Melbourne’s winter has arrived, and with it, RISING returns to transform the city with 12 nights of music, art, dance and performance.
Running until 8 June, theatres, ballrooms, basements, cathedrals, public squares and hidden late-night spaces across Naarm/Melbourne will pulse with more than 100 events, bringing together local and international artists for a city-wide celebration of movement, music and gathering.
“RISING begins with an invitation to gather and move. Across theatres, dance floors, cathedrals and public space, this year’s festival explores the ways music, movement and storytelling bring people together. Melbourne comes alive at night during RISING, not just as a backdrop, but as an active participant in the festival itself,” said RISING Artistic Director and CEO Hannah Fox.
“Victoria’s calendar is packed with creative events and activities. Right now, Melbourne’s CBD is thriving, and with RISING’s diverse, exciting and engaging program including plenty of free and low-cost activities and events, the city is going to get even busier – don’t miss out on this special festival!” said Minister for Creative Industries, Vicki Ward.
The opening days of the festival see Melbourne transformed by large-scale international works, major music performances, public art, dance and after-dark experiences. At the heart of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, dance unfolds across theatres, ballrooms, clubs and public space as spectacle, resistance, ritual and collective release.
Opening the festival, Chunky Move’s landmark work Glow returns in a rare revival, twenty years after its pioneering fusion of dance and interactive technology first premiered. Elsewhere across the Biennale program, Lucy Guerin Inc premieres The Forest, a hallucinatory new work exploring humanity’s deep relationship with trees and ecological collapse, while Branch Nebula’s Exposure and Dancenorth’s RED push the body into increasingly volatile and surreal territory.
Beyond the theatre, the historic Flinders Street Station Ballroom reopens for Land of 1000 Dances – a living dance academy where audiences can step inside classes spanning Bollywood, ballet, vogueing, Polyswagg, country struts and the Melbourne Shuffle.
In the Biennale’s second weekend, global street-dance phenomenon The Royal Family Dance Crew bring their explosive showcase Defend the Throne to Hamer Hall before leading God Save the Queens, a major free Pasifika block party and mass dance takeover at Fed Square.
At Arts Centre Melbourne, Europe’s hottest director Florentina Holzinger returns direct from Venice Biennale with A Year Without Summer, an audacious new epic fusing horror, science fiction, musical theatre and dark comedy.
Beginning Thursday 28 May and running across RISING’s opening weekend, Midéegaadi, a major new city-scale projection and sound work by Native American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, transforms Fed Square and the Hamer Hall façade into a luminous gathering place exploring Indigenous futurisms, cultural continuity and global First Peoples connection.
Inside ACMI, The Vinyl Factory: Reverb has opened as a multi-sensory exhibition exploring the relationship between music, art and contemporary culture. Originally staged in London at 180 Studios, the exhibition features works by Stan Douglas, Jenn Nkiru, Virgil Abloh, Kahlil Joseph, Jeremy Deller and more, alongside immersive listening experiences and interactive installations.
And at City Square, Barkindji artist Kent Morris presents FLOWER POWER, a large-scale public artwork centred on the murnong (yam daisy), transforming the space into a reflection on Country, survival and cultural reclamation.
Music pulses through the city across opening weekend with a stacked lineup of international and local artists taking over venues large and small. In a major world premiere presentation for RISING, Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey brings together two towering figures of Black music, poetry and political expression to honour the legacy of one of the most influential voices in modern music.
Brooklyn rap royalty Lil’ Kim arrives at Festival Hall to celebrate her landmark albums Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M. while at The Forum, London art-rock outfit Dry Cleaning bring their off-kilter post-punk and razor-sharp spoken word. Inside St Paul’s Cathedral, Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass reverberates through stone and body alike in a powerful opening weekend presentation.
RISING’s sprawling music program continues into the festival’s second week with Day Tripper returning as the festival-within-a-festival at Melbourne Town Hall and Max Watt’s. The multi-room marathon brings together Kae Tempest, Saul Williams, Kahlil El’Zabar, The Congos, Chanel Beads, Discovery Zone and more across a full day and night of live music and performance.
Alongside Day Tripper at Melbourne Town Hall, and running from 2 – 7 June taking over the main hall foyer, Tsu Lange Yor presents THE GARDEN, an immersive experience to celebrate the launch of its new fragrance of the same name. The activation invites audiences into an olfactory world of plants, scent, light and sound. Designed around layering, ritual and sensory exploration, the activation invites audiences into an evolving olfactory world inspired by fruit, blossoms, leaves and earth.
At Melbourne Town Hall Palestinian-French-Algerian artist Saint Levant brings his genre-defying ‘New Wave Arab’ sound to Australia for the first time, while Welsh songwriter and producer Cate Le Bon delivers her surrealist art-pop mastery.
At Hamer Hall, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 carry forward the formidable Afrobeat legacy of Fela Kuti, while TR/ST brings his mammoth, industrial-tinged synth-pop live show to Australia for the first time. Melbourne Recital Centre hosts Saul Williams alongside percussionist and producer Carlos Niño, Adrian Sherwood meanwhile heads underground to Max Watt’s with a bass-heavy live dub set steeped in low-end experimentation.
RISING’s second week performance program pushes further into spectacle, surrealism and personal histories. Direct from New York, Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity transforms Festival Hall into a giant warehouse-scale machine on the verge of collapse, blending haunted carnival aesthetics, punk energy and surreal choreography into a wildly disorienting spectacle.
Meanwhile at Malthouse Theatre, actor, writer and director Khalid Abdalla, known for The Crown and The Kite Runner, presents Nowhere, a deeply personal and politically charged “anti-biography” weaving together revolution, migration, colonial history and memory through storytelling, archive footage, music and performance
Across the city RISIG’s program also continues with Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back illuminating Hamer Hall each night with large-scale First Peoples projections from local and international artists, while the First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams once again transform the city’s tram network into moving canvases.
RISING’s after-dark culture continues with Bass Lounge, the festival’s underground late-night club hidden beneath Chinatown in the Paramount Retail Centre. Running each Friday from 10pm to 4am, the neon-lit space brings together local and international DJs, live performers, karaoke rooms and global club sounds deep into the night.
Running until 21 June, audiences can encounter Furby Chorus and FRIENDs at Emporium Melbourne, where studio BOWL’s uncanny sculptural installation transforms nostalgic childhood companion robots into an unofficial flash-mob performance erupting unexpectedly throughout the day.
At Arts Centre Melbourne’s forecourt, Major Partner ahm presents the ahm Oracle – a playful, immersive experience grounded in its People Things brand platform, which celebrates that there’s no single way to feel good. Part info booth, part mystical reading, the Oracle helps people tune into how they feel and find the RISING events that fit, with personalised tarot-style readings and tailored recommendations.
RISING takes place across Melbourne until 8 June 2026. For more information and full program, visit: www.rising.melbourne for details.
Images: Midéegaadi Gathering in the Square at Fed Square | Chunky Move’s GLOW – photo by Rick Clifford | Virgil Abloh, 12-inch Voices, 2019 – photo by Jack Hems | Kae Tempest (supplied) | Voyage Into Infinity – photo by Walter Wlodarczyk