Approaching the creative process with an abolitionist framework invites integrity and flexibility. My interview with the artists Benji Hart and Anna Martine Whitehead revealed how a commitment to the principles of abolition strengthens their creative processes, keeps them honest, and brings them into relationships that shape the outcomes of their artistic practice. As performance artists and educators, they hold a keen awareness of abolition as a verb and a horizon (rather than a fixed identifier)—something that they can move toward, with others, even in moments of ambiguity and difficulty. The scope of our original conversation was expansive—we talked about the arduous and fulfilling labors of iterative art making, consent in collaboration, living wages, generative tensions in the creative processes, and the stickiness of naming Black art forms. We discussed these ideas in the context of producing their performance pieces: Hart’s World After This One and Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts.
World After This One beautifully meditates on vogue, gospel, and Afro-Puerto Rican bomba—three Black art forms created by racialized, incarcerated, and enslaved people—revealing how these expressive modalities share a language of resistance. With a backdrop of political struggle, they emerge as a space for fierce movement and spiritual restoration despite physical, ideological, and systemic violence. Hart’s performance sifts through the expressive vocabulary of each art form, inviting us to learn what they have in common and what their specific historical contexts can tell us about power and racial capitalism, from 19th-century Puerto Rico to Rikers Island in the 20th century. There is a shared language of resistance, but Hart shows that difficult, unanswerable questions also emerge when we delve into this complex grammar of Black creativity. The excerpt of our interview reveals how iterations of their performance were morphed between San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Chicago.
Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts is set in the waiting room of a prison, with a libretto written by the artist themself. The powerful lyrics grew out of conversations with students from the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) in 2021, at the now-closed Statesville Prison of Illinois. Through live music, song, and dance, a constellation of Black queer and femme performers translate how disorienting the waiting room can be. They also create strategies to bond and transgress the prison industrial complex while they settle into this liminal space. By virtue of being set in a theater, FORCE! an opera in three acts reminds us that prisons aren’t the only carceral infrastructures that need to be dismantled. Every day we encounter architectures that contain our movements and impact how we interact with one another; we navigate disciplinary lines and punitive systems of surveillance. FORCE! an opera in three acts invites its audience to be in somatic solidarity with people on the inside, an invitation that Whitehead elaborates upon in our interview. Their responses below also show how an abolitionist framework afforded Whitehead and their constellation more abundance, in theory and in practice. Embedding “surplus labor” (understudies) and “surplus time” into the creative process, Whitehead says, are two ways to offer flexibility, time for rest and study.
Yasmine Espert (YE): Why was it important for you to have an abolitionist framework?
Benji Hart (BH): I see abolition as the core to everything I do. It is both a worldview and a philosophy, but it is also a commitment. It is a strategy. It is a lens. It has come to inform so much of who I am and the work that I do. Abolition helped me to root all three of these forms, bomba, vogue, and gospel, as art forms created in resistance to state violence, whether slavery, incarceration, policing, or colonialism. This was a way of both reclaiming the art forms and politicizing them in ways that they are often depoliticized.
Abolition forces us to reflect on the complicated work of creating and world making when we actually don’t have consensus. How do we create without consensus, or can creation help us find consensus? These are all hard questions that I personally don’t have the answers to. For me it is what these art forms are pushing us to think about, and that informs so much more than just creation in terms of creating a 45-minute performance or creating a phrase of dance. We really are talking about creating communities, creating traditions, creating new worlds, and all of these questions are raised there just as much as they are raised within these forms. That is partially why these art forms have so much to teach us.
To give an example: through oral traditions, we can trace vogue’s origins back to incarcerated trans and queer people in the Rikers Island prison complex. Thinking about vogue as an art form created, undeniably shaped and birthed, with the genius of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people adds layers to voguing’s complicated relationship with power, with capitalism, with commercialism, with whiteness. I wanted to re-root these traditions in this history of struggle that sometimes gets intentionally or unintentionally lost or drowned out, without erasing the tension and the complicatedness and the lack of clarity, for lack of a better word, in terms of what this art form is trying to teach us, what this tradition is struggling against currently. And I wanted to recognize that this was not always an easy or a clear question to answer, and certainly not one that we all answer in the same way.
Anna Martine Whitehead (AMW): The abolitionist framework helps keep me honest, but also it was always an effort to keep theater honest. We are not going to do that Theater, capital T Theater thing. We are going to do a better thing. But it’s hard to make abolitionist performances inside these hierarchical and capitalist systems that subscribe to punitive and scarcity mindsets. This shit costs a lot of money. Heavy lighting design requires material resources. A cast of 14 requires material resources. That means we have to engage with some stuff that makes it a lot harder to even use a language of abolition. For example, inside FORCE! an opera in three acts, we are not a company, we are a constellation. That term has been really important to the project because it allows for the fact that there are performers and a crew, but there are also people in Stateville Prison who were readers of the libretto in the early days and helped work through some ideas. There are organizers and educators who are not at all performers, who never were on stage with us but have been really important to the work. Abolition has been important as a term to give us some framework for thinking about people being able to come and go but still make a meaningful contribution that is recognized and honored.
Another example is how we deal with understudies, or I should say the lack thereof. Of course we can’t afford understudies. But I wish we could because the understudy is a dope-ass concept; I could write a whole, like, dissertation about how cool of a concept that is, just as a practice of abundance. But anyway, we can’t afford it. What we try to do instead is take four and a half years to make the opera. When you need to go home and take care of your aunt with COVID, you can leave the project and we have space for you to leave and also make sure that there will be room for you to come back and that neither you nor the project are going to be financially in straits if that happens. The concept of the understudy—a surplus of labor, where none of it is redundant (or where the redundancy is built into the practice)—is crucial to the work. So instead of surplus labor, I attempted to give us surplus time.
we are talking about abolishing the police. We are talking about confronting and destroying these violent racist systems.
YE: Building on this thread about practices of abundance, what is it like to work with more traditional performance spaces that have fancier facilities, staff, and budgets? I imagine that this material support afforded you some flexibility. But I’m curious, what were some of the things that felt more constraining and challenging from the institutional side of things?
BH: Institutions with money and resources can make some parts of the process so much easier. I have so many fewer things I have to worry about. But that also inevitably changes who is in the audience. And in fact, some of the places that were technically the most challenging to perform in were [sites of] some of my favorite performances. Fancy lighting is great, in other words, but that is not the only support you need as an artist.
World After This One and a lot of the pieces that I make are pretty minimal and can change shape depending on the container. There can be no tech, there can be minimal tech, there can be lots of lighting and cues, there can be mics and audio support or not. It gives me a little flexibility as an artist, but that also means the performance can really change in how it feels. The biggest factor is actually the audience and who is in the room. Do they respond, do you get that call and response? Do people feel comfortable making noise? Are things that you are saying speaking directly to people in the audience or not? That really changes the feel of the performance.
When I performed World After This One in Puerto Rico for the first time at La Goyco, as part of Navigating Blackness, which was an exchange between Black artists in Chicago and San Juan, it was essentially an outdoor performance. We had to put rugs down so that I wouldn’t scrape my knees, and it was the only time I ever performed it with shoes on. I usually like to perform it barefoot. But this required shoes, and so things like that you really had to roll with and make it work. But the energy in that space was so different and the ways that I had to project totally changed the tone of the piece. The script was actually translated into Spanish for folks who didn’t speak English; they were reading along in Spanish. There were just so many interesting things happening in that performance that were not the result of the institution, or at least were not the result of the materials being provided by the institution. But they were the result of who felt comfortable showing up to that space and how people showed up to that space and the ways that me having to relax certain parts of the performance allowed for other people in the space to relax in terms of their ability to interact with it. Things like that can be so unpredictable and so cool.
When you are prioritizing Black audiences and prioritizing Black spaces, that almost inevitably means prioritizing institutions and spaces with less money and less resources. If you are willing to roll with that, if you are able to work with that, which can be challenging—there can be real barriers involved for you as an artist—there are also so many surprises and so many rewards that come out of that that you don’t get to experience if you only work with elite or well-resourced institutions.
AMW: For FORCE! an opera in three acts the institutional support has come from venues, but also from funding. There were already 10 people in the show by 2021, who were all Black, and COVID was happening. It was really important that people be paid and that they be paid to not necessarily produce anything, or they be paid in a way where people could come and go, where we could have time to sit around and talk about how we individually related to the themes of the show. That is something that I was able to do with the institutional support; being able to consistently pay people who are in their early 30s or in their 20s and are almost entirely queer and all Black has felt really good. It’s really profound to help young, queer, Black performers make a living wage for their art form, and to allow for their art form to include study, rest, and a living wage. You are supposed to get paid a living wage in order to also be able to take care of your life, not just to churn out stuff. So that has been transformative for me.
YE: I have a question about design and costume. Martine, you are working with a constellation—a number of people to set a mood with the libretto, a live band, and beam lighting. But the core of the narrative unravels around a scaffold. A cast of 14 people walk, talk, sing, and dance around this prop; they even climb it. The scaffold really anchors the set and makes the uneasiness of being in a waiting room feel more palpable. Benji, it is more of a solo and intimate experience for you in the black box—just you, the beam lights, a podium, and the ancestors. You dress simply, in all white, so that we can focus on your movement and the iconic bomba skirt. There is something about both performances that reads as minimalist to me, but in very different ways. Does that resonate with you both?
AMW: Scenically, Benji’s world reads minimalist, but seeing it at Green Line, which is a small space and a black box, made it feel like we weren’t in a place on earth. I felt like we were in the spirit realm, or we were in a realm that has a relationship to earth but is sort of traveling across dream spaces, ancestor space. There was room to just sort of be in the world that you were making with your body and with costume. That was my feeling.
BH: I love that. That is a great review. I would use the word minimalism, for lack of a better term, but my goal with a lot of what I present is really to try to pare things down to their simplest form so that the complexity of the form doesn’t get lost in some of the other trappings. With forms like vogue, the focus on spectacle can for me take away from all of the complex things that the art form is doing just on its own. But I really love Martine’s description of the blank slate, and how it allows you, but also forces you, to imagine. That is definitely a goal of what I was trying to do.
It’s interesting to think about the term minimalism for FORCE! an opera in three acts because FORCE! an opera in three acts was such a different experience, in my opinion. I felt that there were a lot more intentional aesthetic choices being made inside of FORCE! where the aesthetic of bare scaffolding and exposed lights transported me to a very specific world. The confetti gels falling, that was such a moment that stuck with me. And then the cloud, the gaseous cloud created by the fog machine, that was very iconic, it was a snapshot that I’m always going to remember from this piece.
AMW: I love hearing your memories and reflections on it, Benji. That is really cool. One of the intentions of the scenic design and the space making in FORCE! an opera in three acts is to make that connection. I made a piece in 2017 that was more specifically about histories of prison architecture and its relationship to other architectural typologies. I performed it at Green Line, and there was a Q&A one day and somebody who I respect a lot asked, “Why don’t you perform this inside a prison, because don’t you think that that would be the audience who would most relate to what you are talking about?” My brain was like, What I did clearly didn’t work because what I need to do is convince you all that you all relate to this, and you didn’t get it. So I need to try again. Then FORCE! an opera in three acts happened, and there are a lot of different ways that I thought about that in FORCE!.
Part of the research for this project led me to speak with artist Maria Gaspar, and we were talking as people who have made work with folks inside prison. We were talking about the very strange experience of being in a collaborative relationship with someone incarcerated, where you leave and they stay. We were talking about spending six hours moving around and being in a dynamic situation in prison and how your body hurts. It is the concrete, but also just the air is bad and your body just doesn’t—you are holding your pee and all this stuff. She gave me this term that has been so helpful in my thinking in general and definitely in FORCE! an opera in three acts, which is the idea of somatic solidarity. You can have a fraction of the somatic experience that the people that you are collaborating with have on a regular basis. And on the level of your body, you are already in solidarity with those people. FORCE! an opera in three acts is specifically about the folks who go inside, so I wanted to capture that feeling of discomfort, that feeling of not wanting to be here. “I don’t want to be here” is the statement of the whole prison waiting room, in my experience.
YE: The terms Black, queer, and abolitionist are so important to the people who are in your shows, and the people that inspired them. There’s a specificity to the beauty and the struggle of their stories, and you’ve worked for years to translate that to the stage. Black, queer, and abolitionist are also attached to your projects in terms of structuring press releases, proposals, and communications for a wider public. Both of you have mentioned some ambivalence about how these terms are applied to your work, though. Some of us are aware that there’s danger when radical language gets co-opted, diluted, and separated from the communities that created it. Can you say more about that?
AMW: And I am pretty positive that all three of us are in the practice of trying to make abundant possibilities for Blackness. But one of the reasons this last year, I thought, I can’t keep capitalizing that B in my own work, because I was thinking, What is that? What am I even saying? Do we all agree on what the capital B stands for? Because I don’t know what this stands for and I don’t want to have to be held to account for something that I didn’t even originate. Even before I could think about anything, there were already all these ideas of identity, including the identity of creating an abolitionist work or a queer work or a Black work—we are already operating on the level of language. I want us inside of FORCE! an opera in three acts to be able to do stuff that is just, like, I don’t know what the fuck we are doing, we are just having a time and it is probably going to be really Black, and it is probably going to be really gay, but I don’t want it to have to be that before we even get to do it.
BH: There is such a difficult tension between wanting something to be clear and explicit, which I often feel is an important struggle for me as a Black, queer artist, where I don’t want to take the Black or the queer out. But at the same time, I feel what Martine is saying: What does it mean for me to assert that this thing is that thing, when it means such different things to different people?
What is coming up for me the most is the politics of abolition and specifically the idea of “abolitionist” as an identity. I really don’t like that. Dylan Rodriguez talks about how abolitionist is not an identity because it is not an individual identifier, it is a collective commitment and it is one we have to keep making over and over and over again. It is not a person or a place or an arrival point, it is a horizon that we are constantly struggling toward and that we have to recommit to struggling toward together, collectively, every day. I really believe that, and that really resonates with me. The danger of abolition becoming just a thing that we identify ourselves as [doing], or a label—such a relationship is not actually helpful in pushing us toward that horizon. So on the one hand, abolition is so much a part of this piece, and I want people to see that, and I want people to grapple with that. But especially as abolition becomes a more jargony or buzzwordy term, the police, prison, military part gets taken out of it in a way that also frustrates me. I’m like, no, we are talking about abolishing the police. We are talking about confronting and destroying these violent racist systems. As much as the creation part can’t be taken out, I would argue the destruction part can’t be taken out either.
So while I’m really wanting my abolitionist politics to be clear, I don’t want to be identified as an abolitionist and I don’t want my piece to be called an abolitionist piece because what does that actually mean? What is the point of me claiming that as an identity, or me projecting that onto this piece as a signifier, when the thing we are struggling toward is so much bigger than that and requires so much more of us? Which for me is another complicated thing to grapple with as an artist. I really believe that art plays such a crucial role in movement building and in helping us practice, the flexing of our muscles and the testing of these structures. And at the same time, do I think that me dancing at Steppenwolf is going to defund the Chicago Police Department? No, I don’t, or not directly at least. There have to be other things that I’m committed to and other ways I engage in fighting that go beyond just what I create as an artist, or at least my art has to be engaged in more than just production, performance, sharing with people and them watching it. There are really important things that come out of that, it is not to say that that doesn’t matter, but is that getting us toward abolition? Is that what is moving us in the direction of a police-free, prison-free, and demilitarized world? Those are sometimes hard questions that I want to ask myself more directly, that I want us as creators to ask ourselves more directly. Not to cheapen or to take away from the work that we are doing, that is not my intention at all. But to ask hard questions about what it actually takes to get to where we are saying we are trying to get to. And where are we doing that in our work, and where are we not?
I also increasingly cannot stand the word activist. One of the reasons is that I often experience it as a way for people to shirk responsibility for doing difficult political work. I often hear people say, “Oh, well, I’m not an activist,” “You are an activist,” or “Those people over there are activists, but I’m not an activist.” It irks me so much because so many of the people we label as activists also do not identify as activists. They never chose to be activists, but they are fighting for their lives or the lives of their loved ones, to protect themselves or to survive, and it is not a choice that they ever got to make, it is not a choice that we ever got to make.
Activist erases all the ways in which most people never get to choose to be political, they have to be by nature of who they are, where they live, where they come from, and what is being done to them under these systems and structures; and it is also a way for people of privilege, whatever that privilege might be, whatever that protection might be, to be like, Oh, you know, it is great that you do that, but that is the work that you do, I don’t do that type of work, instead of this work being a collective responsibility and something that we all need to find a way to engage in. No one gets to wash their hands clean of that responsibility.
It becomes another cycle in which all the same people are doing all the hard work, generally Black women, trans people, poor and working-class people, who don’t have a choice to be or not be an activist. Actually, we all need to be finding ways, which can look different for all of us, but we all need to be finding ways to be engaged in the act of shaping the world that we are trying to move toward, and that requires commitment, and that requires risk taking, and that requires messiness, and that requires failure, all these things that people would just rather not have to deal with. We should all be making that commitment, and we are not going to get to the places we are saying we need to get to without everyone making that commitment in some form in their lives and in the work that they do. 
Featured image: Benji Hart (left) © William Frederking; and Anna Martine Whitehead (right) © Landen Motyka