Women in Creative Industries ‘Fighting the Good Fight’ award in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded an International Chair at Artec Paris 8 University at the National Institute for the History of Art, Paris, and the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement Hawking Award for Developed Understanding of Public Engagement.
Her work hinges on visibility, challenging convention, and public engagement.
Lois was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre, WOW, and Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop and the AiR Supply Collective in London. Lois was named a Senior Fellow by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in 2014. She has been a writer, director and performer with Peggy Shaw and Split Britches since 1980. She is a Patron and on the Board of advisors for Live Art Development Agency (LADA), a consultant for live programs at the Wellcome Collection. She has also served on the board of the Chelsea Theatre and advised the National Trust on public engagement activities.
Lois was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in 1949. She completed a BA in Theatre Studies at Radford University, and moved to New York in 1975 where she began working with Muriel Miguel, which led to the founding of Spiderwoman Theatre. While touring Europe with Spiderwoman, Lois met Peggy Shaw who was working with Hot Peaches. Shortly thereafter, Peggy joined Spiderwoman where Lois and Peggy began to collaborate. In 1980 Lois and Peggy, along with Deb Margolin, created the performance Split Britches: The True Story, which led to the founding of their own company, Split Britches.
Performance
According to academic Jen Harvie in her book The Only Way Home is Through the Show, “Lois Weaver is simply one of the most important feminist artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries… Lois’s solo and collaborative work has pioneered some of feminist theatre’s most important innovations.” One of the primary focuses of her work has been to alter stereotypical representations of women by challenging both the tradition of theatrical practice and the construction of gender roles in society.
In the early 1990’s, she began to focus specifically on the representation of femininity. Having exploited the dynamics of butch/ femme in her earlier works with Peggy Shaw, Lois wanted to investigate the visibility of a ‘femme on her own’. Lois received a NYFA Fellowship and an OBIE for her ensemble performance in Belle Reprieve in 1990. In addition to her work as director and artistic director of Split Britches over the past 40 years, she has also developed a rich solo performance career including her persona Tammy WhyNot.
Activism
Lois’s activism consistently challenges convention, seeking to to question institutional power and provide a platform for those who have historically been silenced. Her activism and life’s work center on the act of ‘queer-ing’, working to make space and take up space; where everyone has a seat at the table, and no seat is higher than another.
She was a partner in Staging Human Rights, a People's Palace Project that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK, and Director for PSi#12: Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on performance and human rights held at QMUL in 2006, Vienna and Glasgow. She was principal artist on Democratising Technology, a research project that uses performance techniques to initiate conversations on technology and participatory design.
Public Engagement
One of the most significant aspects of Weaver’s work has been an investigation into how techniques and principles of performance can facilitate public engagement, create community and encourage direct, democratic dialogue beyond the stage, through the audience and into everyday life. She sees collaboration and facilitation as an intimate form of public engagement. She is a collaborator not only in making work, but also in making work work. The art of facilitation - organizing opportunities and events for other artists - is an important part of her own art practice.
Her experiments in performance as a means of public engagement Public Address Systems include the Long Table, Porch Sitting, Care Café, the Library of Performing Rights, the FeMUSEm, and her facilitating persona, Tammy WhyNot.
Teaching
In addition to her part-time position at Queen Mary University of London, Lois has taught independently and through short and long term residencies at institutions such as Harvard, UCLA, Wellesley (2000), Tasmania, Hampshire Colleges (1990), and the Universities of Richmond (2009), Texas (2005), Maryland (2002), Hawaii (1993). In 1997, she was a Hunt Scammon Distinguished Artist at William and Mary College, and in 2006 she was a Penny Stamps Distinguished Lecturer as part of her Martin Luther King, Jr.-Cesar Chavez -Rosa Parks Visiting Professorship at the University of Michigan. Her teaching strategies often require students to develop a line of inquiry, methodologies and a project outcome based on modes of contemporary performance while also setting up and running a performance space for their work. She focuses on students developing collaborations and strengthening professional skills to increase employability and prepare them for the industry. Her half time position at Queen Mary has provided the time and place to continue to develop as a creative artist as well as the resources to interrogate other aspects of her relationship to performance: performance as pedagogy, performance as facilitation, and performance as research.
Book
Lois’s performance practice and history has been documented and illustrated in The Only Way Home Is Through The Show: Performance Works of Lois Weaver, eds. Lois Weaver and Jen Harvie, published in 2015 by Intellect and the Live Art Development Agency.
A recent conversation
Lois participated in Studio 303’s Queer Performance Camp having a conversation with the interdisciplinary artist Lenore Claire Herrem. The conversation was framed as an intergenerational reflection on what came before, what’s happening now, and what’s coming next.