Over Christmas 2025 Louiseanne Wong was invited to perform their outdoor work-in-progress version of I Am. Am I at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Circus Plays programme.

The performance played across five days on the Tai Kwun’s Laundry Steps, and Louiseanne also took part in a professional two-day workshop for local and Asian circus artists to explore, share and reimagine the vocabulary and practice of contemporary circus to create more opportunities for dialogue and experiments.

When asked in an RTHK Interview, ‘how do you manage to put all these different elements together to tell a unified story?’ Louiseanne says:

In a way, I see circus, parkour, dance, whatever genre within those umbrellas are like languages that your body can say, just like how we speak different languages. And I like to think about asking questions. What are you trying to achieve in that scene? What does the character really want to do at the end of the scene?

As one of Hong Kong’s first contemporary circus festivals, the event’s reputation built over the years is now far and wide. This year, in its eighth edition, circus artists and circus lovers from around the world got together to revel in this splendid celebration of circus art.

The 2025 programme featured top circus performers from Hong Kong, Belgium, France, Korea, Denmark and the USA in a vast array of spectacular shows. Circus Plays not only presents the varied faces and extraordinary power of circus art, but also provides room for exchange and collaboration, nurtures young talent, promotes Hong Kong’s contemporary circus, and creates more possibilities for the art.

Who am I? Who calls the shots?

Dance, circus, parkour and theatre rolled into one, Louiseanne Wong’s latest work peels away the layers of value in our identities in a performance balanced between explosion and intimacy. Lu’s experience as a Hong Konger widely exposed to foreign cultures eventually leads to I Am. Am I, a discourse on social conditioning, displacement, and counter-stereotypes.

At the centre of the stage is a refrigerator, which is both a playground and a battlefield. The artist jumps onto it, goes inside and breaks it apart. The household appliance is a symbol of survival, memory and time freeze, alongside an analogy to existence and entrapment.

Powered by exuberance in dance, preciseness in parkour, and spectacles in circus, I Am. Am I boasts a raw energy as it questions pressing issues such as the dispersion of East Asians, entrenched racial inequality, and the fight for one’s lost identity.

Image: Winnie Yeung