Sister Spit began in 1997 as a lesbian-feminist spoken word and performance art collective founded by Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson. Since then, Sister Spit has toured North America’s theatres, universities, and festivals, performing at the Casto Street Fair, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and San Francisco’s LadyFest. Today, the legacy continues with Sister Spit: The Next Generation, a no longer exclusively female continuation of the original collective. Renowned writers and poets hit Vancouver’s Wise Hall on April 14 as part of Sister Spit’s 2015 North America tour.

Hosts Esther Tung and April Alayon introduced Sister Spit and ran through the preliminaries of the night before passing the mic on to Virgie Tovar. Virgie, ‘a hot fat Latina femme’ writer and activist, M.C.’d the show and broke up the string of poetry with engaging, hilarious and quirky personal stories. An excellent story teller is rare to find, and she has the talent to unearth something sparkling and extraordinary in everyday life situations. Poets Myriam Gurba, Mica Signourney and Tom Cho surprised the audience with the diversity of their styles and their dedication to performance. Each artist was honest and unabashed, able to express their uninhibited thoughts through performance and movement. Sister Spit established a strong sense of community throughout the night; the audience was comprised mostly of friends, family and Commercial Drive locals, and all bathrooms were gender neutral.

The content of the program was generally amazing and, most often, hilarious. Poets’ use of voice, tone, volume, accents, facial expressions, and gestures added so much to their words; it was a completely different experience to watch, rather than read, their work. This is why Sister Spit is so brilliant; it is obvious that these artists belong on stage, sharing what they love and hate and think about the world. Their performances were inspiring, empowering, and educational, wrought with humour and strong opinion.

The next time Sister Spit rolls into Vancouver, I’d like to be there, because I know that this brilliant collective will continue evolving, creating, and finding original ways to express itself to whomever they encounter along the road.