Anna Martine Whitehead
FORCE! an opera in three acts

November 22-23, 2024
Friday November 22 at 7pm
Saturday November 23 at 2pm and 7pm

photo by Wills Glasspiegel of an outdoor environment at sunset. Water in the background, a curved concrete structure in the foreground, atop which a performer covered in gold mylar strikes an arched pose.
photo by Wills Glasspiegel of an outdoor environment at sunset. Water in the background, a curved concrete structure in the foreground, atop which a performer covered in gold mylar strikes an arched pose.

Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

Co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

FORCE! is an opera, but what is an opera? If opera means “big work,” what could be blacker? In this big work, characters become fractals for the abundant relationships blooming in the shadows of the state and carceral power. In this big work, a constellation imagines a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls.

Since late 2019, FORCE! has developed as an iterative re-imagining of performance practice, constantly re-centering care, consent, queer divergence, and rest. The FORCE! constellation re-imagines rehearsal protocols and lets loose discipline to build an abolition feminist theatre practice. This project gathers lessons from lichens, direct actions, mutual aid societies, and other emergent strategies to leverage sound and movement as vectors for processing state violence and racial capitalism. As audiences travel with performers through space, sound, and silence, the boundaries between them become increasingly less important. Using the prison as a particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE! is also an attempt to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.

Co-composers: Angel Bat Dawid, Ayanna Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead. Music Direction: Ayanna Woods, Teiana Davis. Dancers: Jenn Po’Chop Freeman, Zachary Nicol, Rahila Coats. Musicians: Eva Supreme, Daniella Pruitt, Nexus J, Kai Black, Wyatt Waddell, Teiana Davis. Costume Designer: Sky Cubacub.

FORCE! is a Vera List Center Fellowship-commissioned project and is supported by research assistance, production grants, and curatorial support by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School as part of its Correction* Focus Theme. The New York premiere of FORCE! is additionally commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater.

The creation of FORCE! is supported by Pivot Arts, University of Chicago Arts + Public Life, St. Benedict the African Parish, The Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of Fine Arts, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The Chocolate Factory Theater, 3Arts / 3AP, New England Foundation for the Arts / National Theater Project, National Performance Network / Creation Fund, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University / Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Centers, House of the Lorde. This presentation of FORCE! is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

FORCE! is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, On the Boards, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, REDCAT/California Institute of the Arts, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and NPN.