This article gives an account of a multi-media production, Water Feels, which I created as a part requirement of the Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television programme at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2008. ‘Layering time’ seemed to me the best way to deal with the importance of unity in diversity and of continuity and representations of traditional culture in a contemporary world. As a multi-media production, Water Feels was also an exploration of conceptual relationships between different art forms and the potential, in this use of mixed media, for notions of time present and past existing simultaneously.

All stages of the production were an invaluable experience that contributed towards my discovering a particular visual style. This style involves the heightening of the event of screening a projection by adding live performance to it. A live performance is unique because, unlike film, it can never be repeated the same way twice. Each moment during the duration of the performance thus acquired added value because of the resonances, echoes, reflections, and self-reflections resulting from the interplay of live performance and screening.

The size of the surface area for the performance and its relation to the space required for the projected image was a crucial problem that had to be solved quite early in the process. The successful interplay of the media depended on addressing the tension between the spatial necessities of projection and the practical and aesthetic spatial demands of performance.