Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Isolated Acts
Rachel Sadie Lieberman | Akiko
June 12-14, 2025 | Red Eye
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2025
DATES & TIMES
Thursday, June 12, 7 pm [masks required]
Friday, June 13, 2025, 7 pm [post-performance engagement]
Saturday, June 14, 2025, 7 pm
VENUE
Red Eye
2213 Snelling Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55404
TICKETS
Pay as you wish, suggested $17-70.
If cost is a barrier, please email boxoffice@redeyetheater.org for discount ticket options. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
ABOUT NEW WORKS 4 WEEKS
Red Eye presents the 2025 edition of the New Works 4 Weeks Festival: an annual gathering for live performance works that respond to the current moment and imagine collective transformation. Each year, artist cohorts engage in peer exchange, mutual support, and dialogue around creative process that culminates in this public sharing. Over nearly four decades, this incubator of new work has become a cornerstone of the Twin Cities performance landscape.
The 2025 artists bring varied approaches to performance—calling on dance, installation, sound, theater, poetry, textile, fiction, devising, sculpture, puppetry, film, improvisation, and more—with a shared commitment to questioning artistic form and challenging dominant culture. Their works traverse themes including journeys and portals, unraveling and reimagining, memory and make-believe, distortion and destruction, authority and coercion, crisis and consumption, lineage and form, how to stomach the horrors and how to tend to seeds. They ask: How do we talk to ourselves? How do we struggle for and against each other? What comes after this?
Each year since the inception of Works-in-Progress in 1983, followed by Isolated Acts in the early 90s, Red Eye has supported artists to develop performance works that push artistic form.In 2025, Red Eye is deepening its practice of collective work, bringing on an expanded group of festival producers: Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra, jess pretty, and Lelis Brito. This year offers multifaceted conversation around the works, including written reflections by embedded writer José A. Luis. Each weekend will also include a post-performance engagement to foster dialogue and connection between festival artists and community members.
COVID POLICY
Masks are recommended for all Friday and Saturday night performances in the festival. On all Thursday night shows, masks will be required. Masks will be available at the door each night.
ACCESSIBILITY
Red Eye’s space is fully wheelchair-accessible.
Run times and sensory notes for each piece will be added to the website as the works develop and the information becomes available.
Please reach out to staff@redeyetheater.org if you would like to receive content notes for any of the pieces.
To request ASL interpretation, audio description, large-print programs, or other accessibility-related accommodations for any event, please contact us with as much advance notice as possible. staff@redeyetheater.org | 612.870.7531
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Rachel Sadie Lieberman
Desecrate
Collaborators: Dominick Burkhardt, Javan Mngrezzo, Ayaka Moriyama, Addie Smith
This is a dance about a prayer, about fringes, about scrambling for each other, against each other, about building heroes, and villains, and victims, and rise, and fall. This is a dance about hypervigilance, and enacting devastation, about symbols distorted, about destroying something while pretending to save it, and how to stomach the horrors. About not knowing how to stomach the horrors.
Growing up, Rachel Sadie Lieberman trained, performed, and taught primarily with Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago. She moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College, and graduated in 2018 with a BA in Geography. Rachel has since performed in works by Contempo Physical, Leila Awadallah, Off-Leash Area, A Cripple’s Dance, ARENA Dances, Javan Mngrezzo, Annika Johansson, Analog Dance Works, Black Label Movement, and Zoë Koenig. Primarily a movement artist, Rachel also plays in textile arts, textual arts, sound, set, and costume design and construction. She has choreographed work presented by Alternative Motion Project, Franconia Sculpture Garden, Candy Box Dance Festival, Black Label Movement, Threads Dance Project, and the Walker Art Center. Off-stage, Rachel works at Cow Tipping Press, teaching and publishing creative writing by authors with intellectual/developmental disabilities.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Akiko
Fever Dream
Dancers: Masanari Kawahara, Pedra Pepa
Sound: Matthew Amundsen
Visual and costume: Orren Fen
It's a pile of questions wrapped around a hot dog
It's a sentimental journey, a train to Utah in 1942
It's dodgeball I never wanted to play
It's a fever dream I don't know how to wake up from.
Akiko is a multimedia story teller, teaching artist, curator, and activist. She has been creating both visual and performance art since 2016. She uses poetry, music, dance, collage, and puppetry. She creates art to reflect her time, and the narrative of immigrant women of color. She aims to create a shared language within her community to collectively resist the oppressive system.
Akiko is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
This Cultural Districts Arts Fund activity is funded, in part, by the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department at the City of Minneapolis.
New Works 4 Weeks 2025 is additionally made possible by grants from the Jerome Foundation and The McKnight Foundation.