Anna Martine Whitehead: FORCE! an opera in three acts, Book Launch and Performance
@ Graham Foundation
4 W Burton Pl., Chicago IL 60610
Opening Thursday, November 12th, from 6PM - 8PM
Join us to celebrate the publication of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts. Simply defined as a “big work,” an opera is a song cycle capacious enough to contain multitudes. Whitehead created FORCE! as a 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 work is a black femme story of interior lives and shared fantasies, busy with what blooms in the shadows of the bureaucratic state and of carceral power.
In December 2019, the Graham Foundation opened its doors to a “jam session” with Whitehead, which doubled as an undercover audition for FORCE! Whitehead returned to the Madlener House as a 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow to develop the work. Now published by Sming Sming Books following the opera’s 2024 tour, FORCE! brings together a foreword by Re’al Christian with the libretto and its footnotes, contributions by Suchi Branfman, Jenn Freeman, Maria Gaspar, and David Thomson, and a live recording of the opera. Using the prison as a prism through which to examine how carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE! and its accompanying publication reflect Whitehead’s attempt to abolish the prison industrial complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.
To mark the launch, Whitehead shares highlights from the opera and its footnotes, alongside performances by Teiana Davis, Kai Black, Carmani Edwards, Daniella Hope, Nexus J, Zachary Nicol, and Eva Supreme. Publication contributor Maria Gaspar presents her ongoing project Disappearance Jail, a collective recording of the eventual erasure of carceral geographies in each of the fifty states within the US. Copies of FORCE! an opera in three acts will be available for purchase from the Graham Foundation Bookshop. This event is presented in conjunction with the Chicago Art Book Fair.
Learn more about FORCE!
Official Website
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Tags: Anna Martine Whitehead, Book Launch and Performance, FORCE! an opera in three acts, Graham Foundation
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