Access notes: This performance includes flashing and bright lights, loud sounds, and heavy haze. Audiences will be directed to their seats after the first 20 minutes of the program, which will not be seated.

Since its development began in late 2019, FORCE! an opera in three acts has become a way to rethink performance making in order to center care, consent, queer divergence, and Black femme rest. We unlearn our training to build a Black feminist theater practice.

This project builds on the transformative COVID-era organizing done by groups like Creating New Futures, as well as the emergent interest contemporary art audiences have shown in “arts in corrections” as well as works that address themes of prison and detention. The excitement around artists and exhibits that visualize prisons—and the work and lives of people inside them—signal a growing willingness among audiences to look critically at the prison industrial complex (PIC), which is profound. Yet there is work to be done beyond a willingness to look. As many scholars and activists have argued (such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, adrienne maree brown, Sarah Fathallah, and Sean Lewis), the PIC replicates itself outside the confines of prisons and policing. FORCE! is, in part, an attempt to abolish the PIC in our performance practice.

This work reimagines rehearsal protocols, thinking alongside a broad group of collaborators and prioritizing marginalized ways of knowing, such as joy and dreaming. Visit force-anopera.com for more information. Thus far, FORCE! has iterated as and through a 2021 block party at St. Benedict the African Parish in Chicago and Abolitionist Company Class, a series of workshops coupling abolition study with performance at the DePaul Art Museum in 2022. FORCE! has been documented through a series of films, including our labor has become more important than our silence, 2020, and Cadenza, 2022. Additionally, songs from FORCE! were performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in March 2022.

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires; the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San José Museum of Art, CA; Links Hall, Chicago; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Read more about the artist at the TBA Festival page on PICA.org.