This libretto accompanies 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Anna Martine Whitehead‘s FORCE! an opera in three acts.

This is an opera, but what is an opera? If opera is defined simply as “big work,” what could be blacker? FORCE! an opera in three acts features a live band blending gospel, folk, pop, and jazz, with experimental dance, song, and the spoken word. FORCE! is a performance of strange sisterhoods with the power to disintegrate walls blooming in the shadows of the prison industrial complex. A meditation on often-overlooked spaces—prison waiting rooms—FORCE! travels through silence, sound, and rhythm to dissipate borders between performers and audience members.

Comprised of a Chicago-based cast, FORCE! is created by Anna Martine Whitehead alongside co-music directors, Ayanna Woods and Teiana Davis; co-composers Whitehead, Woods, and Angel Bat Dawid; and is devised in collaboration with performers Zachary Nicol, Jenn Freeman, Rahila Coats, Eva Supreme, Nexus J, Daniella Hope, Kai Black, and Wyatt Wadell; with support from Tramaine Parker, Jasmine Mendoza, and Brittany Brown.

Since late 2019, FORCE! has developed as an iterative re-imagining of performance practice, constantly re-centering care, consent, queer divergence, and rest. The creative team re-imagines rehearsal protocols and releases disciplinary categories to build an abolitionist feminist theater practice. This project gathers lessons from lichens and other emergent strategies, direct actions, and mutual aid societies and leverages sound and movement as vectors for processing state violence and racial capitalism. 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.

Libretto by Anna Martine Whitehead.

Composed by Ayanna Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead, and Angel Bat Dawid.