Split Britches
Last week we were fortunate enough to see the performance group Split Britches perform at Dixion Place. Split britches (for those of you who don’t know) have been around since 1980 and together Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver literally took my breath away. They challenge gender, explore butch/femme culture and completely blew my mind.
Having a partner who is not only a performer, but also a theatre reviewer, and performance studies academic means that I see quite a lot of theatre, but without a doubt I can say this was the most incredible show that I have ever seen. I’m sure by now you are wondering what this has to do with femmeness, and why I’m spending all this time talking about it, when normally by this point I’ve launched into a discussion of femme gender presentation, or queering femininity etc.
However over a week later, I’m still talking about this show because something magical took place that night. I sat on a old sinking couch right next to the stage, before the show Peggy Shaw came and shock my hand, asked about the tattoo across my chest that reads “paradox†and I almost forgot my name! Looking around the room, we were surrounded by butch/femme couples old enough to be our parents. It saddened me to realize that so often we don’t know our history, it was a sliding scale/pay what you can sort of thing and still everyone in the audience was easily twenty years our senior, and yet, I felt like I was home.
It isn’t very often that I feel seen as a femme when out in public, when what I am doing with my gender, my presentation, my sexuality is understood, so when it does happen it feels all the more special. I was seen that night. My legs wrapped under me, hir hand on my thigh, I watched people I wanted to learn from, people I wanted to know more about, people who I felt understand more about my life, love, history than most ever see. Maybe one of the most incredible things about the night was watching Lois Weaver, a femme, command attention from that audience. So often the images we see of femmes are so overly cloaked in youth, it was incredible to see a beautiful, powerful, and sexual femme who wasn’t 20 or 25. Seeing her on that stage made me remember again that there is a history of who we are, and made me feel very connected to something much larger than myself, something much larger than even the haphazard group of femme friends that I consider to be my community.
Maybe this is just my experience, but I think that we see a lot of older butches, their salt and pepper hair, and wrinkles only increase their attractiveness, but that isn’t always the case with how people see femmes. But seeing her on stage, a femme older than me I felt excited and seen and in a way felt like I was given a view into the future of queerness, of butch/femme culture, and of queered femininity.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Peggy Shaw is really amazing. I worked with her years ago when the theater I interned at bused in To My Chagrin. They had two show performance weeks and although it was difficult, I loved the change over - their set was a chopped Chevy and had to be set and struck every week. It was really one of the only shows that summer that I felt honored to have worked on. And it was really nice to have Peggy and Vivian padding around the actor’s house. For a company 20 minutes outside of Provincetown, it was satisfying to not be the odd woman out for that month while they were both there.