Red Eye Works-in-Progress Festival 2026

Red Eye presents the 2026 edition of the Red Eye Festival, formerly known as 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 2026 artists bring varied approaches to performance processes—calling on dance, installation, sound, storytelling, textile, devising, satire, meditation, personal narratives and more—with a shared commitment to questioning artistic form and challenging dominant culture. Their works traverse themes including community distress and bodily peace, global conflict, grounding, absurdity, grief, desire, threads and uprising. They explore these themes through dance, sound, assemblage, multimedia installation, celebration and satire.

Edna Hand

Dear Mom My Gut is Your Gut

Edna Hand is an undisciplined artist who practices allowing for doing nothing, allowing their outside to match their inside, allowing words for the things that are true, allowing movement for the things that have no words, and allowing sound for things that cannot move. They are a commitment to sensing the wholesome threads of pleasure in being with pain and learning to use the power of mirror neurons for good. Their art is an experiment in expanding that learning into community and in service for the liberation of all beings.

Gaya

Sani ~ planet of disruption

Gaya dances to spite the binary of known vs. unknown, and to practice slowness and humility. Currently, their practice is shaped by studying the poems of Akka Mahadevi and Basavanna, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's experimental triptych, and Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez's Let's Become Fungal!

Jarek Pastor

1) Grow Up 2) Get Real

An exploration of time-based processes. A question of who’s leading which revolution where. A limited-time offer to set and forget a future if you call now!

Jarek Pastor is a theatermaker with a focus on composition, dramaturgy, and directing. Their work moves with a tonal dynamism to enact absurdist portraits of social systems.

Río Saúl

trans soils, borderless bodies

Transsoils, Borderlessbodies is a multimedia performance that explores the relationship between land and gender. Through embodied memories of my grandfather, plants, and a small gay bar, we traverse a world full of grief and a desire to be witnessed in aliveness.

Río Saúl I'm a rural trans artist from Salinas, CA now living in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. At its core, my work is about belonging, ritual, transitions, and inhabiting multiplicities. I have continued to explore these themes through movement because if I don't dance, I will be in a bad mood!

Kat Purcell

brutal, body it

In collaboration with The People's Closet, not a fashion show, a bricolage of discards and further distressed, the deconstruction of categories for new assemblies, the questioning of garbage, and being okay with ends (of threads).

Kat Purcell is a nonbinary transexual performer, lighting designer, experimental producer, installation artist and anarchist pursuing the work of cultivating new/old formations of community inter-dependence alongside many incredible caregivers and culture bearers.

DejaJoelle

Fast

DejaJoelle is a Black Centered Healing Artist, Choreographer, Director, and Cultural Healing Curator. She believes Dance serves as our connection to ourselves, our communities, and our overall Divinity. DejaJoelle creates Sacred Black Space to discover ancestral/intuitive Rituals and Practices that move toward Healing using Dance, Body Reclamation, and Revolutionary Love Practices.

Kenna-Camara Cottman

“my so-called Legacy”

an immersive creative experience curated by practices informed by Black American Music and Movement

Kenna-Camara Cottman is Black, non-binary, a parent, a child and a community member in Mni Sota Makoce.

Kenna may be known for her work with Voice of Culture, as a dancer, choreographer and educator, but it could also be noted that Kenna is also a practitioner of all the elements of Hip Hop, a community radio host and DJ, a certified Yoga teacher, and an improvisational vocalist.

Kenna is a abolitionist non-violent transmitter and receiver and also in the practice of creating and experiencing Black space for cultural arts and liberation. Current projects include self study and reclamation through the Body Prayers cycle.

Kenna is the child of Ancestors Beverly and Bill Cottman, community parents & artists each in their own rights.

Kenna is the mother of Yonci Peaceful, a well known and respected artist, writer, DJ, activist and musician; and Ebrima Baye, an accomplished soccer player, golfer, enthusiastic gamer and proficient drummer.

www.voiceofculture.org for more information on Kenna's forward facing projects.

Leila Awadallah

an experiment in wielding ripples of vibration | INTIFADA INCANTATION

A group of Palestinian performers are joined by a self-playing instrument that drones and shifts based on the vibrations in the floor and air. A series of experiments and incantations will take place; attuning to the ripples and attempting to wield them towards the shapes of intifada.*

* انتفاضة - to shake off, tremor, uprising

Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator based in Minneapolis and sometimes Beirut. She is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance with her sister Noelle Awadallah; a project that centers Palestine, a body-as-homeland practice, a site for improvisational inquiry and folk-rooted experimentations of SWANA dance forms. Leila is wielding her energy towards cultural INTIFADA on multiple fronts, and asks you to join her in the long middle of the revolution to liberate Palestine and demand LANDBACK / THE RIGHT TO RETURN.

Photo credit: Houssam Mchaimech