FORCE! Comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater This Month

The Chocolate Factory Theater will continue its Fall 2024 season with the New York premiere of FORCE! an opera in three acts, a new dance/opera performance by Anna Martine Whitehead. Performances run November 22–23, 2024. 

FORCE! features a live band (blending gospel, folk, pop, jazz, and spoken) and three dancers, all observed by Whitehead from atop a high scaffold, travel through silence, sound, and rhythm to construct a meditation on often-overlooked spaces—prison waiting rooms—and to dissipate the borders between performer and audience. 

FORCE! comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater following performances at MCA Chicago, Redcat (Los Angeles), and PICA (Portland, OR).

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 theater 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.