Red Eye Festival 2026 Works-in-Progress 15: Edna Hand, Gaya Sani, Jarek Pastor, Río Saúl - May 21 to May 23

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.

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: A Waiting Room 
An exploration of time-based processes; a frail rhapsody for single voice. A Waiting Room features She (raggedly youthful, buoyantly feeble) in a meditative limbo between hope and fulfillment.
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. Team/Collaborators: Marcela Michelle (Performance); Jarek Pastor (Writing and Direction); MK Tuomanen (Research and Outside Eyes).

Río Saúl: trans soils, borderless bodies
Trans soils, Borderless bodies 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.
I’m a rural trans artist from Salinas, California 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!

Thursday, May 21 at 7:00pm — requires masks and offers a discount to our Elders 70+
Friday, May 22 at 7:00pm — post-performance engagement, ASL interpretation
Saturday, May 23 at 7:00pm 

Pay as you wish, suggested $18-80. If cost is a barrier, please email communications@redeyetheater.org for discount ticket options. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Additional Accessibility Information: Red Eye’s space is fully wheelchair-accessible. Masks are highly encouraged. Some events require masking and masks will be available at the venue if you don’t bring your own. Please only attend if you are feeling well, and if not, we are happy to change your tickets to a different day at no charge.

Location Info

Red Eye Theater
2213 Snelling Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55404

website

Contact Info

Halie Bahr
communications@redeyetheater.org