Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Dameun Strange | Marcela Michelle
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2024
June 13-15, 2024
Red Eye Theater
WHEN & WHERE
Red Eye Theater
2213 Snelling Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Thursday, June 13, 2024, 7 pm
Friday, June 14, 2024, 7 pm
Saturday, June 15, 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
Dameun Strange
O.S.A.G.D. (Of Starlight And Great Distances)
O.S.A.G.D., part of Dameun Strange’s BlacSonic Universe, is a afrofuturist sonic theatre piece, a ritual of healing following the story of Oni 1, a Black asteroid engineer from the year 2055. The audience witnesses Oni’s genetic healing session, through which they are able to time travel to points where ancestors experience impressionable trauma. At those points, Oni receives gifts from his ancestors which heals and transforms them into Star-Nu.
Dameun Strange is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and award-winning composer of conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic works focusing on the African diaspora's stories and themes, often exploring surrealist and afro-futurist ideas. Dameun aims to express through sound and poetry, the beauty and resilience of the Black experience, digging into a pantheon of ancestors to tell stories of triumph while connecting the past, present, and future. Dameun has composed music with such artists as Leslie Parker, Ananya Chatterjea, Joanna Lees, Pramila Vasudevan and has been a featured performer in concerts celebrating the work of George Lewis, Thurston Moore, and Henry Threadgill. He is a 2018 recipient of the ACF | Create Award and 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship. Most recently, his work was commissioned by BMI Foundation for renowned flutist Adam Sadberry, _not running. (The Life of L. Alex Wilson) for flute and electronics was premiered at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center in March 2023. Dameun lives in Saint Paul, MN with his wife, Corina, and their daughter, Ezra. Like any good nerd, he enjoys a good sci-fi story and has a soft spot for anything related to cosmology.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Marcela Michelle
MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%Real
Brandon Anderson Musser: Sound Design, Original Music
Natasha Malmberg: Custom Fabrics
Performed by Emily Gastineau, Pedra Pepa, and Marcela Michelle
Researched and developed by the ensemble with Mads Granlund
You are ushered by your own desire into the belly of our collective dreaming. She is in-situ, waiting, being, exposed. Even venery has its triangulations. If you mix the pigments yourself the colors will be more vibrant—and still, don't you long for a clarion call? I'm going to read to you for a while, and you're going to like it, yes? Turn taking is a part of the game. I want you to eat it. Eat it all.
Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and producer living and working in the Twin Cities. With a diverse background in the arts, her work often deals with questions of simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and the platonic ideal host. She is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in the inaugural Cross Disciplinary field, a 2019 mentee of the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation, and has had residencies with Rosy Simas Dance, Hennepin Theatre Trust, and Tofte Lake Center. In addition to her freelance work, Marcela was the Artistic Director of 20% Theatre Company from 2019-2021 and is currently the artistic director of Lightning Rod, a queer arts organism serving the QTGNC artist community living and working on Mni Sota Makoce. When she’s not onstage or in a rehearsal room, Marcela enjoys cooking, eating, watching video essays, and spending time on the couch with her Wife and dogter.
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.