Rachel Sadie Lieberman | Akiko

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.