performance
Split Britches - Miss America
Miss America - Crowning Glory
Split Britches Lesbian Feminist Theatre Company was founded in 1980 by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin. Since then they have transformed the landscape of queer performance with their vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performance.
Split Britches is performing Miss America at the Great Hall of the People’s Palace 21st - 23rd March, Mile End Road, London. E1 4NS
£10 (£6 concessions) Free to Staff and Students of Queen Mary, University of London.
Please reserve tickets by calling 020 7882 5196 or email R.Sharp@qmul.ac.uk giving your details.
You will be asked to pay on arrival for the performance.
Split Britches has sustained it’s reputation for 30 years, how have you managed to do that?
We were part of Spiderwoman Theatre which began in 1975. Split Britches formed in 1980 and we have never been funded as a company and we don’t depend on funding to survive. We make the work and then get paid for the performances like the old vaudeville artistes. Vaudeville was the working class performance scene that came to prominence in the USA from the early 1880s until the early 1930s and it inspires much of what we do both practically and aesthetically. We have always had other jobs. Lois is now Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary University and Peggy teaches independently. We also run workshops and residencies.
Even though we are a lesbian feminist performance company we never made work about coming out stories. From the beginning, lesbianism was a given in our work and from that given we explored what was happening in our communities and the wider world. We believe artists should be alert to what is happening in the wider world and not just in our personal lives. Split Britches was very fortunate that our work was embraced by the academy and part of that interest and critique has also contributed to our survival.
Split Britches is a lesbian feminist performance company. How does it feel to make work in an allegedly “post-feminist” world?
We called ourselves a lesbian feminist company because identity was important and we didn’t want people to assume a heterosexual focus from the kind of work we did. And in the post-feminism era we held on to the name because because we were just plain ornery! We are aware however, that the label has kept people away from our performances, because they think they know what we do. However when they turn up they are pleasantly surprised. We never want to deny the community we came from even though we are not dealing with community specific issues. In terms of access to funding, our lesbian feminism has never hindered us because we have a strong track record and have forged our own style.
We created what we called a “broken aesthetic”. Quoting a songwriter friend of ours we are “caught between polish and no polish at all.” For instance, we are not great singers and dancers but make a point of singing and dancing in our shows. We are inspired by our time with Spiderwoman Theatre that was named after Spider Woman, the Hopi Native American goddess of weaving and pottery. She always left a flaw in the design so that the spirit could be free to come and go. We are interested in the flaws.
How did the idea for the show Miss America come about and how does it deal with the American Dream?
The idea for Miss America came about because Peggy had a dream about being an 80 year old butch woman wearing a bikini who was crowned Miss America and she was very happy. When she told anyone about the dream, they laughed. We thought this contradiction was worth exploring. So part of the show deals with gender equality, beauty and freakishness and a critique of the nostalgic view of womanhood that was an essential part of the 1950’s American Dream.
Lois wanted to explore what it meant to miss America. She was aghast when Katrina hit New Orleans and we were watching people dying and the government did nothing. The flood polticised many mainstream privileged reporters like Anderson Cooper who were shocked at the slowness of the response. Katrina was a wake up call. So Lois plays a reporter and Peggy is crowned Miss America in a beauty pageant that takes place in a storm.
Now that Obama is president, the American Dream has to be reconfigured. It was based on a “me and mine” culture now perhaps we need to be less individualistc and local and more communal and global.
Miss America integrates video into the performance. What inspired you to do this?
We project YouTube videos that we found online. We chose YouTube videos because they have a homemade quality. You will see the YouTube frame around the images on the screen. We wanted to show both the trauma of severe weather and the pervasiveness of ‘weather as news’ as well as use the storm as a backdrop to Lois as the news reporter.
What advice would you give a performance artist starting out now?
- Make your own work
- Get a gig and do it as often as you can
- Don’t wait for the grant
- If you don’t have a venue take one or make one in a city square or empty store front
- Find people to collaborate with
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