Photos: Valerie Oliveiro
Or (Laura) Levinson | Noelle Awadallah
New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2024
May 30-June 1, 2024
Red Eye Theater
WHEN & WHERE
Red Eye Theater
2213 Snelling Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Thursday, May 30, 2024, 7 pm
Friday, May 31, 2024, 7 pm
Saturday, June 1, 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
Or (Laura) Levinson
DOIKAYT: a velt mit veltlekh
Performer-collaborators: Eliana Matea Berger-Durnbaugh, Simkha Brown, Katya Chizayeva, Luca Evans, Yael Horowitz, and Ozzy Irving Gold-Shapiro
DOIKAYT—hereness. A velt mit veltlekh—worlds within a world; or, idiomatically, “small world.”
This project began as a seed, exploring Ashkenazi Jewish relationships to land and solidarity in diaspora. What has emerged over the past three years is an ever-deepening expression of personal, cultural, and ancestral research. At the center swirls Yiddishland—that ethereal/imagined/erased/bone-deep space we call home—made of words, poems, music, dance, folk practices barely but fiercely remembered. We reach into the mud of memory, prophecy, compost, unknowing and transformation; and in our digging, we abrade that which has calcified, compost that which is gone, and breathe new life into those seeds drawn from decay.
Or (Laura) Levinson (they/them), is a Minneapolis-based dancer and performance artist blending elements of original choreography with live music, participatory ritual and song. Their most recent project, DOIKAYT: gedenktentz, was an interactive outdoor performance featuring klezmer music, Yiddish folk dance, and themes of Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora and the search for home, belonging, and solidarity on Dakota land. Past workshops and performances have included DUMPSTER FIRE: An Evening of Queer and Trans Performance at Franconia Sculpture Park; DOIKAYT: a performance-ritual of the diaspora at Minnehaha Creek; and Swimming Home, a workshop co-created with Palestinian-American choreographer Leila Awadallah and following the threads of diaspora, ancestry, and body-as-homeland.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Noelle Awadallah
Returned Arrived
Sound Design: Jamal Awadallah
Prop Design: Noelle Awadallah and Josie Johnson
Returned Arrived takes place in the in-between spaces: unbounded by time - aliveness in all tenses. An ode to Palestinian liberation and resistance hand in hand. An ode to the land's memory of those who forced open craters like wounds. An ode to the unbounded futuristic sphere where you and I exist in the same realm. Scoppio scoppio! waSalnaa!
we are a people of the earth and those who attempted to destroy us eventually destroyed themselves. —Vivien Sansour
Noelle Awadallah نوال (she/her) is a Palestinian-American dancer, improviser, choreographer, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). Her work as the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance is underscored by five years (and counting) of dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre, a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018), and her daily pursuit of a “land-based life,” which emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. For Noelle, sumud drives her commitment and approach to multidirectional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings.
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.