For You is a performance and social practice group founded by Erika Chong Shuch, Rowena Richie, and Ryan Tacata. Their productions range from one-to-one performances to large-scale, evening-length theatrical works, and are grounded in the lived experiences of participant-collaborators.

Erika Chong Shuch

is a performance maker whose topic-driven ruminations coalesce into imagistic assemblages of music, movement, text, and design. Interested in expanding ideas around how performance is created and shared, Erika’s work has been performed in city halls, industrial office spaces, church basements, and food courts. Her original works have been supported and commissioned by Creative Capital, Rainin Foundation, SF Arts Commission, Gerbode Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Berkeley Rep’s Groundfloor, Intersection for the Arts, YBCA, deYoung Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Dancers’ Group, Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange/Corcoran Gallery/DC and in Korea: Daejeon Metropolitan Company, Chang Mu Company, Mullae Art Space. In addition to her own work, Erika choreographs and directs for theater companies such as Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Folger Theater (DC), Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Kennedy Center (DC), American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, Shotgun Players, and Kansas City Rep with upcoming productions at Arena Stage(DC), Pittsburg Public, and Theater for a New Audience (NY). More.

Rowena Richie

is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist. She has been a guest editor for the Bay Area publication In Dance, where a number of her personal essays have appeared as well. She is a collaborator on a series of short documentaries about creative aging, including Gertrude and Virginia in San Francisco (2019), which was featured in the Poetics of Aging Film Festival, and Wisdom Weavers (2022), which explores the connection between weaving and brain health. In 2019 Rowena was awarded an Atlantic Fellowship for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), at UCSF. The fellowship deepened her resolve to practice and promote the arts across generations as a means of supporting individual and community wellness. She received a Global Brain Health Leader award from GBHI, the Alzheimer’s Association and the Alzheimer’s Society to produce her pilot project, Creative Engagement for Dementia Dyads, which is documented at fivebravespirits.info.

Ryan Tacata

is a performance maker, educator, and scholar based in Vancouver, BC. He has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) and received his PhD in Performance Studies from Stanford University. His recent work includes a minor repair. (2019), an archive-based response commissioned by the City of Chicago for the exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it; Lolas (2017), a performance installation in honor of Filipino grandmothers (Asian Art Museum, SF); and dancing in Doggie Hamlet (2015–) by Ann Carlson, a site-specific dance with four human performers, sheep herding dogs, and 30+ sheep. His academic research plays critical intimacy in the key of everyday life, and focuses on alternative methods of archival research and performance art historiography. He is currently writing on the occasion of art with an emphasis on social ceremony, art history, and occasional literature. He taught courses in performance at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in the MFA Theater and Performance Making Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (SF) and University of Chichester (UK). In 2018, he was Visiting Lecturer for the Abandoned Practices Institute with Erin Manning, and was Lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program at Stanford University from 2018-2020. He is currently Assistant Professor of Performance Creation at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC.) M ore .