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Pleasure Power Portal

PLEASURE IS NOT FRIVOLOUS, IT IS POWER.

Premiering Fall 2026

First Church of the Brethren

425 S. Central Park Ave | Chicago, IL  

Pleasure Power Portal explores acts of memory, pleasure, and ancestral connection through the relationships, places, and things that bring us fulfillment. Using story and performance, this work will map complex stories of Black humanity on Chicago’s Westside, a region of the city that is often overlooked and misperceived. In partnership with First Church of the Brethren in Fifth City, Honey Pot Performance invites Westsiders to join in conversations and performance experiments that map personal and collective pleasure histories as acts of empowerment: Our joy matters. This multigenerational process will engage seniors, adults, and young people to identify unique stories of pleasure, digging into the myriad ways residents define this mode of feeling through their everyday lives. This sensuous body/mind/spirit exploration serves as foundational research for a new original multi-sited performance work that will premiere at First Church and several other Westside locations in 2026.

Pleasure Power Portal 2026

A multi-part performance linked by a range of experiences that explore the range of pleasure as meaning making, embodied liberation, and connective tissue of human relation. The work unfolds as:

  • The prelude (September 26, 2026): The Pleasure Parade, a Second Line for the Westside. Staged in First Church’s outdoor space and garden, this procession will act as the opening performance moment, heralding a month of pleasure explorations to follow it. A movement and sound procession with a street party vibe will segue into a long table dinner experience. This event draws on the public events HPP did in 2025 (Juneteenth, Royal Affair, Fifth City Festival) as creative research to invite artists and community to come together for a shared moment of collective gathering where pleasure is teased out and declared. 

  • The apertif (October 3-4, 2026): An intimate series of designed tactile experiences to encourage human connection and relationship tending (building off of Adult Tea and our pleasure activation stations). Held in a secret location, this limited registration experience will invite participants to engage in an interactive art-filled environment through movement, sensory creative play, and dialogue. 

  • Pre fixe performance (October 17-18 and October 24-25, 2026): Spectacular. Colorful. Joyous. Buoyant. Thick. Immersive. Moving. This dance theater performance will be staged in First Church’s sanctuary/performance space. The work intentionally roots in the sensual aesthetic of disco, a key predecessor to Chicago house’s emergence. Exploration of a range of social and partner dance forms like stepping, bopping, the hustle, two step, and the freedom of the body within a disco-house aesthetic will inform movement creation and composition. These dance forms and basic steps will act as guides to cultivate a space steeped in ease, whimsy, and with a deep sensibility of groove. Subtle and sexy, but also voracious and direct - the world of this work will also be layered structurally with the tools and content created in the creative research phase: recorded pleasure stories, images, video footage, and a designed deck of pleasure prompts used to inspire movement creation. Together, this disco aesthetic and deep well of “pleasure” content will be mined to build an immersive environment where the documented archive converges to paint a rich, textured picture of what pleasure looks, feels, sounds, and acts like when people come together to experience it, both individually and collectively.