Melbourne’s winter festival RISING will lean strongly into contemporary dance and contemporary music when it returns this year, running from 27 May to 8 June at venues across the city.
RISING program announcement – quick links
Dancing up a storm at RISING
The performance program is dominated by dance, including the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, featuring works by Belfast-based choreographer Oona Doherty, previously announced act the Royal Family Dance Crew (whose artists perform a style dubbed Polyswagg, a blend of hip-hop and street dance styles with traditional Polynesian practices) from Aotearoa New Zealand, and the return of Chunky Move’s Glow, 20 years after its 2007 world premiere.
RISING’s program also features a number of participatory and public dance events, such as Land of 1000 Dances, a living dance academy at the Flinders Street Station Ballroom.
Nodding to the venue’s history as well as the significant reach of Melbourne’s train lines, which stretch from the CBD to the furthermost outer suburbs, Land of 1000 Dances will host dance classes for a wide range of dance styles, from Bollywood to ballet, jazz to jive, vogueing to Polyswagg.
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Similarly, Fed Square will host dance classes with the Royal Family Dance Crew, whose Hamer Hall performance for RISING very quickly sold out, according to RISING Artistic Director and CEO, Hannah Fox.
‘The free show they’re doing at Fed Square will take their Polyswagg style – for which they became famous enough to do choreography for Superbowl half-time shows and arena shows for Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber – and teaching it to us, the public,’ Fox tells ArtsHub.
‘They’ll perform a “don’t try this at home” version, and then they’ll break it down and teach it to the crowd for a mass dance moment.’
A festival for a city shaped by music and movement
The festival’s music program features the return of Day Tripper. RISING’s immersive, day long festival-within-a festival of contemporary music will incorporate everything from poetry and punk to roots reggae, avant-jazz and experimental pop this year.
In addition to performances by US artist Lil’ Kim, dubbed the Queen of Hip-Hop, Day Tripper will present the French-Senegalese neo-soul artist anaiis, Palestinian singer-songwriter and rapper Saint Levant, and British post-punk band Dry Cleaning.
‘Melbourne is a city shaped by music and movement, always moving forward and reinventing, remixing and birthing new sounds and styles from dolewave to bounce, from traditional Wurundjeri dance to the Melbourne Shuffle,’ Fox said in a media statement.
‘Music and dance are universal ancient languages and remain the most loved way we gather as a community – from folk dance to the rave, and from sticky carpets to arenas.’
Fox is now the sole Artistic Director of RISING, having previously shared a co-artistic directorship with Gideon Obarzanek, who has stepped sideways to curate the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale – which is a ‘pretty significant chapter of the RISING program this year,’ she explains.
Obarzanek was formerly the Artistic Director of Melbourne’s flagship contemporary dance company Chunky Move, and helming the Australian Dance Biennale ‘just made a lot of sense for him,’ Fox tells ArtsHub. ‘He was really keen to focus on building that [event] from the ground up, essentially. It’s quite a big project, and obviously plays to his strengths.’
More RISING highlights
So what does the RISING program offer punters who aren’t interested in contemporary dance or attending gigs? ‘Good question,’ Fox laughs.
She’s quick to point to a major new work by Austrian feminist director Florentina Holzinger, ‘one of the biggest names in European theatre’, as being a performance highlight. Holzinger, whose provocative dance work TANZ startled and divided audiences at RISING in 2023, brings her new production A Year Without Summer to RISING and Arts Centre Melbourne this year.
‘It’s her first musical, and it really is a musical. It’s an all singing, all dancing piece about our obsession with attempting to control nature. So it’s looking at ageing, you know, the quest for endless youth, the quest for immortality, and this kind of unhinged belief that Tech Bros are going to save us from climate disaster. It’s a really fantastic show,’ Fox says.
Theatre-goers are also catered for by works such as A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, a revival of Australian theatre stalwart Brian Lipson’s 2007 exploration of the life and crimes of English scientist, statistician and founder of the eugenics movement, Sir Francis Galton.
Another is British actor, writer and director Khalid Abdalla’s ‘anti-biography’, Nowhere, which charts the writer/performer’s life against a backdrop of seismic global events – from Abdalla’s involvement in the Egyptian revolution and his experience of the counter-revolution, through to 9/11 and the set of Paul Greengrass’ 2006 film United 93, where he was typecast as a hijacker.
Another theatre piece, the immersive Voyage Into Infinity by US performance artist Narcissister, promises to transform The Substation in Newport into a warehouse-sized contraption on the verge of collapse.
‘[Narcissister’s] practice is so broad,’ Fox explains. ‘I think it really speaks to a lot of what we’re trying to do with RISING and the performance program, which is taking an interest in artists who don’t comfortably fit in any one category.
‘She’s a performer who always appears in masks and merkins, and she’s dabbled in an incredibly broad range of media. She’s made documentary film, she’s done live performance, collage, sculpture, and her contacts range from nightclubs through to museums and film festivals.
‘And for RISING, she’s bringing her biggest performance work to date, Voyage Into Infinity, which is inspired by the Bad Brains song of the same title.’
Fox says the work takes place inside a giant kinetic installation, based on a Rube Goldberg machine. ‘It’s made from all these found objects, these kind of precariously balanced, handmade contraptions that are rattled into motion. There’s a pumping live score and pyrotechnics and all this action being triggered by these female-presenting, masked figures that are haunting this whole space,’ she says.
‘It brings up all these questions around age, identity, beauty and race as you’re watching the work. I think she’s a really fascinating artist.’
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Is RISING being squeezed?
Outside of the Australian Dance Biennale – which also features works by Townsville-based company Dancenorth, Berlin-based Australian performer Martin Hansen, leading Melbourne company Lucy Guerin Inc, Chunky Move’s Antony Hamilton collaborating with his brother Julian Hamilton of The Presets, and the closing night event Sissy Ball, a celebration of queer Dancehall culture – and the expansive contemporary music program, RISING’s 2026 program looks somewhat sparse this year.
Given the challenging times the sector is operating in – including several significant Victorian arts organisations unexpectedly losing their funding – has RISING also been subjected to a funding squeeze?
‘I think it’s a pretty tough time across the sector in general, and we’re no different. We are working in a tighter financial environment. But we also feel very lucky to be able to put on this festival,’ Fox replies.
‘I’m very conscious that, as we’re working with a whole lot of cultural partners, that the kind of tone of these relationships has to shift, where we’re really thinking through playing to each other’s strengths … and trying to share resources wherever possible. And I have noticed a real necessity to do that, but also a greater will to do that. So that’s a small silver lining in tough times,’ Fox says.
