Pleasure Power Portal

PLEASURE IS NOT FRIVOLOUS, IT IS POWER.

Fifth city festival

August 23, 2025 |1-6pm

First Church of the Brethren

425 S. Central Park Ave | Chicago, IL  

Fifth City Festival

This free, all-ages festival is part end-of-summer celebration, part back-to-school community jam—centering joy, creativity, and empowerment for, by, and about the next generation’s dreams and desires.

Featuring:

🎧 DJs + Performances by
Sam Thousand & Yanna Lynette

🧘‍♀️ Yoga & Wellness with
VibeSpace, Squarely Rooted Yoga, Lady Sol & Mecca Perry

🎨 Art • 🎶 Music • 🍴 Food • 🔥 Footwork Dancedown Battle curated by Murdamommy — with a cash prize for the winner • 💥 More

We’re using pleasure as power to break down barriers and uplift youth voices.

Come celebrate with us—the Fifth City way.

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.