Feeling Right, in Solidarity: Place-Based Performance Loops and Anti-Gentrification in Black Cambridgeport
by Kris Manjapra and James Chiyoki Ikeda
Safeguarding the urban histories and futures of Black people amid the forces of hypergentrification and anti-Blackness demands attunement to the social meaning of place. This struggle depends on building broad solidarities. The work of anti-gentrification at the neighborhood level focuses on redressing patterns of displacement and alienation, structured by the differentials of race, gender, and class that drive the property market. St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church, a historic African-Caribbean meeting house in Cambr idge, Massachusetts, is located midway along the “tech innovation corridor” between Harvard and MIT. The church also sits at the heart of one of Cambridge’s historically redlined districts, where a sizeable Black community has long dwelled and flourished, despite battling the forces of civic exclusion, financial segregation, coercive indebtment, and the carceral state. This same redlined neighborhood area has been flipped, today, into a locale of prestigious housing stock for the affluent and upwardly mobile—one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the country. For these reasons, St. Augustine’s is at the center of the anti-gentrification struggle today.
The church’s roots come out of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Black church movement of the early twentieth century, during the reign of what Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis have called the “Jim Crow North.” Today, the real estate market casts St. Augustine’s as a free-floating, de-historicized commodity, liable to be gutted and flipped into condos or business space. Anti-gentrification work, however, refuses this commodity logic and embraces St. Augustine’s as a thickly textured dwelling place with social value steeped in the past and future of Black community life.
Our project uses place-based “performance loops” at St. Augustine’s to share the stories, textures, and temporalities of Black Cambridgeport with local publics, building embodied solidarity among parishioners, descendants of past congregants, neighborhood folks, artists, academics, and political leaders. This emerging solidarity re-signifies the church building within the grid of Cambridge’s overheated property market, resisting commodity logic, and asserting a different system of social value anchored by Black life in the area.
If a “performance” is the feedback loop between performer and audience produced by their dynamic interactions—a definition we borrow from performance scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance (2008)—then a place-based performance includes place itself as a third actor, interacting with both performer and audience in a thick weft of connections. In a historical place such as St. Augustine’s, “looping” describes the mode of interaction between performer, audience, and place in which people feel themselves to be immersed in a historically nonlinear environment—what we call a “cryptic vessel”—in which pasts, present, and futures fluctuate. Whereas gentrifier time (or capitalist time) is linear—a one-way “march of progress” in which property value apparently increases as neighborhoods get whiter, younger, and richer—we are interested in a resistant looped time that flows from the embodied awareness of different co-existing presences: the historical, the present-day, and the yet-to-come. Place-based performance loops move between the ascendant and descendant temporalities of a specific dwelling. They build solidarity through shared encounters with the silent or hidden textures that surface, enigmatically, when we tarry in places of memory. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick powerfully explored in Touching Feeling (2002), new possibilities for social combination across differentials of race, class, gender, and disability become possible when place itself is experienced as a highly textured cryptic vessel of encounter and wonder, and not as a flat, normed, commoditized space.
As an anti-gentrification praxis, place-based performance loops open space and time outside the affective patterns of what Kemi Adeyemi calls “the neoliberal city.” In Feels Rights: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (2022), Adeyemi argues that gentrification reorders place and meaning to facilitate the capacity of one group (often rich and white) to “feel right,” while eliminating the ability of displaced and minoritized people to experience that right feeling. The neoliberal city is thus “an explicitly racialized regime of territorializing feeling and feeling good” (Adeyemi). This amounts to the commodification of affect in which “people, feeling, and landscapes are knitted together as the value of financial profit is bound to the accumulation of certain kinds of good feeling for certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places” (Adeyemi). Opposing gentrification requires opposing this commodification of affect and foregrounding the non-market value of place in ways that refuse displacement of the existing community and facilitate the forging of new solidarities. Place-based performance loops, like at St. Augustine’s, have the potential to build cumulative, sedimented relationships between people and place that undergird collective claims-making and activism.
Gentrification in Cambridgeport
Anti-gentrification work thwarts the linear time of racialized property markets, in which Black, Brown, and working-class urban communities are gradually displaced from their historic sites of dwelling by new housing and development demands infused by fintech, biotech, and infotech financialized capital. In the Greater Boston Area, of which Cambridge is a part, this linear time of gentrification is speeding up, with historically Black neighborhoods such as the South End, Kendall Square, Riverside, and Cambridgeport—all categorized as “very competitive” housing markets by Redfin metrics—witnessing accelerating year-on-year increases in housing prices since 2015.
With its location between Harvard and MIT, the neighborhood of Cambridgeport is an epicenter of this hypergentrification. Over the past decade, as the overall population of Cambridge has increased by 10%, the Black population has decreased by over 10%. Iconic Black-owned cultural sites, such as the Western Front nightclub, have closed down, only to be bought up and turned into condos. Black home ownership in Cambridgeport, 27% in 1970, had fallen to 20% by 2020. Black residents with generational ties to the area have been largely displaced, their land titles taken over by the younger, whiter, and wealthier.
St. Augustine’s itself is thus a performer, an actor, in the process of its own survival, creating new feelings and responses among a diverse configuration of neighborhood partners.
Places like St. Augustine’s, whose sedimented social and historical meanings are the bedrock of Black community life in the area, are being gentrified away. The loss of these kinds of “common properties” (by 1925, there were some fifteen Black churches in the environs of Central Square in Cambridge; today, there are six), means the loss of their deep histories and the alternative Black futures that they embody. One common trajectory for the market’s transformation of socially meaningful common property (also called “third spaces”) into private profit is so-called “chondo” preservation, in which historical places of church community life are gutted and transformed into blank, shiny, remodeled condo units, alienated from their historical roots in ways that consign their historical uses, at best, to the realm of commemoration—memorialized only on a plaque in the gentrifying linear time of “moving on.” This genre of preservationist logic has underlaid the effective destruction of third spaces and cultural sites in Cambridge, Boston, and across the nation, for decades. For example, Blessed Sacrament Church, only blocks away from St. Augustine’s, St. Hedwig’s in East Cambridge, the Holy Cross Church in East Cambridge, and the Beth Israel Synagogue in East Cambridge, all with roots in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, have been made into condos.
Our work at St. Augustine’s, rooted in a deep and long-standing collaboration with the small, yet resilient, worship community at the church, insists that the preservation of this Black cultural site must attend to the textures of place. Place-based performances become part of an ongoing, extended, collective ceremony to evoke and reckon with the looped, nonlinear time centered around the church. Performance allows for this disruptive time to be felt and communicated, and makes possible new affective solidarities that break up the seemingly inexorable logic of racialized displacement, and the feeling of “moving on”—the dominant affective form of gentrification. St. Augustine’s itself is thus a performer, an actor, in the process of its own survival, creating new feelings and responses among a diverse configuration of neighborhood partners. This makes possible an anti-gentrifying preservation ethic, or what might be called “Black Preservation,” which is not about doing something to this historic Black church, but rather, about allowing new kinds of community to be performed within and along the highly-textured grain of this living place, in ways that counter gentrification’s script.
A Brief History of St. Augustine’s AOC
From the 1890s onwards, hundreds of thousands of Caribbean people departed the islands of Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Grenada, and Trinidad to the northern United States, in a Caribbean “great migration” searching for work and opportunity, pathways to higher education, and entry into the professions. Between the 1890s and 1940s, Caribbean migrants began settling in Cambridgeport, during the decades of colonial malaise between the death of the British colonial sugar industry and the coming of Caribbean flag independence after the Second World War. Specific parts of Cambridge—Riverside and Cambridgeport, for example—became the main receiving area for many upwardly mobile Caribbean families, even as these same neighborhoods were intensively redlined by the city and by banks at the same time. In 1930, a group of Caribbean migrants, mostly from Barbados, pooled money to purchase a meeting house—a worker’s chapel in the neighborhood of Cambridgeport—and named it St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church.
George Alexander McGuire, the church’s founder, came as an Episcopal pastor from Antigua to the United States in the 1890s. Eventually pursuing a medical degree in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after many years leading Black church communities across Philadelphia, Richmond, and Arkansas, he established St. Bartholomew’s Church for West Indians in 1908. That church, close to Cambridge’s Central Square, is still alive today. At its founding, the church was not recognized by Cambridge’s white-run Episcopal diocese, so McGuire left the denomination entirely. In the 1910s, he met Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey, as the Garveys traveled internationally to establish the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Together, McGuire and the Garveys created a new Black-led church denomination loosely affiliated with the UNIA. They called it the African Orthodox Church, with St. Augustine’s as its pro-cathedral, or worldwide center.
By the 1960s, the church served more than seventy-two families, and over 200 people. The families that attended St. Augustine’s lived between the Cambridgeport and Riverside neighborhoods in Cambridge, on the one hand, and in Roxbury, a heavily Caribbean-American neighborhood four miles away in Boston, on the other. Church members living in Cambridgeport and Riverside were largely tenants of white homeowners, but a sizeable number of worshippers actually owned their own homes—some 25% of families. Today, approximately half of those homes remain in the hands of their descendants, showing the resilience of Black presence in the area. Yet, the other half of congregants’ homes have either been sold on the property market, almost entirely to white families, or else, in a significant number of cases, seized and resold by city authorities for non-payment of taxes. Since the end of rent control in 1994 and the growth of Cambridgeport’s hyperactive property market in the 2000s, Black renters in the area have been almost entirely displaced. Meanwhile, Black homeowners have been disproportionately subjected to property confiscation.
Still, St. Augustine’s harbors what James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) has called a “hidden transcript” that counters this script of gentrification and Black displacement. The church has withstood real estate’s “market time” for decades. From 1955 to 1970, members of the church vigorously resisted the construction of a planned “Inner Belt” highway that was intended to slash through the neighborhood. The church served as a place for a large Black community to worship for generations, to hold baptisms and funerals, to gather for community meals in the basement kitchen, and to enjoy musical and dramatic performances. Even today, as the church community has reduced to just four remaining members, the fact that services are held every Sunday, and that the members have fended off the property market and the efforts by realty hawks to buy up their building and convert it into parcels of private housing commodity, testifies to the historical aliveness of the place.
In 2020, Black History in Action for Cambridgeport (BHAC) started work as a collaboration between church members, neighbors, and academic workers as a place-based nonprofit dedicated to anti-gentrification. Over the past five years, the nonprofit has preserved the physical building: raising money, developing architectural plans, and hiring contractors to replace the roof, re-shingle the church’s exterior, install newly glazed stained glass windows and new doors, and construct an accessibility ramp. The nonprofit, with the help of Northeastern University’s Arts & Humanities Social Action Lab, is also creating a documentation center at St. Augustine’s, archiving and digitizing the church’s documents, and safeguarding its material treasures, including its liturgical objects, its crockery, and its memorabilia gathered over a hundred years of life. BHAC also conducts oral histories with church members and their family networks to record the stories and itineraries of Black Cambridgeport.
Place-Based Performance Loops at St. Augustine’s
But this work of anti-gentrification preservation transforms into something more powerful and future-oriented when combined with place-based performances. Through performance events, the church building itself asserts its aliveness in ways that disrupt the linear time of property, resisting categorization as an antique or a memorial. St. Augustine’s aliveness is sensory and tactile—it is felt in the textures of the place, in the particular ways it creaks, the way it smells, and the ways it feels to the touch, all of which are brought to the fore during performance events.
Black History in Action for Cambridgeport holds regular performances at St. Augustine’s, steeped in these textures in ways that cultivate a new affective community, a sensory solidarity network, to resist the logic of gentrification. Experience is key here; the exhibitions, poetry, and music performances that regularly take place at the church immerse people in the layered world of St. Augustine’s temporalities of pasts and futures. These events create loops of community, returning participants to the unfolding enigma hidden amid material and historical layers of place and memory. As opposed to the feeling of “moving on,” place-based performances at St. Augustine’s cultivate and make communicable the feeling of “returning to” and “staying with.” And the stamina to return to a place and its textures is a source of wonder. This shared experience of wonder is the spark for a new kind of neighborhood-based solidarity across lines of race, gender, class, and disability in a hypergentrifying urban environment, in which the linear time of privatizing property pretends to rule, and appears to accelerate.
Again, the methodological centerpiece of our work at St. Augustine’s is the place-based performance loop—the complex meaning-making process that unfolds when performers and audiences interact with the textures of historical objects and historical place, creating experiences that flicker between different pasts, the present, and possible futures. A nonlinear, layered sense of time results, which breaks up linear capitalist time. Unlike in a museum exhibit, where deracinated historical objects are encountered in an alien space, beholding a historical object in its own place thrusts the viewer into a dynamic engagement between the object’s past, the historical contexts and conditions that make its existence possible, the object’s presence in the present-day context, and its disposition to the future.
This engagement with the materiality of the church and its treasures stretches the viewer across different moments in time. The viewer “loops” through time repeatedly, juxtaposing different meanings from what they are seeing and sensing; and an experience of wonderment results. In this process of looping, place-making is an act, and place-based performances produce a new collective subjectivity—a new actor—that defies the logics of property-market time, even at the small scale of a single city or neighborhood or building.
In April 2024, BHAC hosted a performance event at St. Augustine’s called “Black Cambridgeport to the Future.” The main room was staged as an exhibition about the church’s history—we affixed panels to the walls with historical narratives, old photographs, and QR codes to online oral histories and maps. We invited members of the neighborhood, across the old-timer/newcomer divide, to an evening of self-directed movement and collective immersion, facilitated by live music. At that stage in the renovation process, the front entrance of the church had a temporary set of wooden stairs leading into a newly constructed annex adorned with gorgeously wrought wood panels, but with protective paper still covering the new floorboards. Entering the church itself, the scent was a mix of old wood and fresh sawdust. Two pianos and an assortment of other furniture created a sort of front vestibule separate from the rest of the church, with informational posterboards about the history of St. Augustine’s and BHAC’s work arranged beneath the brand new stained-glass windows and a thick bell pull hanging from the belfry. Visitors mingled in this area before turning into the nave, where the old wooden pews were arranged to simultaneously maintain the feel of a traditional church, while also dividing the space into quadrants with clusters of historical objects set out on tables and inward-facing pews to facilitate engagement with the objects. The middle aisle between the four squares was interrupted by other displays of historical objects, creating a series of possible paths that snaked through these mini-exhibits. There was no clear “correct” pathway to follow, nor any clear beginning or end to the exhibition.
Each quadrant featured material treasures from the church, curated to illustrate one of four “narrative circles” of the world of St. Augustine’s: generational, social, geographic, and spiritual. For example, the “generational circle” included a registry book with a list of names of infants baptized at the church in the 1950s, alongside Sunday school work of older children from the 1960s and pamphlets from parishioners’ funeral services from the 1990s. The spiritual circle included a biretta hat of the bishop and an incense censer, both carefully displayed according to the wishes of the church members. The juxtaposition of these objects suggested certain narrative possibilities, but each object also had its own story to tell, imprinted in its specific materiality. The display of these treasures generated an aura in the space. They each had particular textures that became more and more apparent the longer the audience members spent time observing them. As the audience meandered around the space at will, the presence of these objects, the arrangement of the pews, and the feeling of the room itself enabled an experience of looping, and of wonder.
As a crowd of people engaged in their own processes of looping, the church was imbued with live music. A contemporary classical saxophone/bassoon duo called “Two Toes Tiger” and singer-songwriter Devin Bailey performed original music (some improvised, some composed) throughout the event, providing a common sonic context within which the audience could loop. The musicians, set up in the area near the pulpit just before the chancel, looped themselves with the room, while engaging the audience simultaneously. They were framed by portraits of the AOC’s founder Bishop George Alexander McGuire and his successor, Bishop Gladstone St. Clair Nurse, who seemed to look on approvingly. Few people simply sat and listened; the dynamic feedback loop between audience, performers, and place enabled everyone to enact their own self-directed mode of engagement, whether through looking at the objects, or connecting with other people, or playing music that resonated with the space both physically and spiritually.
The vibrations of the music, physically mediating between the audience, the objects, the room, and the musicians, was shared between all those present, regardless of what they were looking at or who they were with. The materially and sonically textured environment of the church served as a basis for strangers to connect—a common shaping force in the general “vibe” of the room which influenced how individuals looped with the historical objects. The processes of place-making, and of “feeling good,” to use Adeyemi’s term, unfolded in the interstices between the meandering audience, the attentive performers, the objects, and the room itself, with these many discrete parts accumulating into a single art event whose very center was the historicity and layered social meanings of place.
Performance theorist Tommy DeFrantz observes the fundamental importance of physical co-presence in Black artmaking, arguing in Black Performance Theory (2014) that “performance involves subjectivity occasioned by action born of breath.” The place-based performances at St. Augustine’s constitute an invitation into Black performativity, or what DeFrantz calls Black Expressiveness:
black is the manifestation of Africanist aesthetics. The willingness to back-phrase, to move with a percussive attack, to sing against the grain of the other instruments, and to include the voices of those gathered in the fabric of the event—these are the elements of black that endure and confirm. Yes, it can be the grain of the voice or the sway of the hip; a stutter call that sounds like an engine starting or an unanticipated reference to political circumstances: these elements mark the emergence of black in time and space. This black is action: action engaged to enlarge capacity, confirm presence, to dare. (DeFrantz, emphasis ours)
For DeFrantz, the invitation into Black expressiveness empowers a collective actor, a new affective community, to feel something together, something “beyond the limited events of words alone,” to practically expand its capacities within the scope of a differently imagined future. By building a particular kind of affective solidarity, place-based performances at St. Augustine’s invite people to come together in experiences of wonder, and beyond the exclusionary realm of what appears as normatively possible.
The word “invite” is key because it centers the agency of people whose moves cannot be predetermined or predicted. While a room can be staged a certain way, any given performance event itself is produced by a totally unique and idiosyncratic moment of human co-presence marked by spontaneity. One cannot know ahead of time how the room will move people, and embracing this unknowability is key to the process of envisioning alternative futures.
We saw some particularly gripping examples of the wonderment this spontaneous combination of people in place can conjure in another recent event at St. Augustine’s, a “Sunday Matinee” held in February featuring two young Black artists, the poet Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah and the banjo player Grace Givertz. Neither knew anything about St. Augustine’s before this event, yet the church asserted its placeness and historicity through their performances.
Givertz noted how special it felt to perform in St. Augustine’s. She described being struck by the room as soon as she entered it and expressed surprise at having had no idea about this aspect of local Black history before the event. To bring oneself as a performer into a space as lived-in as St. Augustine’s, with its gently creaking wooden floors and the distinctive sonic experience of its stillness, is to weave into its fabric, to loop between temporalities in a way that binds.
Oppong-Yeboah described his poems that day as centering “memory and history, how it experienced and moves through and around us.” He spoke powerfully about his own upbringing in the Church of Pentecost, that denomination’s transnational history (founded in Ghana by an Irish missionary and brought around the world by Ghanaian emigrants like his own family), and the strange familiarity of this completely different church. Oppong-Yeboah opened his set with an acapella rendition of the Randy Scruggs hymn “Sanctuary (Lord Prepare Me),” and almost immediately, more voices rang out from the pews. Members of the audience, which included legacy members from the church community along with a multi-racial and multi-generational group of others, sang along. In that moment, performer and audience joined, and the looping of this new assortment of people transformed the matinee into some kind of ceremony. “It’s how I first experienced the song myself,” said Oppong-Yeboah, “as one voice amongst many.” Reflecting on the role St. Augustine’s itself played in his set, Oppong-Yeboah said “I felt held in the space . . . And it felt powerful to be able to weave my own personal histories into the history of the space.”
In the most recent performance event at St. Augustine’s, which featured artist Forbes Graham, the focus was not only on the power of bringing one’s own art into this historical place, but also on helping the church to speak for itself to the assembled. Graham designed a sound bath based on the oral histories of St. Augustine’s, recorded by the Black History in Action team. He blended audio samples from the oral histories with music and sonic effects, using the remix to expose both the spoken and unspoken in the recordings, and the way history loops in the present. The oral histories came in and out amidst various kinds of ambient buzzes, tones, reverberations, and blowing sounds. While oral histories can sometimes feel flat or testimonial, Graham’s sound performance traced the textures of voice and the grains of experience sedimented in them, then released them back into the church, whose walls and high wooden ceiling reworked the sounds in unpredictable ways. In Graham’s art, these voices occasioned a ceremonial moment of attentiveness, of tarrying, tuning in—of wonder.
About the experience of composing the place-based sound bath for St. Augustine’s, using oral histories from congregants, Forbes Graham said, “It was like stepping through different windows in time simultaneously.” The design of the sonic form was, itself, “diasporic,” he reflected. “I found myself thinking about multiple layers of diaspora, as it relates to people moving out of a neighborhood but still identifying with it.” For Graham, this resonated with his own experience, growing up in Maryland, but with parts of himself distributed across D.C. (where his parents are from), North Carolina (where his grandmother grew up), and West Africa (where his ancestors once lived). Composing and performing the sound bath not just in but also for the cryptic vessel—the nonlinear place—of St. Augustine’s, shifted things for the artist. “It was nerve-wracking! I felt a great sense of responsibility to serve the place, the oral histories, and the listeners. It took a great deal of concentration to focus for two hours, even if I was mostly adjusting sounds.” And Graham’s intense quality of presence, elicited by the texture of place, transformed the audience, too, making it more responsive—and responsible—to the history of Cambridgeport’s Black experience.
Anti-gentrification names an array of ongoing actions and struggles to interrupt market time, but these must be rooted in an underlying feeling of receptivity to what and who all continue to endure and maintain presence despite being excluded from the dominant reproduction of propertied norms. This ability to feel good differently is rooted in an ethics—and a performance—of place.
Place-based performance loops create opportunities for all audience members—including St. Augustine’s parishioners, neighborhood folks, local elected officials, artists, scholars, and curious passersby—to experience in their bodies many layers of historicity and social meaning simultaneously. The audience, from those intimately connected to first-time visitors, feel a new collective subjectivity at work that transgresses gentrification’s patterns of division, displacement, and social alienation. Moreover, the regularity of these performances has built a stamina to feel differently about the neighborhood, and to form ever-richer and more thickly layered relationships with place. Solidarity, as a feeling, both requires and returns stamina. And the growing durability by which a changing neighborhood public returns to and stays with St. Augustine’s, in turn, generates powerful counterclaims against commodification and the reduction of place to property.
Feeling Black Aliveness
If gentrification casts communities like the world of St. Augustine’s as static, antiquated, flattened, and anachronistic, resisting gentrification must involve re-signifying communities as textured, sedimentary, dynamic, integrative, and alive. One of the most exciting potentials of the place-based performance loop is its capacity to integrate many different people, old-timers and newcomers alike, into a different way of feeling time beyond the neoliberal, racial norm. The existing congregation at St. Augustine’s is, of course, especially tied to the church, but performance loops can give other people opportunities to inhabit and relate to place in ways that are fundamentally connected with the congregation’s way of inhabiting and relating to it. In other words, if gentrification simply replaces one population with another, place-based performance loops can expand the existing community into a larger, syncretic one that resists the reduction of socially meaningful places to property, and counteracts gentrification and displacement without freezing “the community” in time and putting it under commemorative glass. Crucially, this expanded community includes artists of all kinds who make the performances come alive, as well as professional historians seeking to put their skills in service of anti-gentrification work. Historians help recover, organize, narrate, and share place-based histories in collaboration with existing community members, enabling people with different relationships to that place and its history (including the historians themselves) to join together as a collective force that can more effectively resist enclosure by capital. Historians retrieve deeds, assemble and organize archives, unearth place-based stories, locate those stories within a broader web of historical forces to produce a more complete account of cause and effect, and deploy the various institutional resources at their disposal in the service of the place- based community. The place-based performances at St. Augustine’s are grounded by the fruits of such historical work—curated vibrant artifacts from the church’s history arranged in a building undergoing major physical restoration, inviting people into different dimensions of meaning and feeling. This fruitful collaboration narrows the chasm between community and academe—one example of how performance-based anti-gentrification praxis can enable new practices of solidarity.
The very existence of St. Augustine’s— both as building and as “world”—is an affront to capitalist time. Within the framework of the property market, an old church with a small congregation is something antiquated and anachronistic; it is untapped market energy whose kinetic release results in the capture of profit, and in replacing those who used and inhabited the space with higher-value occupants. Through the gentrifier’s lens, this is merely the inevitable way of things; all alternative futures are foreclosed. But if resisting gentrification is quixotic and “impossible” in a place like Cambridge, then place-based performance loops are a daring attempt to enact the impossible. If gentrification pushes us further and further towards alienation, generalized loneliness, and social rupture, place-based performances hold out the possibility of new solidarities, new subjectivities, and a new method for uniting disparate groups against the linear march of commodified property. Within the walls of St. Augustine’s, then, these performance events (these ceremonies, even) offer a return to what Black churches have always done—create a cryptic vessel for the flourishing of Black aliveness, and fertile soil where alternative futures can take root and grow.