Performance

Projects

Refractions

Over the Creek was an multidisciplinary art event produced by The Creek Collective and Inter Arts Matrix, with generous creation and project support from the Waterloo Regional Artists Microgrant by Pat The Dog Theatre Creations and funding from the City of Kitchener, that took place at the mouth of the Schneider Creek watershed in August of 2024. The event featured the aerial silks performance piece titled Refractions, created and performed by Erika Lui and presented at a free public community showing just across the opening mouth of the Schneider Creek watershed at Willow River Park/ Victoria Park. The performance followed with the unveiling of the Schneider Creek community mural project, created and hosted by visual artists Jackie Bradshaw and Nadine Badran, and a screening of Ben Gorodetsky’s documentary, A Hole in the Ground, that featured the artistic works and research of folks that then went on to conceive The Creek Collective. 

Refractions is an aerial dance act devised on silks by Erika Lui, with musical composition by Deborah Carruthers, and musical arrangement by Syndey Lancaster. Deborah is a non-conventional inter-arts creator who devised a graphic score to represent the emotional likeness and qualities of Schneider’s Creek, with musical interpretation by Laurier University’s Improvisation Convergence Ensemble (ICE). Refractions animates the words and reflections captured in Geoff Martin’s surface/tension audio-walk about Schneider Creek. ‘Refraction’ is defined as the shift in the pathway of light as it travels through a medium. Refractions seeks to explore and embody, from the perspective of the creek, the shifting feelings of tension, entanglement, compression and release that follow the history of the creek and the life that once flowed and still flows through it. 

The Chaos Project

The Chaos Project is a contemporary circus show made up of three distinct but interrelated vignettes exploring the thematic concepts of chaos and order. The work uses movement to delve into how these concepts intersect, collide, compliment and challenge one another in different human settings. The overall project is Conceived and Directed by Kirsten Edwards with Dramaturgy by Zita Nyarady and Produced by Hercinia Arts Collective. Each vignette is led by a different choreographer in collaboration with the performing artists, offering a variety of perspectives on the work, themes and overall concepts. 

Captured in the photographs above are lomography photographic shots and still shots developed during the creation process of The Chaos Project: Parts I - Play (May, 2023), II - Corporate Chaos (June, 2024) and III - Revolution (May, 2024). Erika Lui, along with Isadora Bello, Vanita Butrsingkorn, Athena Lamarre, Laura Lawless, and Taranee Ponjani were cast as artistic collaborators for Part I - Play, directed by Emily Hughes, that explored the chaotic and orderly elements of childhood, imagination and play-making on dance trapeze.  Erika was also cast as a performer for the second iteration of Part II - Corporate Chaos, directed by Kirsten Edwards, exploring the structures of the competitive and capitalistic world on aerial rope (corde lisse); and in Part III - Revolution, directed by Diana Lopez-Soto, set in a post-apocalyptic environment that uses aerial harness dance to explore the aftermath of a cataclysmic event.

Previous Performances

Trick or Treat Circus: A Halloween Cabaret - Goldie Mill Ruins, Guelph, ON, October 2024

Disco Cabaret by Femmes du Feu Creations - Welland, ON, August 2024

Winter Student Showcase by TriCity Centre for Circus Arts - Cambridge, ON, Dec 2023

Slipstream by Lindsay Bellaire - Femme Folks Festival, March 2022 & 2023

Circus Sessions by Femmes du Feu Creations- Welland, ON, June 2022

Cirque du Poulet by Hercinia Arts Collective - May 2022

Rough Drafts by Aloft Circus Arts' 2018 Year 1 Fulltime Group (performed June 2019)