RFP: Works-in-Progress

Works-in-Progress is a cohort-based container for creative process, peer exchange, and public sharing of a live performance work. Each year, Red Eye assembles a cohort of artists who wish to engage in dialogue around their creative process. These artists form a temporary community of practice, including varied backgrounds, aesthetics, and approaches to performance, but with a shared commitment to questioning artistic form and challenging dominant culture. This cohort is intentionally composed with an eye towards strengthening community relationships, bringing together artists with a balance of perspectives, and shared, parallel, or adjacent interests.

Process is non-linear and can take many different shapes, and “work-in-progress” can mean many different things. This program invites artists to both hold their process open and to experiment with public sharing. This could look like: a sketch towards a larger project, a format for sharing an ongoing practice, a compositional experiment, practical visioning work around particular a concept in your practice, workshopping a segment of a larger work, etc., but not a fully contained, completed, or produced piece.

Works-in-Progress participants receive modest technical, production, and marketing support, as well as access to rehearsal space at Red Eye as available. Cohort members meet periodically over the program period for feedback showings, where each artist shares material from their process and participates in a feedback protocol that has been developed over Red Eye’s history. The program involves critical reflection on making, as well as how we talk about making.

Each artist in the WIP cohort presents 10-15 minutes of work as part of a shared evening in the first weekend of Red Eye’s celebrated New Works 4 Weeks Festival. Works-in-Progress is linked to Red Eye’s Isolated Acts program, which supports six artists/collectives in creating half evenings of performance in the final three weeks of the festival. Works-in-Progress has been part of Red Eye’s programming since it began in 1983, and forms a recognizable feature of the Twin Cities performance landscape, with many alumni of the program serving as key makers in the community. 

Sunday, October 13, 1-3 pm: Information session, in person at Red Eye Theater, 2213 Snelling Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55404 (No registration required.)

Thursday, October 31, 11:59 pm: Applications due via Google form

January-May 2025: Program period culminating in public performances