Anna Martine Whitehead
Thursday, May 23–Saturday, May 25
Photo by Argenis Apolinario
Over years of making performances inside and around prison, and visits with incarcerated friends and family, Anna Martine Whitehead meditates on the relationships of women and femmes in the waiting areas—the loved ones forced into a complex intimacy both tied and always resistant to the institution. FORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared fantasies where characters become fractals for the abundant relationships blooming in the shadows of the state and carceral power. Queer and dreamy, ambitious and angsty, and inspired by Black girls, abolition feminists, and waiting rooms everywhere, Whitehead’s powerful opera imagines a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls and features collaborations with composer Ayanna Woods and a constellation of freedom dreamers. Using sound, movement, and 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.
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