RISING, Melbourne’s festival of music, art and performance will return in June.
The festival brings 105 events, more than 480 artists, 23 new commissions, 6 world premieres and 8 Australian premieres. RISING will stretch down the spine of Swanston Street and beyond, with large-scale installations, free public events, and world-class contemporary music, theatre and dance.
“RISING 2024 is a festival that belongs to Naarm, Melbourne. Some of the most exciting voices in art, music and performance offer moments of catharsis and reflection with mass music making in a church or summoning the cosmos in our town square.” RISING Co-Artistic Directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek say. “The most important part is coming together to be thrilled, bemused, shaken or delighted.”
Federation Square will transform into a vibrant forum of First Peoples’ art, politics, and cosmic connections with The Blak Infinite, an expansive, free exhibition and public programme.
First Nations soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham AO and audio artists Byron Scullin and Thomas Supple’s sound work ‘The Rivers Sing’ returns to RISING, offering a nightly pause at dusk that blends field recordings with human voices.
Attendees can expect musical experiences from Melbourne icons Dirty Three in their first hometown shows in 12 years; US hip hop icon Yasiin Bey (Mos Def); Melbourne industrial icons HTRK; Fever Ray, the solo project of Sweden’s Karin Dreijer; Mount Druitt’s OneFour; UK producer Evian Christ; US pop star Sky Ferreira, and more.
Dirty Three
Meanwhile, the RISING theatre dance and performance programme features world premieres, new commissions, and works set to challenge, entertain, and provoke.
Melbourne Town Hall hosts ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, presenting ‘Big Name No Blankets’. . . An illusionist’s dinner party becomes an absurd meditation on human consumption in ‘FOOD’. In a world premiere presentation from Lucy Guerin Inc, ‘One Single Action (in an ocean of everything)’ sees dance duo Amber McCartney and Geoffrey Watson ride internal and external rifts, in a world fraught with interference.
UK comedian, writer and theatre maker Daniel Kitson is putting on a show at MTC Lawler called ‘Collaborator: A Work In Progress’. He describes the show as being conceived specifically to be performed in the round.
In a new RISING commission, ‘ECLIPSE’ at Melbourne Town Hall sees a war raging between two of Naarm’s fiercest queens, Cerulean and Stone Motherless Cold. It’s a First People future-forward drag show spanning the ages.
'ECLIPSE'
Melanie Lane’s dance opera ‘Arkadia’ invites audiences to step through a wishing well, into a utopian realm. Inspired by Greek mythology, it’s a Garden of Paradise, where gods, nymphs and aliens transform. At the Capitol Theatre, India’s most popular mentalist Suhani Shah will plunge into your thoughts and blow your mind.
Melbourne Out Loud, in partnership with the State Library of Victoria, is a free, new exhibition featuring the newly-complete archive of late Australian maverick photographer Rennie Ellis. For RISING, Rennie Ellis Up Late is a party curated by MzRisk. Have a boogie with DJ Gavin Campbell, Rara Zulu, Voices of Halo, Crew-X and House of Diesel.
Tickets are on sale 14 March at 12pm. Check out the full programme here.
RISING (Melbourne) is on from 1-16 June.
