Above: APAture 2004 Dance Featured Artist Erika Shuch presents an excerpt of her production "All You Need," Sept. 25. Pictured here are "All You Need" dancers Jen Chien and Dwayne Calizo of Shuch's ESP Project. (photo: Alexander Warnow)

Erika Shuch in her 2004 production "Hybrid Project" (photo: Jeff Fohl)

Erika Chong Shuch is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher living and working in San Francisco. She is the artistic director of the Erika Shuch Performance Project (ESP Project). Founded in 2002, the ESP Project is a group of dancers, actors, musicians, and designers who create original works of Dance Theater. The company uses movement, text, music and imagery to expose the extraordinary in ordinary human experience.

The ESP Project explores the inevitable terrain of love and death with both daring vulnerability and explosive humor; weaving together the images and ideas that creating theater that resembles a mythical dreamscape. "Our point of departure is the known... the world we enter into is a colorful amplification of the familiar, governed by the impulsive insistence of the human heart in all of its complexity."

The ESP Project's mission is to create original dance theater work that reflects the questions and feelings of our immediate communities. Incorporating live music, movement, and text, we aim to produce art that inspires social change by articulating our hopes for the world we inhabit in an artful and compassionate way.

The ESP Project has performed in theaters ranging from the Magic Theatre to ODC Theatre to the SF Public Library, and is a resident company of the Intersection for the Arts.

Erika Shuch is a recipient of the SF Bay Guardian's Goldie Award for artistic achievement in dance for 2003.

Erika is also a participating member of CHIME, Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange, a program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. As a recipient of a CHIME grant, Erika works under the mentorship of fellow dance theater director, Joe Goode.
In addition to creating her own work, Erika has been guest choreographer at the Magic Theatre and lived in Berlin where she performed with the Alex B Company and Sommer Ulrickson (Wee Dance Company).

Erika is a co-founder and co-director of the Experimental Performance Institute, an interdisciplinary performing arts program in residence at SF's New College.

The ESP Project has been supported by grants from the Zellerbach Family Fund and Theatre Bay Area's CASH grant.

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