ARTISTS & ELDERS
Since 2020, For You has produced a series of creative collaborations and connections between artists and elders across the world.
A&E PROJECTS 2020 - CURRENT
PARTY ON! PARTY PEOPLE
On tour now
Party On! Party People is a living portrait of a city and some of its lesser-seen characters. In each city, For You presents a series of interactive parties celebrating isolated elders who are identified through local nonprofits working to combat isolation. Audiences show up not as passive guests, but as party-goers ready and willing to throw their hands up and welcome them. Each bespoke party is crafted with careful and specific consideration of each elder’s hopes and dreams. We get to know what makes them tick, their big ideas and small fantasies, and how they love being in the world. Then, based on those hangs, we craft accessible experiences that hopefully say: we hear you, we see you, and we’ve fallen in love.
THE WELCOMING
2021-2023
The Welcoming is a series of socially engaged artworks inspired by the memories and imaginations of elders from the LBFE community.
DR. G’S BINGO EXTRAVAGANZA
2021-2022
An immersive bingo-themed performance celebrating Dr. Geneva Craig—a civil rights leader, frontline nurse, and action movie lover based in Southern Oregon.
Presented by Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
NINE FUCKING STEPS TOWARDS FORGIVENESS
2021
Nine Fucking Steps Towards Forgiveness is a score for invoking the spirit of Jonnie Zheutlin. The title of each step is an instruction, accompanied by our own take-up, sometimes with Jonnie herself. This documentation is not intended to be viewed sequentially as a performance. Rather, we created a score for you to perform Jonnie; to invoke forgiveness in your own time.
Commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 19 Commission and developed at Berkeley Rep’s 2021 Ground Floor residency.
THE GREAT AAPI ELDER PRINT OFF
June 26-27, 2021
As AAPI artists working in social practice and performance, we launched a social engagement poster project for AAPI artist-activists to connect and creatively engage with AAPI elders living in San Francisco.
Glenn Stultz: Out My Window
March 2-31, 2021
Glenn Stultz moved to San Francisco from a small town outside Shreveport, Louisiana in 1967, seduced by the counter-cultural energy and political organizing. He never left and nurtures a deep love of this city he’s chosen to make home. In 2019, he started to teach himself to draw and more recently to paint, spending many hours learning about post-Impressionist and early modern art movements.
Court Theatre X Experimental Performance Initiative: A Bridge, A Gift.
October-December 2020
We worked with Hyde Park Art Center to identify 10 elders who have ties to Chicago’s Southside. With the Experimental Performance Initiative and Court Theatre (University of Chicago), we identified 10 artists working across different disciplines. We paired those artists and elders together and offered creative prompts for their exchange. Drawing on dramaturgy from Court Theatre’s production of The Lady from the Sea (directed by Shana Cooper, choreographed by Erika Chong Shuch, and cancelled due to COVID), we looked for beacons of hope in our connections with strangers.
First Response
March-October 2020
In making this work, we’ve learned that listening is a valuable mode of creation; that everyone has a story, desire, or way of being in the world that is worth responding to. As a response to worldwide shelter-in-place ordinances due to COVID-19, and with awareness that many elders are at risk in terms of infection and the compounding hardships of isolation, we launched a project that brought artists and elders together.
Hello Chorus
March 2020
In March 2020, Beth Wilmurt invited 100 older adult singers to sing with her on Zoom. As Beth transitioned them from a live to a virtual choir, a series of email exchanges were collected like small poems in Wilmurt’s inbox. Wilmurt transformed these email exchanges into mini-songs.