Blown in on a forecast night of damaging wind gusts, “Horizon,” having opened on Gadigal Country at the Sydney Opera House, is currently on Wurundjeri Country, at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne. For opening night, following community night, Brown’s “Salt Water” and Moss Te Ururangi  Patterson’s “Wai Māori/Fresh Water” collaboration is Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first mainstage cross-cultural collaboration, spanning the archipelago of the Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait Islands and across the water to the ancestral lands of Ngāti Tüwharetoa in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Cleansed by the winds of the Tawhirimatea, this “reaching out and meeting of two waters”[4] particularly felt in “Fresh Water’s” Pure: The Cleansing and Purification of the Soul, featuring the full ensemble. Comprised of each dancers’ hands, closed fists are stacked to momentarily draw horizontal and vertical lines of accent, where earlier, hands open, dorsal-side, a fanned headdress in flux had appeared about the face. 

In Blue Star, Lillian Banks twinkles bluer, faster, to tell of a storm approaching, and, like Mateo before her, her magnetic solo ensures the warning is heeded. In Sails, Courtney Radford, Maddison Paluch, and Emily Flannery, with their arms extended at an upward angle, are the sails on the horizon,[5] part descriptive, part poetic. In costumes by Jennifer Irwin, one, a compass overhead, the other three, with single cascading sleeves, the means to return home safely to land. Behind them, the horizon line, still low, suggests distance, and the depths of the sea. Elizabeth Gadsby’s set design gradually changes throughout “Salt Water,” with the rocky crop of the horizon line ever being pulled up higher and higher until we reach “Fresh Water,” the second half of “The Light Inside,” and what was a ribbon of land viewed in the distance is now a looming rockface, misted. Rocks, wind, water, and message, all held in balance.