Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Benny Olk | Masanari Kawahara
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2024
June 6-8, 2024
Red Eye Theater
WHEN & WHERE
Red Eye Theater
2213 Snelling Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Thursday, June 6, 2024, 7 pm
Friday, June 7, 2024, 7 pm
Saturday, June 8, 2024, 7 pm
TICKETS
Sliding scale $15-50 (before Eventbrite fees). If cost is a barrier, please email staff@redeyetheater.org for additional options.
COVID POLICY
Masks are recommended for all Thursday and Saturday night performances in the festival. On all Friday 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
ABOUT NEW WORKS 4 WEEKS
Red Eye presents the 2024 edition of the New Works 4 Weeks Festival: an annual gathering for inter/anti/transdisciplinary performance that challenges dominant modes of making and viewing. This year’s festival contains a throughline of futurisms, which arose organically from the ten commissioned artists. Bringing together many lineages and approaches, the works call together patterns and portals, ancestors and imagined homelands, compost and clay, liberation and becoming, to imagine how we might be otherwise.
Each year since the inception of Works-in-Progress in 1983, followed by Isolated Acts in the early 90s, Red Eye supports artists to develop new performance works that cross disciplines of dance, theater, and music, pushing artistic form and interrogating the contemporary world. The cohorts support each other’s work through process sharings and feedback, fostering collaboration and space to take creative risks. Over nearly four decades, this incubator of new work has become a cornerstone of the Twin Cities performance landscape.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Benny Olk
A SCHEMA
A SCHEMA is a solo performance by Benny Olk rooted in an emergent choreographic practice that interpolates forms through subtle mathematical patterns. These refractions unfold and transform one another, conjuring universes and portaling between them, held together by one dancing body amongst a sea of spectators.
Benny Olk (he/him) is a performing artist and teacher based in Minneapolis with an interest in contemporizing and contextualizing American modern and post-modern dance. As a member of Lucinda Childs Dance Company, he performed reconstructions of pieces such as Dance and Available Light. He performed in reconstructions of works by Merce Cunningham, and has premiered works by Moriah Evans and Anthea Hamilton. His collaborations with Tristan Koepke have been presented at SPACE in Portland, ME and CANDYBOX Dance Festival in Minneapolis, MN. Benny holds a BFA in Dance from NYU and an MA in New Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Masanari Kawahara
doro doro
Soundscape: Sho Nikaido
Becoming an empty vessel
Becoming a stone filled with ancestral love
Becoming a piece of clay shaping to be worth something
Becoming a piece of mud on the bottom of six rivers of Hiroshima
Becoming my stillborn sister who would’ve been born on the year of fire horse
Becoming a wandering spirit trying to get home on a midnight taxi
Becoming my late grandma who delivers milk on bike
Becoming nothing.
Masanari Kawahara 川原正也 (he/him/his) is a Butoh doer, theatre artist, puppeteer, and arts educator. In connection to Red Eye Theater, he has performed in Lelis K. Brito’s A Binding Strangeness (2022) as part of Isolated Acts and Valerie Oliveiro’s SOFT FREEDOMS at the Cowles Center (2022). His solo piece 8’46” (movement for healing), featuring a soundscape by Sho Nikaido is, was performed as part of Offerings: BareBones 2020. Previously Masanari was a member of the Butoh group Nenkin Butoh Dan, which received a 2015 Sage Award for outstanding dance ensemble for Fu.Ku.Shi.Ma. Other dance projects including Anthea Hamilton’s Cabbage Four Ways (2021) as part of Paradox of Stillness at Walker Art Center; Throw Open the Heavy Curtain (2018) by Sharon Picasso Projects; prairie/concrete (2023), Census (2016), Every Other (2015) and Fold (2014) by Aniccha Arts. Masanari is a Playwrights’ Center McKnight Theater Artist Fellow 2018-2019 and 2010-2011.
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 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 program is additionally supported by grants from the Jerome Foundation and The McKnight Foundation.