The Welcoming [IV] is a conversation with Erika Chong Shuch and SanSan Kwan about new, pandemic-inspired forms of making that center care, listening and hospitality. Erika will present on the ongoing creative mutual aid project, Artists & Elders. During the course of the pandemic, For You Performance Group (Erika Chong Shuch, Rowena Richie, Ryan Tacata) brought individual artists and elders together for creative exchange to ease isolation and make new friends. The Welcoming is a series of shared, public rituals that build off these relationships. The event also includes a performative “Warm Welcome” led by special guests who participated in For You’s project The Great AAPI Elder Print Off.

Presented by UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.

Erika Chong Shuch is a choreographer, director, and performance maker interested in expanding the way performance is created and shared. Shuch’s work spans devised experimental performance and social practice, and produces unexpected forms of audience engagement. Shuch’s original works have been presented and commissioned in the Bay Area and beyond since 2000.  She co-founded For You, a performance group that brings strangers together for intimate encounters and considers performance making as gift-giving. As a response to COVID-19, For You launched Artists & Elders, an creative mutual aid project that brings artists and elders. Erika’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, New England Foundation for the Arts, and others. Erika works as a choreographer for regional theaters across the country. www.erikachongshuch.org and www.foryou.productions.

SanSan Kwan's research interests include dance studies, Asian American studies, theories of space and kinesthesia, and interculturalism. Her new book is titled Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is also author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (University of Texas Press, 2004). Her article on cartographies of race and the Chop Suey circuit, a group of Asian American cabaret entertainers who toured the nation during the World War II era, is published in TDR. Dance Research Journal has published her research on contended understandings of the term “contemporary” across dance genres and communities. Additional articles can be found in Representations, Performance Research, and other journals and anthologies. SanSan remains active as a professional dancer and is currently performing with Lenora Lee Dance.