RESPONSE 5
Welp! We’re back! RESPONSE 5 is coming this fall! Due to ongoing and never-ending chaos since January 2025, Up in Arms Collective has gotten back together to fight the good fight the best way it knows how: by making art. Every day, it is difficult to keep up with the endless attacks on everything. It can be overwhelming, exhausting, and, and most of all, toxic.
Resistance. Persistence. It’s time to raise our voices again. Over a dozen artists converge at TheatreSouth at First Congo to create original works that explore today’s America.
Up in Arms Collective was born in November 2016 out of the need of artists to respond to what was happening in America at that time in an open and affirming environment. Its first show was standing room only in March 2017, and three more shows followed in 2017, 2018, and 2019. What was happening then is happening again now but this time democracy is at risk, and artists feel a sense of urgency. Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison wrote: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.”
A collective of dancers, actors, drag queens, filmmakers, and musicians is UP IN ARMS and ready to RESPOND with humor, grief, bewilderment, and hope.
Performing artists include Sheri Bancroft, Orixa Bowers, Burton Bridges, Tbj Jones, Jenn King, Louisa Koeppel, Kristen Osborne Lucas, Wayne Smith, Erin D. H. Williams, and Micah Winter along with artist Marie Dennan, filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking, and Our Own Voice Theatre.
Through RESPONSE 5, Up in Arms Collective hopes to empower and leave others empowered. Art has the power to change us all and transform the world.
Choreographer Louisa Koeppel, who is busy creating a new work that explores the Shel Silverstein poem, “Hungry Mungry,” a children’s poem about a man who eats the world, says, “Art and Performance lift us out of loneliness, rouse us into hope, and help us find perspective.”
Join us for a collective cry and laugh! Up in Arms Collective presents RESPONSE 5 on Friday-Sunday, September 5-7, 2025, at its new location, TheatreSouth at First Congo, 1000 S. Cooper, in Memphis, TN. All performances begin at 7:00 pm.
Tickets are $20 cash only and available at the door. Seating is general admission and on a first come, first serve basis. To find out more about RESPONSE 5, like Up in Arms Collective on Facebook. Donations will be made to Mid-South Immigration Advocates, OUTMemphis, and Planned Parenthood – Memphis.
