Music, art and performance festival RISING will once again unfold across Melbourne this May-June.
Theatres, town halls, railway ballrooms, civic squares and galleries will be reimagined as sites of shared experiences as RISING welcomes artists and audiences from Australia and around the world. This year there’ll be more than 100 events, featuring 376 artists, 7 world premieres and 11 Australian premieres.
Highlights include Florentina Holzinger’s new epic at Arts Centre Melbourne. . . The Royal Family Dance Crew’s Hamer Hall takeover. . . Flinders Street Ballroom becoming a participatory dance academy. . . The multi-room music marathon Day Tripper. . . And the Australian premiere of ACMI’s The Vinyl Factory.
“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,” RISING Artistic Director and CEO Hannah Fox says. “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.”
The Australian Dance Biennale is at the heart of the 2026 programme. It will showcase the strength and diversity of Australian and international dance, and is presented by RISING every two years.
And if dance animates the body, music drives the pulse of RISING. Day Tripper is back as RISING’s festival within a festival, taking over Max Watt’s and Melbourne Town Hall in a multi-room marathon. Brooklyn rap royalty Lil’ Kim takes the stage in a landmark celebration of hip hop legacy. English recording artist, poet and playwright Kae Tempest is joined by visionary poet and musician Saul Williams.
Spiritual jazz pioneer Kahlil El’Zabar brings more than five decades of reinvention – a musician who has played alongside Nina Simone, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Dizzy Gillespie. Plus, Jamaican roots legends The Congos carry the transcendent harmonies of ‘Heart Of The Congos’. New York-born, Berlin-based Discovery Zone threads aching hooks through dreamy digital bricolage.
Elsewhere in the sprawling music programme are the likes of ‘Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yaslin Bey’, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, composer Raven Chacon, Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon, TR/ST, alt-country outfit Wednesday, Florence Shaw, Adrian Sherwood and more.
The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at ACMI is a multi-sensory journey into sound, featuring immersive works by Stan Douglas, Jenn Nkiru, William Kentridge, Jeremy Deller Carsten Nicolai and more, diving into different eras and energies of music.
The 2026 performance programme brings a dynamic suite of international and Australian works, interrogating identity, power, history and belonging. Florentina Holzinger’s ‘A Year Without Summer’ is a riotous musical-comedy cutting into medical science, mortality, and the monsters we engineer in the name of progress.
UK producing company Fuel and actor/writer/director Khalid Abdalla brings his anti-biography ‘Nowhere’ to Malthouse Theatre, weaving together the personal and political. Plus, direct from New York, Narcissister’s ‘Voyage Into Infinity’ will transform The Substation into a warehouse-sized contraption on the verge of collapse.
Australian theatre legend Brian Lipson’s ‘A Large Attendance In The Antechamber’ returns for RISING, inviting audiences into the eccentric mind of Sir Francis Galton. The OBIE Award-winning Jenn Kidwell and ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox invite audiences to ‘we come to collect; a flirtation with capitalism’. It’s dark, funny, incisive, and a little bit misbehaved.
Chenturan Aran’s ‘The Supposed To Be’ is a sharp, sci-fi satire exploding the nostalgic drift of migrant storytelling, while theatre collective Infinity presents ‘Monsteen’, a supernatural participatory theatre work created specifically for teenagers.
Melbourne as we know it will transform for RISING as well – with a number of public works and city transformations throughout. The Royal Family Dance Crew will ignite Fed Square at sunset with a free, all-ages party amplifying Pasifika music, dance and culture. Barkindji artist Kent Morris will present Flower Power in City Square, a free-standing sculptural work centred on the murnong (yam daisy). Plus, each night, Hamer Hall’s facade becomes a luminous canvas for Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back, the annual large-scale First Peoples projection.
The First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams will also make a return in 2026, curated by Taungurung woman Kate ten Buuren.
RISING 2026 is on from 27 May-8 June.
