RISING returns for another Melbourne winter arts extravaganza

Melbourne’s monster RISING Festival kicks off on May 27, with more than 100 events featuring 376 artists, seven world premieres and 11 Australian premieres over its two-week run until June 8.

The ever-changing festival this year launches a new dance biennale, which aims to act as “a city-wide invitation to unlock new joys in movement and embrace dance in all its forms”.

The program includes dance works about life in Northern Ireland (Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer by Oona Doherty), our connection to trees (Lucy Guerin Inc. premiere of The Forest), the stories of women previously lost to witchcraft (Melanie Lane’s Into the Woods), a sheep’s-eye-view of colonisation (Carly Sheppard and Alisdair Macindoe’s The Shepherds) and humans and technology (Chunky Move’s returning work Glow).

For the more participatory-minded festivalgoer, the Land of 1000 Dances in the ballroom above Flinders St station offers one-hour classes in a huge range of styles – from line dancing, ballet, Bollywood and ballroom to breakdance, bushdance, Wurundjeri dance and the Melbourne shuffle.

Among the highlights of the festival’s musical program is trailblazing female rapper Lil’ Kim, Chicago “spiritual jazz pioneer” Kahlil El’Zabar, UK poet and artist Kae Tempest, “visionary poet and musician” Saul Williams, New Zealand indie stalwarts The Bats, Afro Beats royalty Seun Kuti with his father’s original Egypt 80 band, Welsh surrealist pop songwriter Cate Le Bon, alt-country act Wednesday, English post-punk group Dry Cleaning, “new wave Arab sound” artist Saint Levant and Jamaican roots legends The Congos.

For around $120 a “day tripper pass” on Saturday, June 6, offers an eight-hour “multi-room marathon” of around two dozen cutting-edge music and dance acts at Max Watt’s and the Melbourne Town Hall.

Hit multisensory exhibition The Vinyl Factory: Reverb, originally staged in London, is showing at ACMI, celebrating collaborations between music and art and div[ing] into sound through vinyl culture .

Theatrical performance highlights include A Year Without Summer, “a riotous musical-comedy” about medical science and mortality by “Europe’s hottest director” Florentina Holzinger; Nowhere, a “moving and playful ‘anti-biography’ by Arab actor Khalid Abdalla; and Voyage Into Infinity by US feminist performance artist Narcissister, which promises to “transform Festival Hall into a warehouse-sized contraption on the verge of collapse”.

Monsteen, a 3.5-hour participatory theatre work inspired by cosplay and set in a supernatural high school world of vampires, werewolves, sirens and witches is open exclusively to teenagers, aged 12 to 17.

Free activities at the festival include an opening event at Fed Square featuring a massive video piece exploring Indigenous peoples’ global connections with dance and new media – Midéegaadi, by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger – with hot drinks and “a sausage sizzle featuring First Nations flavours” part of the experience from May 28 to 30.

The Square will also be the site of a free all-ages sunset dance event on June 6. Featuring New Zealand’s Royal Family Dance Crew, it promises to be “the city’s biggest open-air Pasefika party”.

Also open to all, with registration, is a “voiceless mass” at St Paul’s Cathedral when an ensemble work by Native American composer Raven Chacon will set the space reverberating with organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and electronics in a reflection on silenced Indigenous voices.

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