CBSCM Program Coordinator

Role: CBSCM Program Coordinator
Reports To: Artistic & Managing Director

Salary/Wage: 22hr, 200 hours (approx 25 per month)

Total Contract: $4400

Duration: September 2023 - February 2024 (Six month contract, with the potential to continue the contract in 2024)

Organizational Mission

Honey Pot Performance (HPP) is a creative Afro-feminist non-profit that has evolved from an organic creative collective into a 501c3 organization. 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. We create multiform performance projects, participatory public humanities programming, and act as an incubator for the development of new works by artists of color aligned with our commitment to performance, storytelling, and the Black experience in all its diasporic variation.

About the CBSCM
The Chicago Black Social Culture Map (CBSCM) archive is designed by Honey Pot Performance (HPP) to reach a wide demographic, from the casually curious to academic experts. The archive documents the lived experiences of Black Chicagoans from the Great Migration through the rise of house music, giving this chronically under-documented constituency an opportunity to see their stories and histories represented as written record and archive. The act of creating and sharing the CBSCM archive not only serves to insert this important segment of American history into the official canon, but also engages those whom the archive represents, inviting them to actively help to build and shape this historical record, and increasing their agency from passive audience into participant and history-maker.

In addition to working directly with community members as primary sources for contributions to the archive, the CBSCM has partnered with local archives and organizations including the Center for Black Music Research, DuSable Museum, the Blackivists, The Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation, Illinois Humanities, Westside Justice Center, and Arts & Public Life | UChicago for research and programming. HPP purposefully approaches the process of archiving as a social, community driven practice, with the aim of fostering intersection and interaction between a wide range of institutions, grassroots efforts, and practitioners. In this way, we hope to additionally serve the archiving and historic preservation community by facilitating connections with communities they may not normally have direct access to.

Most public engagement around the archive takes place in community-based partner institutions and community centers on the South and West Sides of Chicago, both of which are home to majority Black and Brown communities.

Description of materials in the collection, or to be collected

Since 2014, the CBSCM archive encompasses the oral and material history of Chicago’s Black social culture across the 20th century from the Great Migration through the birth of house music through open sessions, targeted interviews, and multi-faceted research, data has been compiled on over 350 venues in the Chicagoland area. Materials in the collection include digitally recorded oral histories, digitized audio from cassette tapes, two-dimensional paper flyers, posters, small hand-held “pluggers,” and printed photographs, as well as sartorial expressions of house music culture.

The data has two main components:

(1) socio-spatial information relevant to the history of Chicago’s Black social cultures, much of which is yet to be imported from a legacy archive; and (2) newly collected primary sources that speak to the complexity and fullness of these cultures. All of this data has been aggregated during the development and production of CBSCM mapping sessions and public programs over the past six years and is still ongoing. New assets include a range of performances, panel discussions, and workshops documented through on-site photography and videography, as well as data captured during on-site oral history interviews, and at audio archiving stations, and still and moving image capture stations.

The Program Coordinator supports the development and implementation of CBSCM’s live programs from ideation through execution. This role also includes support linking knowledge documented at live programs to the workflow of CBSCM’s archiving and marketing teams.

Proposed Scope of Duties

Event pre-planning (approximately 10 hours per month)

• Work with CBSCM program and advisory teams on program outlines and event scopes
• Support program team with venue booking and securing guest talent and curators for live programs
• Understand requirements for each event’s theme and content

Event coordination (approximately 10 hours per month)

• Coordinate collection of relevant biographical and archival content shared by talent for events
• Liaise with talent to confirm participation and provide day of event coordination
• Along with technical director and CBSCM marketing team, support social media and live streaming presence for programs (via IG, FB Live, and/or pop ups)
• Coordinate event staffing for CBSCM live programs, including volunteers
• Coordinate with archiving team to confirm all equipment and set up needs are in place for live programs

Post-production coordination (approximately 10-15 hours per live event)

• Support coordination to get all event content to correct processing agents for archival content creation that will live on omeka site (e.g, Research Manager, Transcriber, Videographer, follow up with talent, etc.)

Useful skills

• Detail oriented
• Self motivated
• Collaborative
• Typing & aural processing
• Willingness to engage with community (talk to people!)
• Social media driven design

TO APPLY PLEASE SEND A RESUME AND COVER LETTER TO: hpp@honeypotperformance.org