For 25 years, Honey Pot Performance has worked hard to support and uplift PGM/BIPOC communities, always making sure that PGM/BIPOC artists and scholars are leading the way in our organization. Through performances, sharing knowledge, archiving, and engaging with the public humanities, we create a space where the perspectives of artists of color are front and center. Our work focuses on how people navigate their identity, sense of belonging, and differences in their lives and communities.

Each year, we invite communities to join us through collective storytelling, archiving, and creative exploration—offering space to express, mark intentions, challenge societal norms, and expand together. This year we focus back in on roots community storytelling, activation and performance through themes of joy as we enter Phase 2 of our project, Pleasure Power Portal. We also continue our longstanding public humanities work with the Chicago Black Social Culture Map, inviting communities to chronicle and preserve the lived experiences of Black Chicagoans, from the Great Migration through the rise and future of House music.

2026 SPRING PROGRAMS

The Doctors: Exploring 1970’s Teen Social Scenes and House Music Culture in Chicago

Chicago Black Social Cultural Map: Community Curators Exhibition & Programming

This exhibition documents the pre-house era influence and innovation of a 1970’s dance crew based in Chicago's Roseland community. These young Black men from Mendel Catholic High School elevated the school’s parties to new prominence, creating significant social cultural contributions to the teen scene and party culture in Chicago. This exhibition emerges from the Chicago Black Social Culture Map’s Community Curators Program which examines the personal archives of The Doctors in collaboration with curatorial writer, DaJona Butler.

Exhibition Opening:

Friday May 29, 2026

6pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Schedule:

6-7pm - The Doctors - Interview Screening + CBSCM: A Look into Archiving

7-8pm - Panel discussion with the Doctors

8-8:45-pm - Community Curators' Talk + Exhibition Walkthrough

8:45 - Sounds by DJ Craig Loftis

Past-Future Forms: Black Movement from Workshop to Cypher

Saturday, May 30, 2026

1pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

In this one day movement centered convening, participants engage in a series of dance workshops exploring techniques born from Black social spaces and community exchanges representing past, present, and future. The event includes three workshops, an artist discussion, and an open cypher.

Schedule:

1pm - House Dance w/ Tre Daniels

2pm - Praise Mother Aesthetic w/ Aaliyah Christina

3pm - Hip Hop Trilogy w/ Bravemonk

4pm - Past Future Forms Discussion moderated by Thomas DeFrantz

5pm - All Styles Dance Cypher w/ sounds by DJ Jo De

(Re)Telling: A Writing Workshop on Memory Work & The Spectacular
For Poets & Storytellers

Sunday, May 31, 2026

3pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Led by DaJona Butler, Curatorial Writer, The Doctors' exhibition

This writing workshop explores memory as both archive and imagination, in conversation with The Doctors exhibition, an exploration of pre-house Chicago party culture and the social worlds built by young Black creatives in Roseland.

Together, we will engage memory work as a living practice: listening to stories, images, and histories that move between documentation and myth, preservation and transformation. Drawing from the exhibition’s materials and themes, we will consider what it means to remember collectively, what gets held onto, what evolves, and how everyday Black life becomes spectacular through retelling.

Through guided prompts and shared reflection, we will move across time, past, present, and imagined futures, treating memory as a portal rather than a fixed record. Participants will be invited to write themselves into this continuum, encountering personal and communal histories as sites of creativity, speculation, and power.

Inspired by the visionary impulse embodied in stories like The Island of Lost Fathers, we will center intuition, imagination, and the ability to perceive beyond what is immediately visible. What do we inherit from those who came before us? What do we carry forward? What futures are we already dreaming into being?

This workshop is an invitation to engage your own archive, personal, familial, and cultural, and to reimagine it as a space of possibility. Trust what surfaces. Follow what calls. Write toward the spectacular.

2026 Past Spring Programs

Creative Design Lab: If Then Artist Lab Series

Saturday, March 21, 2026

11am-3pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

If/Then is a process-based workshop and public-facing laboratory centered on experimentation, presence, and collective inquiry. Artists are supported in generating new work using HPP’s original If/Then method. No finished work required. Curiosity encouraged.

Chicago Black Social Cultural Map: Vinyl & Vittles + Honey Pot Performance Record & Books Pop Up

Saturday, April 4, 2026

1-6pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Vinyl & Vittles is a mobile record fair featuring music and Chicago vendors selling food, vinyl, and more. This Garfield Park installment features DJ sets and local booksellers in recognition of Independent Book Store Day celebrated in April.

Featured DJs: Mr. JayToo, Dj Dreea, Jesse De La Pena, & Brian Reaves

Featured Book Vendors: Da Book Joint & Burst Into Books

Chicago Black Social Cultural Map: Radical Soul Underground

Saturday, April 25, 2026

4-7pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Join cultural historian and DJ Duane Powell as he explores the ecosystem that connects 60's and early 70's Chicago, Philly and Detroit and the radical nature in which it became a catalyst for a global soulful underground scene. Serving as one of Chicago house music’s important ancestors, underground soul created a space of imagination and safety for Black artists and communities.

Philly Soul arrangers and producers such as Gamble & Huff and Baker, Harris, Young embraced the spectacular through lush musical arrangements and funk-filled rhythm and vocal harmonies. Meanwhile, Motown became a haven for queer artists such as The Dynamic Superiors' Tony Washington and Carl Bean and launched queer anthems such as Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.”

After the presentation, Powell will sit in conversation with DJ, curator Ctrlzora, and Discopoet Khari B. to discuss how these regional soul movements set a stage for disco’s excess and house’s groove while also considering how this sonic soul archive inspires their own distinct approaches to music, poetry, and DJ craft.

The Sanctuary Circle

Saturday, May 2, 2026

1-3pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Step into the First Church Sanctuary for The Sanctuary Circle, a free community wellness experience rooted in AfroDiasporic healing traditions. This special gathering will feature a restorative soundbath meditation led by Mecca Elevated, weaving breath, sound, and reflection into a shared space for restoration, creativity, and collective care. Hosted by Honey Pot Performance with support from Good Chaos, sweet and savory treats from Kikwetu Coffee, and wellness goodie bags from BeeLove Cafe, Scratch Goods, Dark Matter Coffee, and HPP! This offering is free and open to all who wish to experience HPP’s world of embodied artistry and connection.

Engineered Conflict in the Fifth City: A Conversation with David Stovall and Meida McNeal

Saturday, May 2, 2026

6-9pm @First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd)

Given Chicago's contested relationship with Black people on the South and West Sides of the city, the evening places Meida McNeal's seminal work, Fifth City Revisited in conversation with the new book manuscript by David Stovall Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago. As the two creators discuss the connections between both works, audience members will bear witness to an unflinching conversation on gentrification, education and resistance.

Honey Pot Performance Spring 2026 Programs: Celebrating 25 Years of Radical Presence, Performance, and Power

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