The Dyke HERstory Dance Tour is a research-based, site-specific dance performance series that honors, remembers, and celebrates the lives, activism, and cultural contributions of Bay Area dyke ancestors. The project will pilot in September 2026 and premiere as a full multi-weekend tour in 2027 as part of Sarah Bush Dance Project’s Sapphic Series.

Rooted in choreographic and herstorical research, the Dyke HERstory Dance Tour brings dance into public spaces of lesbian and dyke historical significance across the San Francisco Bay Area. Through movement, storytelling, and place-based performance, the project invites contemporary audiences into deeper relationships with queer history, collective memory, and embodied connection.

What We’re Creating

The 2026 pilot will consist of a 20–30 minute site-specific dance theater work, performed on a softball field, featuring nine dancers embodying nine dyke ancestors from the Bay Area. Their stories—political, personal, and poetic—will be woven into a time-bending performance that blends sport, ritual, and dance.

This pilot will serve as the creative foundation for the 2027 Dyke HERstory Dance Tour, a multi-weekend, site-specific festival featuring nine choreographers and nine ancestor-inspired performances presented across multiple Bay Area locations.

Research, Community, and Engagement

The Dyke HERstory Dance Tour is developed in collaboration with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA) and grounded in archival research, oral histories, and lived experience.

In addition to performance development, the project includes a series of community-centered gatherings that invite participation, learning, and connection, including:

The project also includes a Volunteer Zoom Research Hour, where community members are invited to assist with herstorical research—helping surface stories, timelines, and archival connections that inform the choreography and deepen collective knowledge.

Why Sarah Bush Dance Project

Sarah Bush Dance Project (SBDP) is an intergenerational, multiracial dance company based in the Bay Area that creates bridges to the world we want to live in. Since 2007, SBDP has created six critically acclaimed repertory works and produces the biannual Sapphic Series, centering queer artists, community, and culture.

SBDP has a long history of performing in unconventional spaces—including parks, public land, museums, and lesbian nightclubs—and of bringing stories of lesbian, women, sapphic, queer, and dyke lives to the stage. This lineage of site-specific work and culturally rooted storytelling is foundational to the Dyke HERstory Dance Tour.

Past works such as This Land, Un-Changing Nature, Spirit & Bones, and MURMUR: Winged Belonging reflect SBDP’s commitment to blending rigorous research, embodied practice, and deep community care.

The Dyke HERstory Dance Tour emerges directly from this lineage—uniting SBDP’s history of queer storytelling, site-based performance, and intergenerational care into a project that honors dyke ancestors while activating public space through movement.

How Your Support Helps

Funds raised through this campaign will directly support:

Your support ensures this work is created with care, integrity, and sustainability—so queer history can live not only in archives, but in bodies, movement, and shared public space.

Together, we honor dyke ancestors, reclaim queer histories, and imagine liberated futures—one site, one story, one dance at a time.