02/13/2026
Before we were HPP, we were ThickRoutes Performance Collage.
From 2001–2009, ThickRoutes Performance Collage, co-founded by Meida McNeal, Abra Johnson, Aisha Jean-Baptiste and Felicia Holman, created bold, interdisciplinary performances across campuses, festivals, and residencies throughout the Chicagoland area.
One of our earliest works, Bag Ladies: Carrying a Diaspora Colored Black, was performed at Northwestern University in 2001/2002. A flowing collage of images, issues and embodied movements, Bag Ladies is a physical meditation on the multiple entries and travels that diasporic navigation entails for contemporary African-American young women. Rooted in explorations of the Black Diaspora, performance theory, and critical race theory, the piece emerged from deep study and creative experimentation.
“At that time, I was in grad school so I was reading a lot about the Black Diaspora, performance theory and critical race theory,” McNeal shared..one of my favorite memories was taking those conversations and editing them to a track that we created.”
Now, as Honey Pot Performance celebrates 25 years of Radical Presence, Performance, and Power, this lineage feels especially powerful.
The journey from ThickRoutes to Honey Pot is more than an organizational evolution, it’s a story of Black women artists building space for pleasure, power, memory, and futurity through performance.
During Black History Month, we honor the continuum: the experiments, the risks, the collaborations, the community care that made 25 years possible, and the many years of Black storytelling still ahead.
