WELCOME

Thank you for joining us for this annual performance gathering—the third iteration taking place in this space, located on unceded Dakota land in Mni Sota Makoce. Red Eye holds this space as a community resource that we steward with care, intention, and reciprocity. As a collective of working artists ourselves, each year we have the gift of accompanying twin cohorts of performance makers through their artistic process. As creation developed this year, our urgent attention has been drawn to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, our society’s complicity, and the practice of resistance. Many of the artists in this year’s festival brought forward proposals around futurisms, drawing on multiple contexts and lineages. We invite you, the audience, into this generosity—to imagine our shared futures moving towards transformation and liberation. 

The work that you are experiencing tonight grows out of Isolated Acts, a program that has been nurturing the Twin Cities performance-making community since the early 90s. Isolated Acts annually invites early and mid-career artists to come together for six months of deep artistic inquiry and critical dialogue as they develop and premiere a full new performance work. Artists are curated by Red Eye’s Artistic Directors; each year, we look for artists who are pursuing projects that reflect our core tenets of collaboration, experimentation, and critical discourse (expansively defined) and, collectively, embody a balance of varied artistic disciplines and practices, personal identities, and lived experiences. Throughout the winter and spring, artists are encouraged to take risks in a supportive environment; they develop their work in the same space where it is ultimately shared with audiences; and they have access to Red Eye’s equipment, as well as technical support, marketing support, and modest stipend. We are thrilled to share the fruits of this labor with you tonight, and invite you to share your thoughts with the artists after the performance.

New Works 4 Weeks continues with two more shared evenings of performance! Please be sure to come back and join us for premieres of new interdisciplinary projects by Benny Olk, Masanari Kawahara, Dameun Strange, and Marcela Michelle, which form the Isolated Acts program. Details and full schedule can be found at redeyetheater.org/calendar.

Thank you for bringing your presence, attention, and reflection to this place, and to the work of the incredible artists in this year’s festival. 

Valerie, Rachel, and Emily
Red Eye Co-Artistic Directors

Or (Laura) Levinson

DOIKAYT: a velt mit veltlekh 

Or (Laura) Levinson (lead artist) is a Minneapolis-based dancer and cultural worker blending elements of original choreography with live music, participatory ritual and song. They are a 2024 recipient of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Arts Impact Grant, as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Creative Individuals grant; this summer, they will study as a creative fellow under Yiddish theater maker Jenny Romaine. Or’s 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, solidarity, and repairing covenant with the water 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.

Eliana Matea Berger-Durnbaugh (dancer, she/her) is a Minneapolis-based performer, researcher, and educator. Her movement sensibility derives from her training in Graham Modern and Bharatanatyam techniques, and she is a new initiate to the world of Yiddish dance. She is endlessly grateful for her teachers: Meenakshi Ganesan, Lisa Thurell, Robert Cleary, Judith Howard, Jane Shockley, Jennifer Bader, Erin Thomson, Rita Mustaphi, Or Levinson, Avia Moore, and many more who are part of her dance lineage. Eliana’s recent credits include Fox & Beggar Theater’s VANAHEIMR and Mary Willmeng’s Little Pieces. She recently produced and directed two plays about south Minneapolis mythology with playwright Griffy LaPlante, and she is excited to cultivate more DIY performance spaces. Eliana teaches youth creative movement at Zenon Dance School and Young Dance. When she is not dancing, she works as the Project Coordinator/Klezmer Organizer for Folk Will Save Us, screen-prints for local art action collective Spill Paint Not Oil, and looks for turtles at Cedar Lake. 

Simkha Brown (dancer & musician) is dancing their way into the arms and hearts of their ancestors and descendants. They are a founding member of The Shmutzik Shmates, a queer Yiddish burlesque troupe, and are a massage therapist integrating care work and re-embodiment into the revolutionary ecosystem of DC. Their ancestors they've met so far come from Ukraine and Russia by way of Philadelphia. They love purple, glitter, and Philly soft pretzels.

Katya Chizayeva (dancer) is a New Orleans-based Ukrainian American Jewish queer artist, choreographer, community activist, and acupuncturist who works with veterans both in New Orleans and in Ukraine. Her artistic work is rooted in bridging both communities to tell the stories of resilience and belonging through the media of dance, film and theater. 

Luca Evans (dancer & musician, they/them) is a drag king, musician, comedian, filmmaker, audio producer and journalist. They make much of their work through their drag persona Sir Cum Sized, using character comedy, klezmer music and clowning to explore gender and stereotypes, and to celebrate the long, queer history of Yiddish theatre. @sircumsizeddrag

Yael Horowitz (dancer, she/they) is a scholar-practitioner living on Lenape land in Queens, New York. She is currently getting her PhD in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center studying contemporary and historic Yiddish performance. This past year they mostly researched the Azazel theatre, a group of multidisciplinary avant-garde performers making kleynkunst (small art/miniature theatre) in interwar Poland. Growing up she watched her grandmothers small and precise footsteps at every folk dance event in the city. You can follow her work on instagram at @_forthearchive or yaelhorowitz.com. 

Ozzy Irving Gold-Shapiro (dancer & musician) is a multi-disciplinary performance artist, Yiddish cultural organizer, and community builder based on Nipmuck, Pocumtuc, and Nonutuck land in so-called Western Massachusetts. They are a founder and co-organizer of the People’s Puppet Parade, an intergenerational spectacle theater processional and a co-organizer of KlezCummington, an annual festival making a home for contemporary Yiddish cultural transmission. They are a founding member of the klezmer band, Burikes, and have been involved as a researcher, translator, and performer in a number of archival Yiddish-based performance projects that seek to destabilize traditional historical narratives including Jenny Romaine’s “The Revival of the Gravediggers of Uzda,” exploring the oft overlooked neighborly relationships between Yiddish-speaking Jews and Muslim Tatars in Belarus and “Vu bistu geven?/Where Have You Been?,” a parable about the (hi)stories of the land where the folk festival KlezKanada takes place. Their work is built from trash and cultural refuse and animated by forgotten possibilities. 

Music

Arranged, mixed and performed by Ozzy Irving Gold-Shapiro, Simkha Brown, and Luca Evans 

• Heylige melokhim – Trad. tkhine, set to music by Noam Lerman 

• Gis arayn – Trad. 

Film

Excerpted from DOIKAYT: gedenktentz,  performed live in 2023 and translated to film by cinematographer Prakshi Malik

A brief cultural lexicon for viewing this work:

• Tkhines – Spontaneous Yiddish prayers, traditionally spoken or sung by “women, and men who are like women.” That is, men who did not speak Hebrew. 

• Red thread – In Jewish magic and folk wisdom, red is a color of protection. Red thread has many layers of significance in Jewish lore, but in this piece it comes from a dream in which Or’s great-grandmother of blessed memory, Malye, appeared to advise them to place a red thread under their pillow at night – for protection, comfort, and fortitude in the face of difficult times. In this piece, the red cord maps diaspora, tracing both the known and imagined trajectories of Or’s Jewish ancestors.

• White linen – According to Jewish burial practices, a body is cleansed and sung to, then dressed and laid to rest in plain white linen. 

• Goles – Literally, exile. Goles does not, however, refer to exile from a specific land or place. Rather, it describes the ache of being so far from Shekhinah (divine feminine/earthly manifestation of g-d) and from Olam Haba, the world to come in which the healing and liberation we struggle for become manifest.

DOIKAYT—hereness. A velt mit veltlekh—worlds within a world; or, idiomatically, “small world.” 

We all dance with ghosts.

The histories of the land, suppressed yet ever-present, waltz with the ancestors in our bones. 

Doikayt, Yiddish for “hereness,” is an idea that sprouted from Jewish Labor Bund in Europe—the idea that wherever we live, that is where we must fight for justice and learn how to thrive through solidarity. 

So...where are you now? 

Take a breath. 

Feel the ground beneath your feet.

Smell the air. 

Listen. 

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. 

The focus of this body of research has always been on diasporic Jewish life—exploring what it has meant for our people to live, resist, and find resilience living under one thousand years of Christian violence in Europe, and what it means now for our people to be implicated in the settler colonial project that is the United States. I was raised in the tradition of the Yiddish Left, a microcosm without Israel at the center. Dortn vu mir lebn, dort iz undzer land—“There where we live, that is our homeland.” My work has focused on preserving and reviving Yiddishist lineage, culture, and history, as an essential Jewish space that does not refer to or rely on Zionism—either for or against—as its core. 

In the world of this piece, Yiddishland goes underground. On the surface, in a future not so far distant from our own, the collapse of empire and the chaos of climate catastrophe continue. Here in the depths, we reach into the mud of memory, prophecy, compost, unknowing and transformation; in our digging, we abrade that which has calcified, compost that which is gone, and breathe new life into those seeds drawn from decay. 

A sheynem, hartsikn dank to Daniel Lentz, Prakshi Malik, Laichee Yang, Yankl (Jake) Krakovsky, A. C. Weaver, rafa kern, Moishe Volf Dolman, and Mindl Cohen. May the power of collaboration continue to fuel our fire as we breathe new life into our traditions. Thank you. 

Noelle Awadallah 

Returned Arrived

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. It is possible, especially now. Scoppio scoppio! waSalnaa! 

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 with Leila Awadallah 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 rooted in land. For Noelle, sumud drives her creative practice to build and uphold worlds through ancestral remembrance, in between-ness, multidirectional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. 

Thank you to the Red Eye staff and my cohort for their unwavering support and for always pushing what’s possible, to Leila, Emma, and Renée for your sweet generous eyes, to Laura for your words that continue to remind me, to Jamal for your collaborative musical energy, to Marcela for your vocal offerings and guidance, to my family, dear friends, and Niko for the clearest love, and to Palestine my teacher through and through, it’s an honor. 

Collaborators:

Sound Design (DJ): Jamal Awadallah 

Prop Design: Noelle Awadallah, with support from Jamal Awadallah and Josie Johnson 

Leaflets: 

gazapassages.com 

Sound Sample Credits: 

The Three Quarters of Hope - Raed Yassin 

The Deaf Oud - Raed Yassin 

The Bird Prays for Allah - The Master Musicians of Jajouka 

Water Broken (The Opening of the Stargate) - Ras G, Ras G & The Afrikan Space Program

Mama El Karima - Yunis 

Imama of Dusk - Raed Yassin

Text Sample Credits: 

The Prison Cell - Mahmoud Darwish 

for comrades who ask, “what is to be done?” during this particular historical conjuncture, a (partial) list of practical things to do - Tim Blunk 

Projection Credits: 

5 Broken Cameras (2011) 

Here and Elsewhere (1976) 

Diary of a Siege (2021) 

Gaza, Oct 2023 via Ahmed Sh Abu Ajwa instagram 

Samouni Road (2018)