“By bringing together gifted artists, respected scholars, and significant activists, we are able to consider the impact and effects of imprisonment from different angles, through different mediums, and with different communities. We hope to illuminate the stories of those who are in prison, and challenge us all to recognize that incarceration is unfortunately fundamental to the fabric of contemporary Californian, and U.S. society and that cultural space is pivotal in this necessary dialogue.” [full review]

– Deborah Cullinan, Executive Director

“(51802) has proved a breakthrough. ‘51802’ is bleak, but it is also heartbreaking. It's deeply personal in the best of ways, the way that makes particularity profound.“ [full review]

SF Chronicle

“The authenticity of her character's anger, pain, and desperation reverberates with a truth that is both fragile and titanium clad. And there is just that touch of sentimentality, a bit of brittleness about her left-behind lover's dreams, that makes her character all the more human. It's quite an achievement…” [full review]

San Francisco Bay Guardian, Rita Felciano

“Instinct is a primary driver for Shuch, a one-of-a-kind choreographer, far from yet very much a part of the Spector girl groups, specters, lonely cons, and rumbling streets below us.” [full review]

San Francisco Bay Guardian, Kimberly Chun – Fall Arts Preview Cover Story

“Comfortingly familiar yet terribly resonant enough to bring tears to one’s eyes…” [full review]

Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian

“Sometimes we need to create little worlds for ourselves,” Erika Chong Shuch states toward the start of her new show, “51802,” which opened Thursday at Intersection for the Arts. “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.”

“It is the writing, pure and simple, that makes ‘51802’ affecting, the way the purges build so unexpectedly into ever-more-complex examinations of the grief, and most fascinatingly the mutual guilt, of this separation. And it is the way that Shuch avoids ‘blaming the system’ in favor of novelistic emotional detail that makes it powerful.” [full review]

San Francisco Chronicle, Rachel Howard

“Erika Chong Shuch is a choreographer as comfortable with metaphors as she is with everyday life. The poetics of the extraordinary and the familiar often exist side by side in Shuch's work: You're as likely to see some ruminations on deep space as you are an exploration of good ol' prosaic heartbreak. Her company, the Erika Shuch Performance Project, presents 51802, a new piece that's full of allegorical spindrift but palpably connected to social issues. The title mirrors the anonymity and facelessness of life behind bars and examines bondage, both physical and spiritual, among incarcerated people. Shuch's lissome yet approachable dancers create rich characters with the assistance of music, song, and text. Magic-realist sequences, love letters, and achingly gorgeous musical interludes relay tales of people estranged from incarcerated lovers, family members, and friends. Shuch's evocative tug-of-war between connection and detachment asks deep questions regarding the nature of liberty, but it's the intense portrayal of human longing that'll send shivers up the viewer’s spine.” [full review]

San Francisco Weekly, Nirmala Nataraj