J.H. Shuǐ Xiān | Charles Campbell

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.

Charles Campbell

Making Monsters

Performers: Akiko, Erika Hansen, Megan Mayer

Costumes and Direction: Charles Campbell

Lights: Heidi Eckwall

Sound: Mike Hallenbeck

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?

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.

NW4W Embedded Writer

In 2025, current OMNIVERS artist and New Works 4 Weeks alumnus José A. Luis joins the festival as embedded writer. His writing practice, titled “Reflections,” meets the festival through a series of pieces surrounding the public performances.

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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.