Creative Design Lab: If Then Artist Lab Series

March 21, 2026 | 2-6 pm

First Church of the Brethren

425 S. Central Pk  Blvd  | Chicago, IL  


Project Description

HPP Creative Design Lab: Reimagining Performance Through Community Voice & Collaborative Creation

The Honey Pot Performance Creative Design Lab (CDL) stands at the intersection of artistic innovation, community engagement, and social transformation. As a dynamic incubator for creative exploration, the CDL offers a rare and valuable space where performance methodologies become tools for both artistic expression and community problem-solving.

Our Approach

Unlike traditional performance workshops, the HPP Creative Design Lab is built upon our signature engaged public humanities investigative process that centers PGM/BIPOC women's experiences. We distinguish ourselves through:

  • Participatory Devising: Our ethnographic, narrative informed methods actively incorporate community voices into the creative process, transforming audience members into collaborators and co-creators

  • AfroDiasporic Lens: We honor ancestral wisdom and ritual practices, particularly focused on divination and improvisation as pathways to agency and self-preservation

  • Cross-Disciplinary Application: Our methodologies transcend traditional performance boundaries, having been successfully implemented in policy development, educational settings, and community organizing


Who We Serve

The CDL welcomes a diverse cohort of participants:

  • Performance artists seeking new devising methodologies

  • Community activists looking for creative engagement strategies

  • Educators wanting to incorporate embodied learning techniques

  • Organizations seeking innovative approaches to problem-solving

  • PGM/BIPOC individuals exploring new modes of cultural expression and preservation

What You'll Experience

Participants in our workshops and labs engage in our unique creative processes that have been refined through decades of performance research, development, and community based practice. These experiences offer:

  • Collaborative research opportunities that transform isolated creative work into community-powered exploration

  • Performance techniques that honor the unseen and elevate marginalized voices

  • Practical tools for translating creative processes into social action

  • Access to HPP's extensive methodology, developed through years of rigorous artistic investigation

The HPP Creative Design Lab doesn't just teach performance, it reveals how performance methodologies can redesign our approach to creativity, community, and change-making. Join us in this laboratory of transformation where art becomes a vehicle for reimagining our collective futures.


If Then Artist Lab Series

If/Then is an entry point into Honey Pot Performance’s Creative Design Lab (CDL) and an invitation into our embodied, relational, and process-driven approach to performance making. Designed as both a workshop and a public-facing laboratory, If/Then centers experimentation, presence, and collective inquiry.

The mission of the If/Then workshop series offered through HPP’s Creative Design Lab is to assist creative thinkers at the start of a project in the completion of collaborative research and generation of source material for the development of new works. HPP and the Creative Design Lab is committed to offering a generative environment that offers itself in service to the curiosities of the lead investigator. A major aspect of the If/Then workshop series is the original devising framework created by HPP that is grounded in divination and improvisation. Participating artists will be introduced to HPP’s original If/Then method, a generative devising process that uses improvisation, critical play, and embodied inquiry to support the creation of new performance material. Artists are not expected to arrive with finished work—this lab prioritizes process, risk, and emergence.


This process is shared with the community in the context of the following beliefs:

  • Afro-Diasporic forms prioritize nonverbal communication

  • Black Feminist and Womanist approaches value equity of all voices

  • Communal and Mutual Aid fosters growth and change

  • Improvisation is a site for understanding human communication and cultural production


3 Objectives:

  • Share the HPP If/Then Divined Devising methodology

  • Collectively support in the creation of new work

  • Engage community as witness in the creative process.