Performance artist creates theatrical experience just ‘For You’

The multidisciplinary performance artist Erika Chong Shuch knows that the whole concept of “For You” can sound elitist and exclusionary, so low-impact as to risk pointlessness. A year is a long time to spend planning, producing, writing, rehearsing and performing a show that only 12 audience members, who have to apply to be a part, get to see. “I was just curious around what happens when the performance isn’t something that you’re necessarily entitled to, that $20 cannot buy you access (to),” she says over coffee in early February. Responses inform the eventual performance, about which audiences know nothing in advance, not even where it’s to take place, just that they have to block off the entire day of Saturday, April 1. Though “For You” might sound like a sui generis experience, it’s also part of a growing trend of individualized theater pieces. Battersea Arts Center and Theater for One have staged on-one-one theater experiences in New York. Like the “For You” crew, Odyssey Works creates pieces for particular people, but their studies, each of one audience member, take months. Shuch also cites the work of Brian Lobel in Britain, one of whose pieces, “you have to forgive me ...” involves one-on-one watching of a “Sex and the City” episode. Shuch supports the goal of making theater more open and democratic, but wanted to find a means “that feels honest and true to me.” The performance itself is an embarrassment of gifts, Easter eggs tailor-made for each of the 12 of us but that also, somehow, weave into a coherent whole. There we witness a silent dance, whose 12 dancers wear name tags of the 12 audience members; at sunset, audience members reenact the same choreography, with the aid of individualized instructions on portable cassette players. At the meal, I wish we audience members had had a chance to get acquainted with each other to at least some degree that the artists had gotten to know each of us. [...] being an audience member to “For You” reminded me of my wedding, where all kith and kin from different sections of my life were in one place.