Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts 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.

This accompanying libretto, written by Whitehead, features the script of the performance interwoven with extensive footnotes, forming a complex constellation of black radical thinking, making, and being.

Since late 2019, FORCE! developed as 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 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! marks an attempt to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.

Comprised of a Chicago-based cast, Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! was created alongside co-music directors, Ayanna Woods and Teiana Davis; co-composers Whitehead, Woods, and Angel Bat Dawid; and was 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.

Published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School on occasion of the New York City premiere of FORCE! an opera in three acts at The Chocolate Factory Theater, the culmination of Whitehead’s 2022–2024 VLC Fellowship.