Helen Smith took this short footage from the bridge. It is the sunlight reflecting on the river. The image suggests a lot of movement which has taken our exploration in a new direction where we are examining speed and humour.

Video and text: Helen Smith


and yet,
the river goes on, replacing and replacing, twirling
reflecting back whatever brightness reaches down from the sky

breathing mist into the petroleum air
shining, dancing,
moving the waste downstream
floating the bodies until someome,
stops dropping them in

Peter Fraser




Water is like thick air. We can meet it inside us, as it moistens our lips, cools our throat and spreads, like a stain, in our stomach.

Or we can go:

inside it
feeling it with our body, feeling it change gravity and the surface of our skin, and our temperature and speed

on it
half held, half rejected – bobbing, floating, sinking a little

or feel it at a distance
considering it, watching it, feeling the sea breeze, remembering

This last way that is the most common. It includes our accumulated experiences of water. We ‘see’ the water with the knowledge that the surface is an illusion. We would sink through it

The little ripples remind us of bigger ripples and waves, of the ocean.

We are familiar with the wonderful impermanence of water bodies – parts of the surface shift this way then that, while other parts do something else, everything adjoining and affecting ever other part.

Even if we don’t want to drink the Yarra, we know it intimately, inside and out: we know what it would feel like speckling our face in tiny droplets, smoothing our lips, cooling the lining of our throat and spilling across the inner surface of our stomach – or we sense a slightly repellent lukewarmth and thickness in the water.

Peter Fraser



Mapping is a complex process by which we come to understand our place in the world. We sense, we dance, we map, we make…and either re-create or destroy our immediate worlds. The performance arm of TheWaterGroup is conscientious in trying to describe how and why we draw, re-draw, create and/or alter our navigations of the world…

“water, water everywhere…”


“….but not a drop to drink”

Coleridge, in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, both expressed the conscience of a man who had done wrong and the worry of our times: how do we rectify a bad choice? What do we do when there is not enough water? What does the human become? What is the future?

Even as we ‘live it up’ for a joyous weekend, are we looking to a future where we thrive, or just survive?

tidal waves and inter-actions

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Each performance site has its history.

We can look at maps, clippings, proceedings, and measure the highs and lows of our waterways, but what correlation does this information have to our ways-of-being and -living-in the world?

How do we make decisions about these vast elements in our environment, such as rivers, marshes, deltas and dams?

What difference does it make (or could it make) to think of each element in this dialogue as being of equal value?

Indigenous elders across varying traditions have long argued that ‘everything has breath, life, intelligence, value’ (cf River Junction Curly, The Blessingway).


So, as we carouse along the shores of the Yarra this weekend, what is the nature of our (inter)actions?


bodies, and water


So, why bodies and water? (and water, food and wine…)


The body is mostly water, water is distilled into wine..


How does water think? What is the body? In what ways are we response-able to our environment? 

Each and every Festival and feast relies on human relations to landscape, and to water. From seed, to seedling, to vine, fruit, harvest and feast, the body (and its actions) are implicated.