This semester I had the privilege of designing projections for Honey Pot Performance’s Juke Cry Hand Clap: A People’s History of House and Chicago Social Culture.

Honey Pot Performance describes themselves as, “a woman-focused collaborative creative community committed to chronicling and interrogating Afro-diasporic feminist and fringe subjectivities amidst the pressures of contemporary global life.” The collective is made up of Artistic Director and interarts faculty member Meida McNeal, Abra M. Johnson, Felicia Holman, Aisha Josina Jean-Baptiste, and most recently DJ Jo De Pressure.

Their most recent multidisciplinary performance piece,  Juke Cry Hand Clap, “explores 20th century Black Chicago social practices through the lens of house music culture. Drawing from blues, gospel, disco, and funk as well as dances like the slow drag, bopping, and the hustle, Juke Cry imagines house as an evolving lineage of African American forms of making community and of cultural resistance influenced by the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North.”

The performance took place at Mana Contemporary and was part of Honey Pot’s residency with High Concept Laboratories. Performances took place on the weekends but there was a ton of other humanities programing that took place during the week.

Working with Honey Pot was one of the highlights of this semester for me. I learned so much about what performance could look like and how it could engage communities in innovative ways. They created a platform to not only tell their own stories of house music but gave others an opportunity to tell theirs. The work was thoughtful, fun, and inspiring.

In recent news, Honey Pot Performance just received news that they were awarded a Propellor Grant to take this data they have been gathering and create an interactive net-based map of the significant space and places in house history! For more information on this amazing community of creators, check out their website.