> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # No still waters: Estuary - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/no-still-waters-estuary/ - Published: 2026-10-08T23:40:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T23:40:52.000Z - Description: Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s Estuary is a beautiful, unsettling exploration of bodies, belonging, water and Country. Through recurring movement, the deep thrum of its soundscape and a landscape contracting around its dancers, the work gathers a disquieting force, while its images linger. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews The dancers are already moving when we enter. Two bodies in a haze-filled room, balancing, folding, collapsing into untidy heaps. They hold a position for what feels like an unusually long time. Then a deep thrum sounds, and something shifts. Another balance, another collapse. They seem to be waiting for something. Across the floor, and across their bodies, words drift over an image of moving ocean. They belong to Aboriginal writer Abigail Echo-Hawk, whose reflections on dispossession begin with a striking reversal: > “*They say the land was stolen from us, but we were also stolen from it*.” As the dancers move, the words rearrange themselves. *Stolen* falls across one body, *I die* across another. A moment later, *belong*. Perhaps the alignment is accidental. It hardly matters. For an instant, the bodies seem to be carrying the weight of these words. ![One dancer holds a vertical inverted balance above another, who is folded low on the floor. Blue light and projected words cover their bodies and the surrounding stage.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson--3-.jpg) Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond form a precarious balance in **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson Ngioka Bunda-Heath's [*Estuary*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Estuary?ref=melbournestagereview.com) takes its name from the meeting of freshwater and saltwater, a place where different currents mingle without necessarily becoming one. Performed by Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond, it is an absorbing, intricately composed work, moving through states of connection, separation, resistance and return. It is often beautiful. It is rarely restful. The words disappear. Light moves gently across the floor, like sunlight beneath shallow water, or perhaps through trees. Birdsong enters the soundscape. One dancer sings while the other moves, then they exchange places. Bodies tumble, roll, rise and settle. For a while, the movement has the unhurried quality of something being carried along. And then the movement seems to seize. Arms suspend. Bodies twitch, seemingly unable to complete a gesture or escape it. The dancers appear caught inside their own movements, as though some invisible force has interrupted the ordinary business of having a body. The passage is brief, but unnerving. Then it is gone. ![Two dancers beneath blue stage light, their four arms reaching in different directions to create a striking, many-limbed silhouette.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson.jpg) Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond in Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson Not every moment in *Estuary* holds the attention equally. Some individual sequences seem slight, their gestures difficult to grasp. But the longer one watches, the more the choreography begins to disclose its structure. Sheppard and Bond link arms around one another's waists and fold into a low, shared body roll. They separate and walk backwards, slowly, deliberately, their eyes fixed ahead. Then they return, moving into a buoyant, almost hopping step, with a lovely looseness after the formality of the walk. Much later, the sequence returns. And returns again. There is pleasure in recognising it, in discovering that what seemed a collection of disparate movements has a memory. Bunda-Heath lets these patterns take their time. A phrase disappears for a minute, perhaps two, before finding its way back, familiar but somehow altered. By the time it returns, the world around it has changed. There are smaller moments of connection, too. Sheppard and Bond catch one another's eyes and smile. The exchanges are fleeting, almost private, and unexpectedly affecting. They seem wonderfully at ease with one another, even when the movement is anything but. Yet when their attention turns outwards, the feeling changes. During one long backward walk, their gaze meets the audience directly and stays there. It is an oddly intimate confrontation. One becomes suddenly conscious of being watched. ![Close-up of two dancers leaning across one another under blue light. One looks down intently while the other, partly reclined beneath them, smiles upward.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/10/Brooklyn-Bond-and-Jack-Sheppard-in-Ngioka-Bunda-Heath-s-Estuary_Darein-Arts-Speakeasy-and-Melbourne-Fringe_image-by-Luke-Currie-Richardson--5-.jpg) Jack Sheppard and Brooklyn Bond in **Estuary*. Photo: Luke Currie Richardson Daniel Nixon's sound design seems to have its own weather. Low frequencies gather somewhere beneath the dancers, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes swelling into a deep pulse that seems to travel through the floor. Birdsong and quieter textures offer moments of reprieve, but never quite dispel the apprehension. Even at its gentlest, the soundscape seems to be listening for trouble. Then the landscape begins to move differently. In the hands of lighting designers Rachel Rui Qian Lee and Niklas Pajanti, and projection designer Shiv Geaney, water and earth spin across the floor. The pace quickens. Flashes of light cut through the haze. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the illuminated landscape begins to shrink. The dancers continue their familiar sequences, but the space in which they can perform them grows smaller. What once unfolded across the floor must now fit within an ever-tightening boundary. The repetition becomes newly urgent. The same movements, under different conditions, are no longer quite the same. At last, the dancers occupy a patch of light scarcely larger than a beach towel. One supports the other in an inverted hold. There is tenderness in their closeness, and something troubling in how little room remains. *Estuary* offers no easy way of separating those feelings. Its images suggest relationships to Country, to one another, to histories carried in the body. But their meanings are not always available, and the choreography does not insist on making them so. I left feeling quietened, though hardly at peace. Certain movements had slipped past me; others had acquired force only in their return. What remained was less a story than a series of sensations: the weight of a gaze, the sudden arrest of a gesture, two bodies finding room for one another as the world around them grew smaller. And somewhere beneath it all, that low, insistent thrum. --- [*Estuary*](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations/Estuary?ref=melbournestagereview.com), presented by [Darebin Arts Speakeasy](https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-opportunities/Programs/Speakeasy-presentations?ref=melbournestagereview.com) and [Melbourne Fringe Festival](https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/home?ref=melbournestagereview.com), plays until 10 October 2026, at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre. --- Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to *Estuary* was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.