Multidisciplinary circus and movement artist Erika Lui connected with nature in the area when they moved to Waterloo in 2009 to pursue a double degree in Psychology and Biology at Laurier, then completed a Master’s degree specializing in Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. They moved back to Toronto briefly but missed having access to nature. When the opportunity arose to return to Waterloo, they knew it was the right move.
“Once I came here, I realized how easy it was to just walk out and find a park,” Lui said. “You’re surrounded by nature. I really love that, and I very much leaned into that when I was a student.”
Lui’s experience of the pandemic was marked by their connection to the natural world and the solace that brought. Not only was spending time outside one of the few sanctioned activities, but it also facilitated introspection and a deeper understanding of self.
“A lot of my time ended up being spent outdoors in nature, dancing through the grass and reconnecting with myself and my body,” Lui said. “I spent a lot of time in the pandemic trying not to lose my sense of art.”
In the pursuit of art, Lui connected with members of The Creek Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists that explore what it means to live, work, and create art alongside Schneider Creek in the Grand River Watershed. That artistic partnership inspired the location for our walk along those bodies of water in Doon.
Lui showed me where Schneider’s Creek connects with the larger Grand River and, as we walked the trail, we paused often to appreciate the movement of the water and nature surrounding us, including watching a family of Canada geese paddling in the river.
While working on dance and circus pieces as part of The Creek Collective, Lui deepened their relationship with the water.
“Water is vigour, water is intense emotions and feelings,” Lui said. “It can be calm at times, but it can also be overruling and there’s a flow to it…I started looking at the water as a symbolic representation of myself.”
For Lui, exploring water in their art meant tapping into strong emotions like anger and frustration and imagining how the water also embodied those feelings. Connecting with water in this way is a form of healing for Lui, and it is also a way to encourage audiences to explore their own relationship with the water.
Although always a very physical and active person, Lui came to the circus as a discipline later in life. They played sports as a child, and pursued gymnastics in high school, but grew frustrated at the misogyny of the sport that has little space for female athletes after the age of 18. That abandonment led Lui to explore physicality through parkour where they were introduced to aerial silks, and an instant connection was made.
What started as a hobby, however, soon grew into something much more profound as Lui struggled to find work in their academic discipline for post-graduation and began to consider alternatives.
“What if I throw everything away, run away, join the circus, and figure things out from there?” Lui said. “The thing that keeps me really powerfully connected to circus is how disconnected I was from my body, and how much [circus] forced me to come back into my body.”
Much of Lui’s circus work involves dancing in air on the silks, but they also create groundwork where the focus is on how the bodies of the performers relate to the space. For Creek Fest in 2025, Lui pushed themself to publicly perform their groundwork for the first time, which resulted in a site-specific piece that embodied elements of parkour as they maneuvered through the space.
The technical aspects of circus performing are also important to Lui as a means to create emotional storytelling. They enjoy the engineering aspect of working with rigging, as well as finding new ways to use existing materials and structures in their art.
Lui is looking forward to returning to Schneider’s Creek for Creek Fest in September 2026 and is also interested in creating a two-person circus show to examine some of their personal struggles and the relationships that have helped them.
“My artistic process always starts with ‘what is it that I am working on right now by myself to try and heal and fix, and how can I embody that in a bigger way on the outside’,” Lui said.
From their work with the Creek Collective to their teaching work in the circus arts, community remains a driving force for Lui.
“The thing that makes us human is that we can problem solve multiple brains together,” Lui said. “The only way that we can survive is through community and through putting in the hard work to build community.”
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