Cell mates
51802 charts love on the outside looking in
BY ROBERT AVILA

Dance theater remains a thriving genre in Bay Area performance. To call it a subgenre of one or the other just doesn't allow due respect for offerings by the likes of Jess Curtis, Joe Goode, inkBoat, Rebecca Salzer, and Deborah Slater. Erika Chong Shuch's ESP Project, the resident company at Intersection for the Arts, is among the leaders in this field. Playful and romantic, with an irresistible urge to investigate the darker regions of inner and outer space, Shuch's work partakes freely and idiosyncratically of all that the bare stage might offer in the way of strategy, including dramatic action, unconventional movement (often incorporating nonprofessional dancers), voice-over narration, taped interviews, singing, video installations, and puppetry — all of which went into the alternately eerie and euphoric poetry of 2006's Orbit (Notes from the Edge of Forever).

Dance Theater Jail piece '51802' Makes Audience Its Bitch
By Chloe Veltman
Published: September 26, 2007

In her 2005 dance theater piece, One Window, creator/choreographer Erika Chong Shuch explored the positive side of confinement — how limitations can often be empowering, freeing even. Her latest, equally charismatic production takes the opposing view of incarceration in examining the ways that being locked up constricts the person behind bars and also effectively imprisons loved ones on the outside. Shuch, who not only creates and directs the multidimensional work but also performs the central role and designs the costumes, tells a story that is as intensely personal as it is universal.