Melbourne’s premier festival of music, art and performance, RISING, has unveiled its 2026 program, unfolding across the city from 27 May to 8 June.
At the start of winter, theatres, town halls, railway ballrooms, civic squares and galleries will be reimagined as sites of shared experience, welcoming artists and audiences from Australia and around the world to gather, move and encounter new ideas at scale.
In 2026, RISING presents over100 events, featuring 376 artists and including 7 world premieres and 11 Australian premieres transforming the heart of Naarm/Melbourne’s centre and beyond. Across venues large and small, the program pulses with music and movement, boasting major international names alongside bold new Australian works and expansive free events.
Highlights of the 2026 program include Florentina Holzinger’s incendiary new epic at Arts Centre Melbourne; The Royal Family Dance Crew’s arena-scale takeover of Hamer Hall alongside a free, public dance event at Fed Square; the reopening of the historic Flinders Street Ballroom as a participatory dance academy; the multi-room music marathon Day Tripper; and the Australian premiere of The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at ACMI.
St Paul’s Cathedral becomes the site of Pulitzer Prize-winner Raven Chacon‘s resonant Voiceless Mass, while The Substation is transformed by Narcissister’s warehouse-sized, Rube Goldberg-like performance installation Voyage Into Infinity, and Brooklyn rap royalty Lil’ Kimtakes the stage in a landmark celebration of hip hop legacy – tracing a path across the city from cathedral to club, ballroom to basement, theatre to public square.
“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.” says RISING Artistic Director and CEO Hannah Fox. “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.”
At the heart of the 2026 program is the launch of the inauguralAustralian Dance Biennale: a major new platform showcasing the strength and diversity of Australian and international dance. Presented by RISING every two years, the Biennale extends beyond the theatre, unfolding across stages, club nights, dance classes and public spaces. From landmark works by leading choreographers to mass participation moments and late-night dance floors, it’s a city-wide invitation to unlock new joys in movement and embrace dance in all its forms.
From Northern Ireland, a white-hot manifestation of Belfast defiance and vulnerability, Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer unfolds across four charged episodes. Acclaimed choreographer Oona Doherty channels the city’s undercurrent of conflict through meditative stillness and explosive physicality, set inside a gleaming cage and driven by a propulsive score from DJ David Holmes (Killing Eve, Ocean’s Eleven). Fusing club culture swagger with ritual intensity, the work reveals the inner lives of Belfast’s hard men and strong women in a portrait that is raw, unflinching and deeply human.
Presented with The Royal Family Dance Crew, Defend the Throne brings Aotearoa/New Zealand’s street-dance royalty to Hamer Hall for a high-voltage showcase of their most iconic work. From Bieber, Gaga and Doja to JLo, RiRi and Janet, if a global icon needs a performance to pop, chances are they’ve called on The Royal Family.
Founded in 2011 by powerhouse choreographer Parris Goebel, the three-time World Hip Hop Championship-winning crew forged their raw, instinctive Polyswagg style from the passion of Polynesian youth – less about counting it in, more about feeling the music as family. At RISING, they blast through legendary sets from the past 14 years while debuting brand new choreography. Crown Nation, rise up.
RISING extends that invitation to move further, with Land of 1000 Dances, reopening the historic Flinders Street Station Ballroom as a living dance academy. From Bollywood to ballet, jazz to jive, vogueing to Polyswagg, classes led by Victorian dance legends and world champions reconnect the city to one of Melbourne’s most mythical dance halls. Built in 1910 as a place where the city could dance until midnight and catch the last train home, the ballroom returns to its original purpose – and everyone is invited to take the floor.
Presented with UMAC at University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre, Lucy Guerin Inc premieres The Forest, a hallucinatory new dance work that draws on our deep, enduring connection to trees. Long imagined as vast, unknown labyrinths populated by unsettling encounters with the non-human, forests shift here from boundless sanctuary to fragile, contested ecosystem. As their future grows increasingly uncertain, The Forest leads audiences deeper into the thicket of the human subconscious, where myth, folklore and eco-horror begin to take hold.
Meanwhile, landmark works return to the stage with renewed urgency. Chunky Move’s milestone work Glow returns in a rare revival, twenty years after its pioneering fusion of dance and interactive technology first premiered. In this intense 27-minute solo, movement is tracked in real time by luminous beams of light using a motion system designed by German artist Frieder Weiss, as a lone performer shifts between human and unfamiliar states.
Originally choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek and awarded multiple Helpmann and Green Room Awards, Glow will be performed by a rotating cast including original dancer Sara Black and current company member Melissa Pham.
Berlin-based Australian performer Martin Hansen presents Frankie, a tragi-comic dance work that treats the body as a flawed mediator – a Frankenstein assembled to test the limits of feeling. Hansen performs a stitched-together creature as a metaphor for incompleteness, isolating and reassembling fragments of movement and storytelling that stretch from Romantic literature into the fractured states of today.
After a one-night RISING appearance in 2021 cut short by lockdown, Dancenorth’s RED returns for its first full festival season at MTC’s Lawler Theatre. Inside a giant translucent orb, a fiery duo collide and glide as air slowly empties and their world contracts around them.
Drawing on the endangered nature of red hair as metaphor, the Queensland dance mavericks craft an allegory for a shrinking planet where biodiversity is being suffocated. Both epic and intimate, RED confronts the urgent challenge of sustaining resilient social and ecological systems as time runs out.
Inside St Paul’s Cathedral audiences are invited to find a pew and feel Voiceless Mass reverberate through stone and body alike. Free to attend with registration, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon’s searing ensemble work for organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and electronics, turns the cathedral into a site of reckoning, reflecting on the lands beneath gathering spaces and the histories that have silenced Indigenous voices.
London-based French-Senegalese artist anaiis arrives at Melbourne Recital Centre with her silken voice and dynamic neo-soul. Shaped by a childhood spent moving between France, Ireland, Dakar and the United States, her globe-spanning sound is grounded in open-hearted empowerment and Black feminism. On her latest album, Devotion and the Black Divine, she shifts from restrained falsetto to rich alto across reggae grooves, warm synths and orchestral swells, creating an intimate, honeyed live experience.
Presented by ACMI and RISING, The Vinyl Factory: Reverb is a multi-sensory journey into sound, originally staged at London’s 180 Studios and now landing in Melbourne. Featuring immersive works by Stan Douglas, Jenn Nkiru, William Kentridge, Jeremy Deller, Virgil Abloh, Kahlil Joseph, Gabriel Moses, Cecilia Bengolea, Julianknxx and Carsten Nicolai, the exhibition dives into different eras and energies of music – from Kingston’s dancehall scene to the late-80s ‘Second Summer of Love’ and contemporary digital art.
Audiences can step inside sculptural sound systems, play with endlessly remixable vinyl loops, roam The Vinyl Factory’s archive of 100 pressings, and experience a six-hour jam film set in a reconstruction of the legendary New York studio ‘The Church’. With its acoustically optimised Listening Room hosting special sessions throughout RISING, Reverb positions vinyl culture as a living, breathing force across art, film and music.
RISING’s after-dark energy continues underground with a weekly club night Bass Lounge, hidden beneath a Chinatown food court in the Paramount Retail Centre. Running each Friday of the festival from 10pm to 4am, the late-night ritual is curated by Yasmine Sharaf and brings together local and international DJs, live performers, private karaoke rooms and unexpected encounters.
And Melbourne Town Hall becomes the runway for the Biennale’s closing night celebration, Sissy Ball, as Cypher Culture transforms the grand civic space into a spectacle of ballroom excellence, embodiment and unapologetic fantasy. Born from the need for safety, kinship and self-determination, vogue families take the stage as thousands chant, compete and celebrate in a night of drama, karma and sensation.
Founded in Australia by Legendary Mother Benji Ra and now curated by Kianna Loubiton Oricci, Australian Mother of the International House of Nina Oricci and a leading force in the Naarm Kiki Scene, Sissy Ball honours the political and cultural roots of Ballroom while igniting it for a new generation, sending RISING out in fierce, collective style.
Among the international highlights, Florentina Holzinger, Europe’s hottest director, returns to Arts Centre Melbourne for RISING following the sell-out success and feverish acclaim of her 2023 sensation TANZ. Her latest epic, A Year Without Summer, is a riotous musical-comedy that cuts into medical science, mortality and the monsters we engineer in the name of progress.
With UK producing company Fuel, actor, writer and director Khalid Abdalla brings his moving and playful “anti-biography” Nowhere to Malthouse Theatre, weaving the personal and the political. Perhaps best known for his roles in The Crown and the Kite Runner, Abdalla charts his life against the shifting cartographies of seismic global events. Blending story, archive, multimedia, song and dance, Nowhere is an impassioned plea for peace that feels both intimate and urgent.
Direct from New York, Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity will transform The Substation into a warehouse-sized contraption on the verge of collapse. In this Melbourne-first presentation, the Brooklyn-based masked performer builds and unravels a giant Rube Goldberg-like machine of ladders, planks, pylons and swinging objects, operated by doll-like companions who crawl from rabbit holes and set chain reactions in motion.
Australian theatre legend Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber returns to the stage for RISING, inviting audiences into the eccentric mind of Sir Francis Galton — part monster, part would-be messiah. A 19th-century polymath and cousin to Charles Darwin, Galton invented the stereoscopic map, the wave generator and the teletype, pioneered the forensic use of fingerprints and recorded the highest IQ of his time. He also fathered the now discredited pseudoscience of eugenics. In this dazzling one-person play, Lipson ushers us into Galton’s book-lined study to encounter an intellect blind to its own prejudices.
The First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams return to the tracks in 2026, presented in partnership with RISING, Transport Victoria and Yarra Trams. Curated by Taungurung woman Kate ten Buuren, this year’s edition celebrates the power of Blak imagination. Six trams will be transformed into moving canvases across the city, launching during RISING and remaining on the network for 12 months.
Barkindji artist Kent Morris presents Flower Power in City Square, a freestanding sculptural work centred on the murnong (yam daisy) – a small yellow flower with a powerful story. For thousands of years, murnong tubers were a staple food for First Peoples across south-eastern Australia, cultivated from vast fields before European farming practices drove the plant close to extinction.
Each night, Hamer Hall’s façade becomes a luminous canvas for Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back, RISING’s annual large-scale First Peoples projection. This year’s edition brings together local and international artists to explore transnational themes of more-than-human kinship and the power of dance and language in listening to land.
“RISING festival returns to rev up Melbourne this winter with an open invitation to Victorians and visitors to celebrate our city at its creative best.” says Parliamentary Secretary for Creative Industries Katie Hall MP.
“Alongside a roster of incredible local and international artists there are plenty of free experiences on offer and opportunities for people of all ages to unleash their inner artist thanks to the first ever Australian Dance Biennale which will offer classes for all ages alongside incredible performances.”
RISING returns to Melbourne from 27 May to 8 June 2026. For more information and full program, visit: rising.melbourne for details.
Images: The Royal Family Dance Crew (supplied) | Raven Chacon – photo by Neal Santos | Ladies’ physical culture class c1931, Flinders Street Station ballroom – courtesy of Public Records Office Victoria | RED by Dancenorth Australia – photo by David Kelly | Carsten Nicolai, Bausatz Noto, 1998, installation view at 180 Studios – photo by Jack Hems | Sissy Ball – photo by Anna Hay | First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams (supplied)