ART NOW, a visiting artist series sponsored by CommWorks, welcomed Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver to Woods Theater on Tuesday, September 25 to perform their original work, “Retro Perspective.”
The show incorporates skits from their previous shows over the years. This fall marks the the third year of the ART NOW series.
Shaw began her performance career in a company called Hot Peaches and Weaver worked with a company called Spiderwoman. The duo met when they worked together on a show for Spiderwoman and have been performing together ever since. Weaver was a theatre student and Shaw says she fell into the industry “by accident.” With the help of Deb Margolin, they co-founded a company called Split Britches in 1980.
“When we started there was not a lot of lesbian material,” said Shaw. The two specialized in what they call “queer performance.” “We wanted to look at issues like economics and what it means to be an artist and pornography and feminism and we wanted to look at those things through the lenses of being a lesbian and make theatre from our own experience,” said Weaver.
Shaw and Weaver explained how they based their career on experimentation to find out what worked for them and what was received well by the audience.
“We didn’t know what was funny for women,” said Shaw. “So we spent a lot of years trying to figure out what was funny. A lot of comedy was pressing women and color and we decided to make our own comedy,” said Shaw.
They’re material has a lot of mainstream influence, the opening scene of their show entitled “Belle Reprieve,” was based on their reconstruction of a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. Weaver walked around the theater taking pictures of the audience, and those photographs were projected on a screen at the closing of the show. Weaver talked about the use of the photographs at the beginning of her show.
“It is about the fact that we’re having a conversation and they think I’m performing and sometimes they don’t even think there’s ‘film’ in the camera, even though there’s no such thing anymore,” Weaver joked. “It’s my favorite way to open a show, more than any other show. I’m really interested in using performance as a means of getting people to talk to each other,” said Weaver. She mentioned that she uses her character Tammy to do so in her shows.
Shaw and Weaver said that they use popular culture for inspiration for some of their skits. One example of this is a skit that comes from Mike Nichols and Elaine May that they re-wrote.
“The most fun one’s are the one’s (skits) we totally ripped off popular culture in order to subvert heterosexual normative and play with that,” said Weaver.
“We pick a lot of our stuff from old black and white television when things were not perfect and polished,” said Shaw. “Reviewers would come to our show and say ‘I didn’t understand it,’ so we would try to use popular culture to relax them,” said Shaw.
The pair talked about facing discrimination, especially in the 1970’s and 1980’s. They reference homophobic behavior, like having things thrown at them on stage.
“We never cared about pleasing anyone,” said Shaw. “We didn’t care about the rest of the world; we just knew we had a lot of things to say.”
Weaver recalls growing up in Virginia and dealing with segregation and she said that ignorance is lack of exposure. “The word ‘queer’ the lesbian/gay trends, all of this stuff are in the smaller towns that we do go to,” said Weaver. “It has changed as a result of it proliferating more in the culture.”
Growing up, Shaw remembers the kids on her block nicknaming her “Ellen,” because she said that Ellen DeGeneres was the only way they could make sense of her. “We’re independent artisans and we’re kind of relieved that there’s so many people doing queer art now that we can do what we want to do,” said Shaw.
Their show at the University was their first performance in New Jersey. “We came from New York City, I feel like we’re in another country. It’s so beautiful here, there’s so much sky. I feel like I’m in Australia,” said Shaw. The performance put on for the University showcased skits from different shows that were written by Shaw and Weaver at different time periods in their lives.
“You get a sense of a long term relationship and I was really struck by how rich of a portrait of a relationship it was,” said communication professor and CommWorks advisor Deanna Shoemaker. Shoemaker arranged for Shaw and Weaver to visit her Performance Theory and Culture class for a workshop earlier that day.
“They used their skills, knowledge, and experiences to help us dig deep within ourselves, to find our inner performer,” said Tara Cooney, senior and student in Shoemaker’s Performance and Theory class. “The workshop truly reflected on our classes performances the next week,” said Cooney.
“It was quite unconventional but absolutely hysterical, if you keep an open mind!” said senior Erika Krudyla who attended the show with her Senior Seminar and Typography class.
IMAGE TAKEN FROM vaudevisuals.com
