FORCE! an opera in three acts
FORCE! an opera in three acts is out now on Sming Sming Books!
Simply defined as a “big work,” an opera is a song cycle capacious enough to contain multitudes. Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts is a big work of strange sisterhoods, featuring fractaline characters with the power to disintegrate walls. A meditation on often-overlooked spaces—prison waiting rooms—FORCE! travels through silence, sound, and rhythm to dissipate borders between performers and audience members.
This accompanying libretto, written by Whitehead, features the script of the performance interwoven with extensive footnotes, forming a complex constellation of black study, making, and being. FORCE! an opera in three acts was presented throughout 2024 at The Chocolate Factory Theater/Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, REDCAT in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Beginning in 2019, FORCE! developed into an iterative re-imagining of performance practice, re-centering care, consent, queer divergence, and rest. The creative team re-imagined rehearsal protocols and released disciplinary categories to build an abolitionist feminist theater practice. Gathering lessons from lichens and other emergent strategies, direct actions, and mutual aid societies, the project leveraged sound and movement as vectors for processing state violence and racial capitalism.
This publication brings together a foreword by Re'al Christian, contributions by Suchi Branfman, Jenn Freeman, Maria Gaspar, and David Thomson, and a live recording of the opera, with essays and artistic interventions made alongside the “emergent opera.” Using the prison as a particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE!, its notes, and the attendant collection of responses mark an attempt to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.