Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Isolated Acts
aegor ray | Margaret Ogas
June 5-7, 2025 | Red Eye
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2025
DATES & TIMES
Thursday, June 5, 7 pm [masks required]
Friday, June 6, 2025, 7 pm [post-performance engagement]
Saturday, June 7, 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.
NW4W Embedded Writer
In 2025, current OMNIVERS artist and New Works 4 Weeks alumnus José A. Luis joins the festival as embedded writer. His writing practice, titled “Reflections,” meets the festival through a series of pieces surrounding the public performances.
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
aegor ray
DAKSHINA
Collaborators: Sati Varghese Mac, BakiBakiBaki, Aurora Masum-Javed, Marcela Michelle, Paige Reynolds, Kristi Golden
DAKSHINA tugs at the threads of inherited power and supremacy. Viewers will be drawn into the realm of symbol and myth, where creation may be confounding. Aberration, appropriation, and antithesis all abound towards a rupture—which hails, reclaims, hails again for all of us. All of us in (uncomfortable) belonging.
aegor ray is a writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His writing interests span queer and trans desire and terror, empire and its long-arching shadows, and the experiences of consuming and being consumed. aegor is writing his first novel. He is a Sagittarius.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Margaret Ogas
Manolo
In Manolo, Margaret Ogas mines her personal archive to explore consumerism, desire, and the tangled ways economies shape our identities. Oscillating between glamour, absurdity, and introspection, she performs rapturous dancing and dark comedy to a soundtrack of recession pop and dancefloor favorites. In a culture born from late-stage capitalism, Manolo asks what of ourselves is left when everything falls apart? And how can we feel sexy when every single thing is on fire?
Margaret Ogas is a dance artist working at the confluence of movement, storytelling, and experimental performance. Drawing from Chicana sensibilities, queer theory, and diasporic futurisms, her dances weave personal narrative with playful design to foster tender connections with audiences. Ogas is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre. Her choreography has been presented throughout the Twin Cities at spaces such as the Walker Art Center, the Southern Theatre, and the Cedar Cultural Center. Her projects have received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2024) and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (2022, 2023, 2024). Beyond her choreographic work, Margaret is a dedicated teaching artist, freelance performer, and grant writer. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.
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 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, 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.