Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Isolated Acts
J.H. Shuǐ Xiān | Charles Campbell
May 29-31, 2025 | Red Eye
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2025
DATES & TIMES
Thursday, May 29, 2025, 7 pm [masks required]
Friday, May 30, 2025, 7 pm [post-performance engagement]
Saturday, May 31, 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
J.H. Shuǐ Xiān
feral
Dancers: Margaret Ogas, Rachel Sadie Lieberman, Pramila Vasudevan, Jules Bither
feral is an energetic container for heartbreak and the layers of grief, loss, and rebirth that often fall hand-in-hand with it. This dance consists of two concentric circles: the sulking, the eye of the hurricane, the pit in your stomach; and the ghosts, apparitions, gargoyles, guardians that swirl their way around and past us. We hope to hold you, we hope to reflect past selves back to your eyes, we hope to mourn with you, we hope to see newness unveil itself. Love is endless and unbound.
J.H. Shuǐ Xiān is a choreographer, improviser, and sound artist based in Minneapolis. She is a 2017/2022 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient and was part of the 2022 Red Eye Works-In-Progress cohort. She is currently focused on researching ritual and meditation through experimental performance.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Charles Campbell
Making Monsters
Collaborators: Akiko, Heidi Eckwall, Mike Hallenbeck, Erika Hansen, Masanari Kawahara, Jess Kiel-Wornson, Megan Mayer
For over 20 years, Charles has been exploring questions of power, coercion, political violence, and the effects they have on our society as reflected in the individual and the personal. This piece is just the beginning explorations of a question that has recently come violently into broader awareness through the grabbing of people off the street without warning by unidentified representatives of the state and sending them to foreign prisons: What constitutes a person's humanity? From that arises other questions, including: How do we see other people and how does that inform what we are authorized to do?
Charles Campbell has been making original performance works since 1998 and he is a founder of both Skewed Visions and Fresh Oysters Performance Research. He works to resist oppressive inequitable systems and to support local, independent, and shifting network of relations that support and sustain living. skewedvisions.org
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.