Tryleather.net: Performance Research and the Embodied Archive

This short article explores the collaborative revival of Try Leather (1975), a stage-based solo by Canadian performance artist Margaret Dragu. Fifty years after its premiere, artists Britta Wirthmüller, Justine A. Chambers, and William Locke Wheeler engaged with Dragu to reimagine the work through movement-based research and archival production. Their process generated an expansive digital archive—collected at Tryleather.net. This platform functions as both score and archive, activating an embodied and speculative approach to performance history. Rooted in feminist performance, sex work activism, and artist-run culture, the project resists static historicization, instead proposing a living, networked archive that invites ongoing engagement and re-performance through collaborative, processual, and community-driven methodologies.