It is a warm night in Portland; the heat of the unprecedented day temperature slowly fading as I enter Winningstad Theatre foyer with a friend. Audience members are being given a small red, yellow, or green piece of paper as their tickets for FORCE! an opera in three acts are checked. Instead of entering the auditorium, we are invited to gather on the street outside, and soon a line of performers exits the building into the waiting crowd. A hex-like cluster of three performers, loosely bound together with a denim patchwork blanket, move along the sidewalk in contorted poses before they turn the corner and disappear from view. A further six performers take to the paved steps leading to the theater, one here, one there, singing into the night: “Tumbleweed, tumbleweed…”. Their haunting harmonies are melancholic, sublime and ethereal.

Other cast members, each holding up a red, green, or yellow page walk through the crowd, beckoning us to follow. No words are spoken, as we form impromptu groups with other strangers, ushered in different directions, some losing their friends in tow. The group I am with is led up the steps, weaving past the singers to a side door of the theater. We follow our leader up the concrete steps of an interior stairwell, not quite knowing where we are or where we will end up. It is a strange feeling, this unknowing, surrendering to being led without instruction, our immediate future beyond personal control. This is the subtle but powerful way that the audience is initiated, physically and mentally, into the mindscape of FORCE!, an opera that revolves around the embodied, emotional experience of incarceration, and its related temporal and spatial realities.

I do not have an incarcerated loved one, yet the memories of my single visit to a Portland prison are indelible. Entering that facility felt like an entry into a world in which the rights and rules of the outside world no longer counted. The pre-visitation waiting room, which FORCE! takes as its psychic space, is a space of initiation into these suspended rights; a visitor’s first taste of a palpable dehumanization process, as one’s appearance, attire, and possessions become the basis on which visitation rights are permitted or rejected. 

This opera is told, not from the perspective of prison detainees or from an overarching reflection on the incarceration system as such, but from the perspectives of loved ones in such a waiting room. It is inspired by creator Anna Martine Whitehead’s personal experience of these spaces, which are mostly occupied by Black and Brown women and their children who keep their incarcerated family members and friends “alive and surviving” – a hidden form of community work.[1] On state average, people of Color are incarcerated at six times the rate of the white population.

Having been led from the stairwell into the main auditorium, the surrounding galleries of the three-level interior suddenly resembled a panoptical prison architecture thanks to the placement of a single scaffolding at the center of the stage operating as a watch tower. From the top a performer shone a light beam onto the audience, revolving it like a night security system, exposing the audience, section by section. This extended the physical and psychological experiences of being watched and controlled, breaking down divisions between “us” and “them.” FORCE! is described by its makers as stemming from an abolitionist theater practice, which, as I witness the opera unfold, manifests the double meaning of promoting the abolition of the incarceration system and foregrounding the incarceration system as an extension of the historic abolition of enslavement.[3] 

FORCE! is an original work and a collaboration between performance-maker Anna Martine Whitehead, co-composers and musicians Ayanna Woods and Angel Bat Dawid and “a constellation of freedom dreamers,” who share its abolitionist, queer, femme, and feminist ethos. The opera cast includes three stand-out singers: “Rap-Soul-Rock Goddess” Nexus J; jazz/poetry/healing-inspired singer Daniella Hope; and theater, opera, jazz singer Eva Supreme. Joining these genre-defying artists are dancer-storyteller-choreographers Jenn Freeman (Po’Chop), Zachary Nicol, and Rahila Coats as well as several multidisciplinary (music/dance/vocal) artists including Kai Black, Daniella Pruitt, Teiana Davis, Anna Martine Whitehead, and Wyatt Wadel. Wadel’s throat-singing and screeching add further levels of vocal resonance. The stakes of the opera can be felt in the striking depth of involvement and powerful strength of presence of the cast, all women and femmes of color.

The three lead opera singers manifest an incredible vocal range, with the music varying between tender and soulful solos, intense vocal sonic-scapes, and occasional upbeat musical-like numbers. This seamless oscillation in tone, tempo and form “explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric” and it is tangibly connected to collective processes of improvisation and co-creation.[4] It is through their song that the opera recounts that the time spent by a detainee on the inside of a prison – be it one year or twenty years – is equally a year or twenty years of the life of the loved one. In one sequence, a singer recounts a dream in which she did not age, and it becomes deeply palpable that incarceration is not only a loss of freedom but a loss of time. There is a harrowing moment where one singer reflects on the feeling of living a love relationship for forty years, sustained only by the merest touch in these weekly visitations. These are lives so interrupted by the emotional weight of this forced separation, that the borders between who is inside or outside the prison start to break down. This is reflected in the opera lyrics: “They’re in the hole, and we’re in the rim”, “I’m getting confused which side I’m on.” 

ORCE! seamlessly maneuvers between these recognizable day-to-day experiences and something more surreal, a kind of mold or fungus that seems to infect the lives and minds of everyone touched by the carceral system. We learn of this unknowable entity in the opening scene, this “thing” appears in a toilet, or has it been imagined? Various levels of abstract sound and devised movement open emotional and embodied registers of anxiety, and confusion that are beyond verbal articulation, and hint at how the carceral system affects mental health. At one moment, a dancer drags the long denim patchwork blanket that now holds a mountain-like pile of something dark and unknown. (Is it coal slag, is it a purple-black vegetable or a crystal?) At another point, they drag their prone body up the steps of the audience pit, and the physical cruelty of the act to his own body is deeply uncomfortable. This visceral experience invokes the physical discomfort and exploitative labor practices of the prison in ways that no anecdote could. It forms an embodied bridge to long histories of enslavement and forced labor. 

In FORCE!, the issue of time is not a question of a single lifetime, the sentencing of an individual. It’s a psychological incarceration specifically rooted in a racialized and racist “justice” system central to Black experience in the US. “We’ve been waiting for our exit or we’ve been played”, one singer reflects. The dream-like aspects of the opera lean into that embeddedness of the incarceration system in the psyche of Black culture – a transgenerational trauma that cannot be separate from the dehumanization of Black life through slavery, redlining, and ongoing economic and access disparities. “In my dreams, I can’t get free, even in my dreams”, one singer reflects. Yet the opera is not without warmth or hope or a feeling of spiritual sustenance; it is there in the voices of the singers as they invoke a tone that sounds like old spirituals, and in the solidarity of the sisterhood of femmes who support each other. It returns energetically in the presence of an amorphous metallic gold-clad “figure” who sweeps through the galleries like a moving amoeba, a single light following it in the darkened theater, creating an apparition-like quality. 

Some of the opera’s power lies in its economy of means. Existing auditorium lighting is used to great effect, thanks to the vision of lighting and set designer Tuçe Yasak and “lighting doula” Itohan Edoloyi. Costumes by Sky Cubacub are understated but distinctive. The few props – one scaffold on wheels, a few concrete blocks, some bolts of fabric, become worlds in the making. A concrete block on which a performer sits, later sits on a performer’s chest, evoking the physical experience of being locked up, unable to move, as well as its attendant psychological weight. It evokes historical images of slavery, the weighing down, the dragging of weight as the means of enslavement.  

The TBA festival that FORCE! forms part of is an all-encompassing endeavor organized by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) that makes amazing productions like this one possible in Portland. No production is perfect, however, and at times, muffled acoustics swallow the lyrics during FORCE!, most noticeably in the all-important opening sequence. Regrettably, and possibly due to its heavy scheduling, the TBA box office did not send out the opera’s 120-page libretto until the day of the performance, suggesting the audience read this PDF as they watched. Given the exquisite word-craft in the libretto, written by Anna Martine Whitehead, I would have wished for it to be printed and available on site. FORCE! would also benefit from being accompanied by open captions, creating additional possibilities for access.[5] 

After the performance, I found myself wanting to know about its making process, which had a slow gestation over five years. Talking with Anna Martine for the first time, I learned that the opera was written in 2019 and unfolded slowly during in the pandemic, with performers collaborating by zoom, often during intense personal experiences including nursing and losing family members. Whitehead and her collaborators sought to center “care, consent, queer divergence, and rest” during this long process, reimagining theater practice and dreaming up an aspirational sociality in the making. 

This comes back in the atmosphere of deep collaboration I sensed while watching FORCE! Five days after the performance, the opera is still quietly lingering, having made a lasting impression. The title FORCE! doesn’t do this opera justice, because in many ways, it is by engaging with incarceration in terms of emotional labor, and not force, that this production is so haunting. Its ethereal voices and embrace of love and solidarity get under the skin, rejecting dehumanization at a profound embodied level. Building on the work of other abolitionist artists, activists, and thinkers in the most experimental and wildly creative ways, this beautiful multidisciplinary creation dismantles the assumption that the incarcerated are contained and somehow outside of society, foregrounding the wider web of lives the carceral system displaces and erodes.

FORCE! an opera in three acts took place at Winningstad Theater, Portland on September 7 and 8, as part of the TBA festival, organized by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Further information and future dates in other cities can be found on the opera’s official website: https://www.force-anopera.com/

Notes:

[1] I cite Anna Martine Whitehead from our phone conversation on 08 September 2024. She reflects further on her personal experiences of waiting rooms and their inspiration for the opera in a published conversation with Coco Picard: https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/building-an-opera-in-the-waiting-room/
[2] A breakdown of statistics per state can be seen on the website of the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative. See: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/09/27/updated_race_data/
[3] For more insight on the prison abolition movement, see Angela Y Davis’s seminal book Are Prison’s Obsolete? (2003) or the recently published Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery (2024), edited by Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, and Aiyuba Thomas.
[4] I borrow these words from Ayanna Woods’s description of her music practice at large. See https://ayanna-woods.com/About-1
[5] The are increasingly more ways to make librettos accessible in the theatre, as discussed in the following article: https://amt-lab.org/blog/2021/9/accessible-technology-in-theatre-captioning