Our Story of 2020

This year has been…. It’s been something, to say the least. For us, we’ve been privileged enough to say that this year has brought us time and space to go deeper in our relationships and in our work, not able to spread ourselves thin in the ways we might normally. That’s been a blessing.

We have found a precious type of joy by really digging in with our collaborators, with our queer family, with our friends, and with our communities. And we’ve also felt the heartache of this year, of this lifetime. But in the midst of all of this we want to reflect on what has sustained us this year - for us that has been Home, Collaboration, and Mutual Aid.

Home

At the beginning of 2020 we entered the final stage of development for our latest live performance, Last Gasp, which was set to premiere at our New York home La MaMa in April 2020 and in June at the Barbican in London. At the beginning of March our collaborator Morgan Thorson was working with us in London for a final choreography residency. This residency happened at the same time as the world coming to terms with the pandemic. So Morgan rushed back to America, and we, Peggy and Lois, locked down in London.

We were lucky enough to be offered a beautiful three story house in London’s Stoke Newington for our lockdown. At first, settling in and just being in this new space was all we wanted to do. We didn’t want to rush into any new projects, and at that moment we didn’t feel the urge to immediately translate our work to the digital sphere.

We did, however, have an itch to share our quarantine experience. We didn’t hear the voices of elder people being amplified, and felt that we wanted to share how this experience affected us. We also felt there was something profound in the home we had found ourselves in: an old three story house that was populated with furniture from our shows and the generosity of strangers. Somehow that physical architecture said something about the way we live, and the particular way we live during a lockdown. So we began to tell our story through our blog, and working with our producer Laura Hunter Petree we combined written word with vlogs of our activities.  

Collaboration

At the beginning of lockdown, we started to think about what projects we always wanted to do but never felt able to prioritize. Working with Laura we started to dig into our archive a bit more, fleshing out our website so that more of our old videos and photographs were present. We still have a lot more material we want to put on the website of our past shows and collaborations, but what we accomplished at the beginning of lockdown felt like a start.

As we began to feel more settled in our lockdown home, we wanted to reconnect with our Last Gasp collaborators, Nao Nagai, Vivian Stoll, and Morgan Thorson, to mourn the loss of our show opening and to continue the conversations we had been having. And so we kept talking, and talking, and talking, and then we decided to experiment with rehearsals over Zoom, which turned into filming, which became using the house as our set, and continued as we discovered new ways to play in a digital realm. Our relationships and collaboration with Nao, Vivian, and Morgan deepened, and together we found a particular joy in a time that often felt overwhelmingly heavy.

Peggy also found a new way to collaborate with our kin by painting images of people wearing masks. To her, they seemed to be a timely symbol of the care we were able to show one another.

Thinking about the vulnerabilities elders and other marginalized people face during the pandemic, Lois made a Lexicon for Survival to explore how we can use the facets of this time as possible tools for making change.

In November our family at La MaMa offered us a virtual residency, and through this residency we decided to present the digital performance we had been working on. We decided to call it Last Gasp WFH, which stands for ‘working from home’ because we saw it as separate from the stage performance Last Gasp. Without too much advertising we presented the performance November 20th on the streaming platform Stellar.

The response was incredible. It was the first time since lockdown we had felt like we were in the theatre again and many audience members told us they felt similarly. We felt the love from so many directions, and it seemed like many people felt the joy we experienced in making with Nao, Vivian, and Morgan.

And then the New York Times called. We didn’t fully understand the scope of the article Elisabeth Vincentelli wanted to write about us until we got an email from an old friend asking if we had seen the paper – and there we were in a huge blown up picture on the front page of the Arts Section!

Mutual Aid

Throughout the pandemic one of the most inspiring things we experienced was mutual aid. The first time we had heard of it was in the 1960s when the Black Panthers formed mutual aid groups to create children’s breakfast programs and food banks. Mutual aid is an act of solidarity from within. Solidarity is something that’s horizontal, an interdependence with our friends and neighbors. It doesn’t trickle down or move up, it actually moves between.

This organizing structure became a widespread phenomenon, with activities to make masks, shop for people, pick up prescriptions, make phone calls to lonely people, and so on. While we were still in London our younger friends, in particular Alex Legge, would shop for our groceries and deliver them to us. This concept of mutual aid inspired us and we hope that we will all build on it in the future for a more mutually respectful and loving world.

Artists were suffering in the pandemic, and a group of New York artists spearheaded by Taylor Mac formed the grassroots effort TrickleUp as a mutual aid strategy to support those who were struggling. The concept was simple, artists submitted digital materials to this platform which audience members subscribed to, and the proceeds would be distributed to artists in need, who were selected by the contributing artists. We were thrilled to be able to provide footage from our 1992 show Lesbians Who Kill, in addition to excerpts from the live performance of Last Gasp.

In the middle of finishing editing Last Gasp WFH, we decided to return to our house in upstate New York, leaving London and our lockdown home behind at the end of the summer. When we returned we were in the throes of election preparation, and eager to get involved with our community in whatever ways we could. With our upstate network, we began hosting weekly socially distanced postcard writing parties in our backyard working with the organization Reclaim the Vote. These felt a bit like Care Cafés, and we found a real joy in sitting with our community while working toward something that felt incredibly important.  

To bookend the election, we also hosted three digital Care Cafés with La MaMa as a space for folks to come together under the auspices of care during that tense time. Those Care Cafés sustained us during that time, and became an essential way we were able to connect with folks we hadn’t seen in a long time, and new friends we made through our solidarity. 

Sheltered in Place

As we move into the new year, we want to continue to focus on these same three pinnacles: Home, Collaboration, and Mutual Aid. They have brought us so much in 2020, and we hope that our desire to maintain a focus there will lead us into a brighter and lighter 2021.

From these three concepts, we have begun working on a new project called Sheltered in Place. Sheltered in Place explores what it means to stay home in the context of a global pandemic. We will work with a wide range contributors to populate a digital house of ideas on residence, helping us feel connected to our local and global networks.

We want to give a special shout out to our family of collaborators, which includes Nao Nagai, Morgan Thorson, Vivian Stoll, Laura Hunter Petree, Alex Legge, Stormy Brandenberger, Lori E Seid, Susan Young, Matt Delbridge, Jo Palmer, Claire Nolan, and Amy Surratt. And thank you all, our extended Split Britches family, for being with us not just through this year but through every year. We can’t wait to begin sharing and connecting with all of you in the new year.