Performance

Anna Martine Whitehead: FORCE! an opera in three acts

Nov 22–Nov 23, 2024

Co-presented with Chocolate Factory
38-33 24th Street, Long Island City

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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.” —Anna Martine Whitehead

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.

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The New York City presentation of FORCE! an opera in three acts is co-commissioned by Chocolate Factory and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, where Whitehead is a 2022–2024 VLC Fellow.

The Fall 2024 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation/The Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Mellon Foundation
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Terra Foundation for American Art
and The New School

Network

Related

Lecture

Anna Martine Whitehead: Still in the Waiting Room

Oct 23, 2024

Presentation

VLC Forum 2022: A Time for Correction*, Introducing the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows

Oct 22, 2022

Performance

VLC Forum 2022: FORCE! an opera in three acts with Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty

Oct 22, 2022

Forum

Vera List Center Forum 2022: Correction*

Oct 20–Oct 22, 2022

Catalogue, VLC Forum

Vera List Center Forum 2022: Correction*

Announcement

2022–2024 Vera List Center Fellows

Jun 30, 2022