Founded in New York in 1980 with Deb Margolin, Split Britches continues with the duo and solo work of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw which spans satirical, gender- bending performance, methods for public engagement, videography, digital and print media, explorations of ageing and wellbeing, and iconic lesbian-feminist theatre.

Split Britches’ collection of scripts, Split Britches Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice, edited by Sue Ellen Case, won the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Drama. In 2012, Split Britches was presented with the Edwin Booth Award by City University of New York in honor of their outstanding contribution to the New York City/American Theater and Performance Community. Lois and Peggy were named Senior Fellows by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance in 2014, an award given to scholars, artists and activists affiliated with the institute whose work illustrates the highest achievement in the field of performance and politics.

Weaver’s Public Address Systems (PAS) project creates spaces for public discussion that are hospitable and open, where alternatives can be modeled and critical questions staged. During the pandemic several of the PAS protocols were developed for digital dissemination.

Over the past 40 years Split Britches’ interconnected repertoire of performance and engagement work has rapidly expanded and projects have increasingly fed into the development of one another. Last Gasp is the result of research undertaken during the 2018-2019 Split Britches Call and Response Tour throughout the US and UK, a tour of the performances Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) and Retro(per)spective which housed sustained conversation in connected engagement activities and platforms.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Weaver and Shaw were keen to maintain momentum for their postponed new live work Last Gasp while having to ‘work from home’. Last Gasp WFH was developed in a site-specific Zoom format using their quarantine home as a structural visual anchor and experimenting with the digital stage as a source of legitimate performance. Working with La MaMa ETC (NYC), the performance was shown to global audiences on demand and in virtual live screenings accompanied by talkbacks. Their latest performance Last Gasp: A Recalibration builds on this work to create a hybrid live-digital show, which premiered at the Barbican in 2022.