A public performance of a participatory art installation, due to take place today (27 September) on the Waterworks River at the Olympic Park in east London, has been cancelled after high levels of sewage were found in the water.
Discosailing: A Ballet On Water by London-based artist Rasheed Araeen involves nine participants, who were each due to occupy an inflatable floating disc. Six performances—organised by outdoor sculpture trail The Line—were scheduled to take place throughout the day, each lasting 30 minutes.
It was first performed on 27 July to coincide with the start of the Olympic Games in Paris—where concerns were also raised about water quality—with today due to be its second showing.
Sewage discharge into UK waterways has been a growing concern. A report this year by The Rivers Trust found that no single stretch of river in England is in good overall health.
Surfers Against Sewage say there were 584,001 discharges of raw sewage into UK waterways in 2023 with 75% of UK rivers posing a serious risk to human health. Last year the charity collaborated with designer Niall Jones to create The Floater, a surfboard made of sewage.
Tim Nunn, from Surfers Against Sewage, says of the Olympic Park cancellation: “This is another case of decades of underinvestment in our sewage system impacting another group of passionate people who love the water.
"We’re an island nation with a natural affinity for our waterways and seas for sports, recreation and art and both regulators and water companies need to start taking this seriously and invest money in monitoring, regulation and improvement of our wastewater systems.”
Discosailing has been a work more than 50 years in the making. It began after Araeen witnessed two people floating on a piece of polystyrene in a canal in Pakistan, where he was born and studied as a civil engineer. He said: “Discosailing is a play. Play is a part of human life, it’s a dance of the body on water.
"The body is free to respond to balance, it can be a sort of ballet. It can be many movements depending on the direction of the wind but it is the slowness of the whole thing which is important. My job is to create the structures and Discosailing is one of them. I create the structure and then hand it over to the public and it's up to the public to carry on with the work.”
The artist Jason deCaires Taylor, who installed a sculpture of swimmers and other water users called Sirens of Sewage on Whitstable beach in Kent earlier this year, told The Art Newspaper: “I never thought I would hear the words ballet and sewage in the same sentence. However this is Britain we live in.
"But let’s be clear this is what happens when you turn a fundamental right: access to clean water, into a profit-making business. We have lots of sharks in UK waters but they tend to be the CEO’s of our national water utility companies.”
Thames Water have been approached for comment.