FORCE! an opera in three acts
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.
The creation of FORCE! an opera in three acts was 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. The New York presentation of FORCE! was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
FORCE! was 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.