The Complaint Society at The Brick as part of The Exponential Festival Jan 4 - 7 2023 • With Performers Deja Bowen & Rachel Rivera & Lena Engelstein & Briana Archer • Looks by A.Potts • Styling by JenniLee • Lighting Design by Sarai Frazier • Movement Direction by Lena Engelstein • Stage Management by Cliff Hoitt-Lange • Text Design by Tanya Rubbak • Program Images by Suz Murray Sadler • Documentation by Team Lunch TV & Zanni Productions • Performance Images by Walter Wlodarczyk • Special Thanks to Jon Neustadter, Lexa Safran,Theresa Buchheister, Ryan Downey, Devon Wade Granmo, Jack Woods, Jesse Dorris, Theresa Sterner & Doc Martens, Agentry PR, Nola Latty, Hugo & Vaz Correia

Contextualized by our era of indefinite emergency, The Complaint Society documents and synthesizes our present of ruined meaning, anxious forces, neurotic tendencies, and looping violence. A range of urgencies–climate grief, state-sanctioned force, restorative justice, reproductive rights, systems of surveillance, the growing fascist theocracy in the US, and the memeification of political mood–appear and reappear in the performance as sirens, propositions for time travel, and calls to action. Cast in lighting on an empty stage, four performers follow a text-based poetic score composed by Cohen as they offer thought forms to an audience in the round. Over the course of this hour-long piece, the performers deliver fast-paced and electrifying combinations of monologues, asides, and soliloquies interspersed with highly-stylized choreographed movement. The Complaint Society is as much a dialogue with crisis as it is dialectic with the world of language at large in which we are all subsumed.