Ruff

Performance artist Peggy Shaw ruminates on life before and after the stroke she had in 2011, delivering a freewheeling monologue with deadpan humor and arresting honesty.

There are dark spots and blanks in Peggy's memory now. Yet in paying tribute to the family, friends and performers who have inspired and kept her company over the years, she reflects on what is lost and equally celebrates the space left behind for new insight. Handing objects to audience members, calling out to Lois for help in the audience, and maintaining the constant presence of collaborators in projections and text, the performance lays bare the devices of care present in Peggy’s life, foregrounding the ways in which a solo performance is never really solo.

Ruff unpacks Shaw’s ageing, lesbian body, exploring issues of memory, personal response to extreme circumstance and the place of the imagination in the neuroscience of memory loss and structural damage. Ruff visually and verbally translates Shaw’s internal experience of illness and ageing into an external assemblage of her multifaceted, creatively capable, ageing brain.

Using Green Screening Technology as a therapeutic technique for seeing radical alternate possibilities, Split Britches have created a performance framing Peggy’s newfound disabilities as possibilities for innovation. The use of this technology as a mode of therapy for stroke survivors was discovered while on residency at the University of Tasmania with technologist Matt Delbridge, and has expanded the scope of the performance project. Through a collective performance workshop format and Chroma-key technologies the project encourages Stroke Survivors to use embodied enactment of fantasy worlds as a tool for therapeutic rehabilitation and well-being in front of an audience to produce a shared experience. Research into the efficacy of avatars as a form of rehabilitation for stroke survivors is an ongoing project in partnership with Prof Pat Healey and Rosella Galindo Esparzo at the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London. More information on this project can be found here.

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RUFF was commissioned by PS122, NYC and OutNorth, Anchorage, Alaska. Winner of the PS122 Ethyl Eichelberger Commissioning Award (2011) and a Rockefeller MAP Grant (2011). Additional Support from the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England.

Performed at venues including Coil Festival, Dixon Place (January, 2012); Chelsea Theatre, London (April 4-5, 2013) and Behaviour Festival, The Arches, Glasgow (April 11, 2013), La Mama, NYC (2014); Wellcome Collection, UK (2014); Mayfest, Bristol (2014); Contact Theatre, Manchester (2014); Barbican Centre, London (2016). 

Trailers by Claire Nolan | Thumbnail images courtesy of Konfrontacje Tealtralne