Simply defined as a "big work," an opera is a song cycle capacious enough to contain multitudes. Anna Martine Whitehead's FORCE! an opera in three acts is a big 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 Anna Martine Whitehead, which doubled as an undercover audition for FORCE! an opera in three acts. Whitehead returned to the Madlener House as a 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow to develop the work, much of the opera's first two years unfolding on-site. From there grew a 4.5-year endeavor of writing, choreographing, scoring, and building an opera.

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 particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE!, its notes, and the attendant collection of responses mark an 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 50 states within the U.S.

Copies of FORCE! an opera in three acts will be available for purchase from the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

Presented in conjunction with the Chicago Art Book Fair

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires (Chicago / Zhigaagong). Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; REDCAT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Museum of Modern Art; San José Museum of Art; The Chocolate Factory Theater; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Anna Martine and her work have been recognized by Ruth Arts, United States Artists, the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, the Graham Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. They have contributed chapters to a wide range of publications including In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett performance works (Soberscove, forthcoming); Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016). Anna Martine is the author of FORCE! an opera in three acts (Sming Sming, 2026) and TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).

Anaiet is a pianist, guitarist, singer-songwriter and composer from the South Side of Chicago whose sound is a skillful blend of jazz, gospel, neo-soul, RnB, rock, and folk influences. Their music is a vulnerable testament to their lived experience, and is an experiment in somatic empathy and self-compassion, as they seek to inspire exploration and contemplation within the inner worlds of their audience.

Kai Black is a multi-instrumentalist, educator and solo recording artist from St. Louis, MO. They moved to Chicago to attend Columbia College, where he majored in Musical Instrumental Performance. Since then, he's been making waves in the Chicago underground/punk/jazz/queer scene collaborating and co-producing with a wide range of artists in Chicago. He's currently co-producing his debut solo project with Slam Lord Studios.

Carmani Edwards is an artist, bassist, and composer from the South Side of Chicago. Black Music has nourished their love of anything that grooves, and collective music making has become a cornerstone of their life. Keeping with these traditions, their songs are sketches, prayers, letters to loved ones, pages in their diary. They aim to show up to any collaboration grounded in care for fellow artists and listeners alike.

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar's body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Formative works like "Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall" and the "96 Acres Project" include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood. She is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Daniella Hope is a multifaceted artist who uses her siren sound and essence to evoke emotional density with graceful dexterity across various mediums. As the inaugural recipient of the BM in Jazz Voice from Oberlin Conservatory, her story is one of a trailblazer. She is currently crafting her debut album with plans for an artist residency preceding the album release.

Nexus J. is the Rap-Soul-Rock Stardust sending waves through Chicago. They're a vocal powerhouse with visceral lyricism bending and blending genre, movement, and storytelling toward art that sticks to your soul. It's Nina Simone meets Megan Thee Stallion meets Freddie Mercury meets Poet Laureate and yes, it's just as iconic as it sounds. Plug into Nexus J. and you connect to a heart hellbent on collective healing—a lighthouse in our journey toward worlds where we thrive.

Zachary Nicol is an artist and performer based in Chicago, working across dance, improvisation, writing, video, and sound. Nicol has contributed to dance, film, and performance projects by artists including Anna Martine Whitehead, Derek Spencer, AJ McClenon, Davide Balula, Erin Kilmurray, Andy Nicholas Li, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, Adam Linder, Joe Namy, Mlondi Zondi, Alexandra Pirici, Ginger Krebs, and Catherine Sullivan, among others.

Image: Ricardo Adame