Dear dear dear friends,

I was recently lecturing at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, and on my way to the theater department I drove under a bridge that was the site of a protest organized by my dear friend, Jesse Howell, many years ago. Dance classes were being cut so Jesse and I hung from the bridge in rock climbing harnesses, our faces masked in black stockings as we dangled above cars and busses. Underneath us was a group of fellow dance students holding big “manifesto” signs that Jesse made. They said “Beauty Is Relevant.” Jesse is super smart.

This year, as so many artists and arts organizations struggle to adapt to a shifting ecology, many of us have been asking questions about relevance. And here, as I write this letter asking for you to donate money to help the ongoing work of the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, I have to ask myself the same question. In fact, 2011 has been full of questions. And the questions themselves have been relevant and meaningful and difficult and deep.

As many of you know, I have spent much of 2011 working in Korea with artists and activists, many of whom are refugees from North Korea. This past year has brought me some beautiful questions. I have been faced with questions of entitlement, are we “allowed” to make work inspired by events outside of our own life’s experiences? How do we do this with grace? Am I complicit in the romanticisation of victims? Who do I want to make this work for? What can I do to broaden the scope of what/who we can communicate with through artmaking? How can I push for aesthetic experimentation while working with topics that are so politicized? How can I hold on to the fact that in theater, we can do anything?

I’ve been rereading Liz Lerman’s amazing book “Hiking the Horizontal,” a must read for artmakers and questioners. Early in her book she writes: “The questions trip over each other. They never stop.” Liz writes beautifully and clearly about asking questions as a way of life and a way of making art.

In asking for your help, I am asking for you to be a part of the questioning. I am asking you to support us as we learn how to ask, as we learn how to live in “not-knowing” and build art that is rooted in a deep curiosity. I am inviting you to ask with us.

Here’s to another year of deeply questioning. Here’s to a year of using what we have learned to give us the courage to stand in the unknown and risk finding new pathways towards an evolving, relevant beauty.

Any donation goes a long, long way.

All love,

Erika