Pleasure Power Portal 

Pleasure Power Portal is a multi-part performance linked by a range of experiences that explore pleasure’s range as meaning making, embodied liberation, and connective tissue of human relation. The work unfolds in the three phases: 

• the prelude/Pleasure Parade, an outdoor procession, street party, and collective dinner
• the aperitif, an intimate series of designed tactile experiences to encourage human connection and relationship tending
• the “pre fixe” evening length performance, a dance theater work informed by a disco aesthetic and deep well of “pleasure” content. 

Together, these events paint a rich, textured picture of what pleasure looks, feels, sounds, and acts like when people come together to express.

*Venue partner: First Church of the Brethren. Pleasure Power Portal is also supported by MAP Fund.

Artist Bio

Meida McNeal is Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History from Ohio State University. Over the past two decades, she has produced numerous creative projects as both a solo artist and with Honey Pot Performance, with works performed in Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, California, and Trinidad. Positioning her work as an Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance and critical ethnography, she has taught courses in dance, critical performance ethnography, and black diasporic cultural production at Northwestern University, Brown University, Governors State, Columbia College Chicago, and University of Chicago. Meida has also supported city visioning and building work in arts and culture for over a decade.

Honey Pot Performance (HPP) is an interdisciplinary, non-profit collaborative chronicling Afro-feminist and Black diasporic subjectivities amidst the pressures of contemporary global life. Since 2001, HPP has cultivated an approach to performance integrating movement, theater, and first-voice to examine the nuanced ways people negotiate identity, belonging, and difference in their lives and cultural memberships. Learn more honeypotperformance.org