The Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project

“ESP Project’s subjects are basic ones: love, life, death, violence…the fact that she looks at them with humor, imagination, and respect for human weaknesses makes hers one of the voices to which we want to listen.” -Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian

Founded in 2001, The ESP Project is a group of San Francisco based dancers, actors, musicians, and designers all representing various facets of this city. Incorporating multi-faceted performers, the ESP Project collaboratively develops and presents new interdisciplinary performance work that celebrates the ordinary in human experience and amplifies the role of theater as a tool for inspiring social change. Their work is effortlessly interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, because the people that make up the company come from a variety of traditions. The company is comprised of artists who are from diverse backgrounds. They are Hawaiian, Filipino, Black, Chinese, Irish, Korean, Christian, Jewish, Queer, Straight, Questioning, Mixed. They are dancers, visual artists, musicians, choreographers, writers. They are a group of people age 25 to 35 who grew up in a world where everybody is “half-something” and the work they create speaks to this confluence of traditional outlooks, this hybrid of cultural identity.

Since their founding, they have created 6 full length dance theatre performance works incorporating live music, movement, text, interactive scenic design, and imagery. ESP has also created a number of shorter pieces varying in medium, from solo dances to short films to workshops. Under the artistic direction of Erika Chong Shuch, the company collaboratively creates a new performance work each year through extensive, 9 month to 12 month series of workshops, rehearsals, design meetings, and open rehearsals and other interactive public events. ESP’s organizational structure is centered around the project itself; all activity is geared towards developing the best possible work and reaching as many new people as possible through dance classes, outreach, multi-disciplinary performance workshops, and fundraising. As artists in residence at Intersection for the Arts, they receive infrastructural support and space to develop their work, deepen their San Francisco roots, and grow as a company.

The ESP Project was nominated for a 2005 Izzie Award; Erika Chong Shuch was awarded a prestigious 2006 Gerbode Award for Emerging Choreographers, was a participant in the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s CHIME program, and she received a 2003 GOLDIE Award for her work with the ESP Project. Our work was featured on the cover of the San Francisco Bay Guardian as the highlight of the Fall Arts issue, and we were featured on KQED’s SPARK and in the Chronicle and 7x7 Magazine. Our audience is expanding as evidenced by our increasingly longer runs and consistently sold-out houses. According to Bay Area dance critic Rita Felciano, Erika’s “subjects are basic ones: love, life, death, violence… the fact that she looks at them with humor, imagination, and respect for human weaknesses makes hers one of the voices to which we want to listen.”

Erika Chong Shuch facilitates a collaborative process in which the ESP Project company members are all expected to work outside of our primary discipline, which is uncomfortable and scary. We believe in risk, entertainment, failure, fun, disagreement, and aggressive editing. We believe that live performance can make the world a better place, and we believe in betterment through empathy, dialogue, activation, and laughter. We celebrate, through our work, the extraordinary within ordinary human experience and we aim to amplify the role of theater as a tool for inspiring social change.

The ensemble regularly brings new collaborators to each work, in an effort to keep the dialogue growing. The regular collaborators are: Erika Chong Shuch, Tommy Shepherd (performer/ composer), Danny Wolohan (performer), Melanie Elms (performer/ choreographer), Jennifer Chien (performer/ co-choreographer), Dwayne Calizo (performer/ vocal director), Daveen DiGiacomo (composer), Ishan Vernallis (filmmaker), Allen Willner (designer), Seth Beale (production).

"’We need to create little worlds for ourselves to make the whole big world make sense.’ This could be an artistic credo for the Erika Shuch Performance Project's signature style of theater, an assemblage of little worlds in which everyman characters pour their souls into monologues teeming with unlikely metaphors, then burst into angelic songs and winking dances.” -Rachel Howard San Francisco Chronicle Review of “51802”

We make art to deal with things we can’t deal with in any other way. The goal is that the performance work itself disguises the self-inflicted therapy and becomes universal enough for audiences and collaborators to believe that the material is speaking to their own lives.

The ESP Project develops and premieres one evening length work per year through extensive series’ of workshops, rehearsals, design meetings, open rehearsals and other interactive public events. Our organizational structure is centered around the project itself; all activity is geared towards developing the best possible work and reaching as many new people as possible through community classes, outreach, multi-disciplinary performance workshops, and fundraising. Our residency at Intersection for the Arts offers us infrastructural support, space to develop our work, deepen our San Francisco roots, and grow as a company.

Artistic Director Erika Chong Shuch is a theater maker, choreographer, performer, and teacher, living and working in San Francisco. Deemed by Robert Avilla in the San Francisco Bay Guardian “among the leaders in the field.”

The company’s work under Chong Shuch’s direction has quickly become known for its unique and original aesthetic and has been met by consistently great praise from new audiences, critics, and culture writers.

“What makes Erika Chong Shuch's work so arresting isn't the way she intuitively melds movement and theater, or the knack she has for attracting brilliant collaborators, or the Gen Y appeal of her slouchy, all-too-human performers.”-Rachel Howard, SF Chronicle

Erika was awarded the Gerbode Foundation’s prestigious Emerging Choreographers Award for the development of “51802” (2007), a piece looking at the effects of incarceration on those left outside. She was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2006), Djerassi (2007), 848 Community Space (2003), ODC Theatre (2003, 2004), and Intersection for the Arts (2003-present). Erika worked under the mentorship of dance theater maverick, Joe Goode in the inceptive year of CHIME, a grant and mentorship program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Erika received the 2003 SF Bay Guardian’s GOLDIE award in Choreography, and her work has been nominated for three Isadora Duncan Awards. Her work has been regularly supported by the SF Arts Commission, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Fund. Erika’s work has been the subject of a documentary on KQED’s television show SPARK, KQED’s radio show “Forum.” and featured on Inside City Limits. Erika has lectured on her work at John F. Kennedy University, the Commonwealth Club.

In addition to creating her own work, Erika has directed plays such as Domino, by Sean San Jose, which had its world premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, co-directed the world premiere of The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, by Octavio Solis, and directed the movement for the world premieres of plays such as Philip Kan Gotanda’s a fist of roses and Daniel Handler’s (AKA Lemmony Snicket) 4 Adverbs with Word for Word theater company. Erika co-created an award winning film, To Hellen Bach, and has created original works on students in schools such as University of San Francisco and School of the Arts. Erika co-founded and co-directs the Experimental Performance Institute (EPI) at New College of California, an interdisciplinary BA and MFA performance program with an emphasis on queer and activist studies.