A Brief But Spectacular take on the art of bringing people together

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett: During the pandemic, a project called Artists and Elders was formed to connect artists to isolated older adults in their communities.

Here, the founders share their Brief But Spectacular takes on the art of bringing people together.

Erika Chong Shuch, Co-Founder, Artists and Elders: So in March of 2020, there is this thing that was happening in the world that forced us all to spend lots of time at home. And we all started getting really worried about the elders in our own lives. And we realized if we were worried about our parents, about our grandparents, surely there are so many other elders that are experiencing a sense of prolonged isolation.

And we started learning about isolation as a health risk. And so we started this project called Artists and Elders, with the idea of bringing individual artists and individual elders together for creative exchange.

For You is a performance collective. We started making performances together in 2017 and we make performances that bring diverse groups of strangers together, and we think about performance-making as gift-giving.

Ryan Tacata, Co-Founder, Artists and Elders: The idea of gifting an experience. Like, all gift-giving and gift receiving is a sort of experience, like the experience of opening up a present at Christmas or like the anticipation of giving something to another person.

Rowena Richie, Co-Founder, Artists and Elders: Thinking about what would make a great gift for that specific person, that really gives us a lot of information and enthusiasm for what we’re doing.

Erika Chong Shuch: My grandparents, their names were Phyllis (ph) and Milton (ph) and they lived to be, like, in their mid-90s, and they were our biggest fans. They loved to come see performances. They would always say that they don’t understand the art, but they love me and they love the people that I work with.

And so, when they became too ill to come to see performances, we had the idea that we would make something for them in their homes. So this idea of bringing a performance, creating something that is bespoke, creating something with the intent to move specific people that we know, that was kind of the root and genesis of some of the For You ideas.

Ryan Tacata: In our process, we get to know people and we spend a lot of time hanging out, getting to know the things that get them ticking. And then we use that information to make experiences that hopefully move them in the world.

Something I have discovered in Artists and Elders and working with older folk is that we don’t ask a lot about their futures. That, for me, is one of the most fun things to do in our process.

Rowena Richie: There’s this stereotype that older people need to be taken care of. It’s infantilizing. One thing we do is listen. We listen a lot. We ask a lot of questions. We want to know what lights you up.

Erika Chong Shuch: And so this act of generosity, although it’s us giving something, it actually feels like it’s reciprocal.

Rowena Richie: My name is Rowena Richie.

Ryan Tacata: My name is Ryan Tacata.

Erika Chong Shuch: My name is Erika Chong Shuch. And this is our Brief But Spectacular take on…

Ryan Tacata: … how to bring people together as art.

Geoff Bennett: That’s great.

And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos about aging online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Longevity.