Workshops

For the last 40 years we have been developing strategies for radical independent performance making in the context of our work as Split Britches. We focus on building collaboration, collective devising, solo performance, applied performance, interventions into classical texts, performance and representation of gender and sexuality. Through our ethos of Know How, we want to spread the strategies we have learned and developed over the years. We’ve found the best way to do this while simultaneously building relationships and learning from more people is by leading workshops.

Like an independent filmmaker, the independent performance maker is responsible for conceptualising their piece, writing text, composing the score and/or choreography, designing visuals, securing equipment, mastering the technology, locating the venue, producing and marketing the event and performing the piece. In this process the work emerges from within the body, self and experience of the performer rather than being imposed or even supported from without. The role of the director is internal rather than external. In our workshops we explore this independent performance making methodology with some of the following processes:

  • (Ad)dressing the fantasy

  • Visualizing the exquisite

  • Using the mundane

  • Finding gesture on impulse

  • Writing words on your feet

  • Telling the creative truth

  • Disengaging, then engaging your editor

  • Collaborating with the enemy

  • Appropriating everything

  • Deconstructing the canon

  • Making people laugh

We pushed these ideas further with collaborators like Deb Margolin, Holly Hughes, Bloolips, Gay Sweatshop, La Mama, People's Palace Projects, Taiwan Women's Festival and with international communities of artists, theatre students, activists, women in prisons and safe houses and residents of old age homes and centers. Lois also developed an open source workshop template with Helen Paris and Leslie Hill of Curious called Getting On: A Backstage Tour, about overcoming ‘age fright’ for elders.

We have given workshops and talks for institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, Federation for International Research in Theatre (Helsinki) American Theatre in Higher Education and Theatre Institute (Warsaw), Peoples Palace Projects and Performing Medicine (UK), Taipei Women's Theater Festival and Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics in the Americas.

Visit our contact page for more information on booking a Split Britches workshop.

Workshops Include:

Performance and Human Rights

A practical workshop investigating possibilities of using performance practice in addressing human rights.

Making Work

A hands-on performance and writing workshop designed to create solo or group performance from the ordinary details and extra-ordinary fantasies of our lives.

Making Work Work

A workshop on the process of interpretation and production of a pre-scripted performance piece.

Performing Gender

A practical workshop and one to one mentoring in the performance of gender in both traditional and non traditional performance.

Our practice of leading workshops also spans residencies, where we can engage in a fuller, deeper way with specific communities over a period of time. More information on our longer term work with groups can be found here.