Honey Pot Performance: Ma(s)king Her: Black Feminist Futures

Ma(s)king Her is a dance theater work addressing the absence of women of color in speculative fiction as empowered future beings and journeywomen. Aligned with AfroSurrealism and Black feminist thought, this modern folktale emphasizing the urgency of creating alternative worlds and economies of value and need, particularly for women of color in a world that often subjugates their collective presence to silence and/or invisibility.

Futurewomen, a web series created in collaboration with Aymar Jean Christian’s Open TV platform, closely documents Ma(s)king Her and Honey Pot Performance's creative process.

Honey Pot Performance is a creative Afro-diasporic feminist collaborative committed to documenting and interrogating fringe subjectivities amidst the pressures of contemporary global life. Enlisting modes of creative expressivity, HPP examines the nuances of human relationships, including the ways we negotiate identity, belonging, and difference in our lives and cultural memberships. Dismantling the vestiges of oppressive social relationships is part of the work. Through critical performance, public humanities programming, and deep community engagement, HPP emphasizes everyday ways of valuing the human.

Following in the footsteps of cultural workers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Beryl McBurnie, Pearl Primus, and Katherine Dunham, HPP forefronts African diasporic performance traditions and draws upon a central notion found in performance studies, Black feminist discourse, and sociology: that non-Western, everyday popular, and/or folk forms of cultural performance are valuable sites of knowledge production and cultural capital for subjectivities that often exist outside of mainstream communities.

Edition of 200.

Images courtesy of Candor Arts.

Published by Candor Arts, 2019, foil-stamped softcover, 212 pages, 8 x 6.5 inches.