“The work is infused with a light and life that demands to be experienced by many. Magnificent.”
Kenton Stevens
4.5 Swirling seas
Venue: Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, Northcote
Melbourne
Dates: 10 Oct 2026 (as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival)
For some, a scientific definition estuary is what makes the most sense. For example, “..a partially enclosed coastal body of water that is either permanently or periodically open to the sea and which receives at least periodic discharge from a river(s)…” (with thanks to Potter and colleagues in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science).
In English, etymologically speaking, the word derives from the Latin aestus “boiling (of the sea), tide, heat…” Some of us know estuaries from holidays, or as places visited during travel—protected areas of water, often warmer, sometimes calmer (but only sometimes), often a little less intimidating than the open sea.
Through the vision and inspired choreography of Wakka Wakka, Ngugi and Birrpai creator Ngioka Bunda-Heath, we are invited to experience, and make meaning of, ‘estuary’ in new ways. There is the meeting of the waters, yes. But there is so much more. There are different forces and natures at play. It is a place of mixing, of shifting states. A place where duality finds form. Where insistence and resistance give way to melding and encompassing. Where earth forms, and animal forms, and forms of the air, collide or coexist. Where we are invited to savour a place of power, majesty and wonder. It is Minjerribah, it is Country, it is heart, it is a place full of possibility.
Realised through the superb physical (and vocal) work of dancers Jackie Sheppard and
Brooklyn Bond—whose onstage connection and ‘play’ is palpable, and one of the keys to the success of the work—the piece unfolds within, on, in projections of water and land (Shiv Geaney), always in motion. It is wrapped in a wonderful, evocative and evolving soundscape (Daniel Nixon), and beautifully rendered in hues of sands and blues (Rachel Rui Qian Lee, with Niklas Pajanti and Geaney).
The work doesn’t so much start, as we enter the space, rather it feels as if it has always been going; it has always been. Slowly, it is already tumbling and simmering. The dancers already creating. Independent shapes against moving waters, and a text about relationship to land, sea and air, to Country, and about dispossession, removal and pain. As words and water wash over the bodies of Sheppard and Bond, they are the waters, and the waters are them.
Bunda-Heath ushers us through a sunrise over the estuary, or maybe a more fundamental dawning, or creation. We are drawn through states of being as the performers, at first spinning in their own orbits, become gradually more entwined and interconnected. Their relationship of push and pull from a distance shifts as they discover greater intimacy, sharing and interdependence. At times, grace and peace and the soothing shapes of nature dominate. At others, more jagged, staccato movements, which feel like dissonance or pain.
One movement of cycled ideas stretches between what might be the dances of water birds, into synchronised human walking, then a series of rolling, reaching, folding motions—played out across the full stage. Only then, to be realised as a sequence once again, but confined this time within a far smaller space, a square of projection (an image moving swiftly, depicting the land from above, as if in flight), underscored by a more intense soundscape of increasing tempo. It is frenetic and mesmeric.
Throughout, there are delightful moments of connection between the performers, not hidden but celebrated. Sounds from song to sigh, swift looks and reciprocal movements of acceptance or recognition, a dual navigation through this journey of becoming.
In Estuary, nature’s alchemy, of the forces at play, is both meditative and soul-reaching. It asks, it challenges and it salves. For a moment, for me at least, the struggles between competing forces suggest perhaps the inherent struggles within the human condition. Not only how we make connection with each other, but within ourselves. How we draw the different elements of our natures, our identities, together. How we resolve them into something whole—like a meeting of salt and freshwater. How do our competing natures balance? Perhaps, like a work that never starts, and never ends, finding balance is not a fixed thing, not a destination to be reached, but a thing in perennial motion. It needs to keep happening, evolving, coming into being.
Estuary culminates in a final, powerful confluence of form, between Sheppard and Bond. A striking, emblematic shape that resonates long into the darkness. The work is infused with a light and life that demands to be experienced by many. And for those willing to wade into these sacred waters, the rewards are plentiful and profound. Magnificent.
Kenton Stevens, Theatre Now
