RISING 2023

RISING has unveiled its 2023 program of 185 events featuring more than 400 artists including 35 commissions and 12 world premieres, set to ignite the heart of Melbourne from 7—18 June., 2023

Over 12 nights of  theatre, dance, music that traverses the globe, large scale installation, public performance, free and low cost experiences, and outdoor works of mass participation, RISING will invite audiences to join a 10,000 strong kazoo orchestra, to slice up the ice, and to reflect, reckon, rave and revel in Melbourne’s night-time buzz.

A festival that embraces Melbourne’s distinctness — from its hidden spaces to its landmarks reimagined, RISING in 2023 will be a chance for Victorians and visitors alike to discover the city anew.

Spilling out across the city’s streets, carparks, churches, theaters, train stations, town squares, and on the banks of the Birrarung, RISING returns this winter to take the city as its stage, bringing premiere art and performance from around the world and across Australia.

“RISING is a mass celebration of Melbourne's unique culture in the heart of the city.” said RISING co-artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek. “The 2023 program is a rallying call to get involved, experience the new and be a part of a festival that couldn’t happen anywhere else.”

Minister for Creative Industries and Tourism, Sport and Major Events Steve Dimopoulos said “Creativity, culture, music, food, fun – RISING brings together everything we love about Melbourne for 12 action-packed days and nights to deliver an amazing event and boost our city businesses.”

THE CITY AS A STAGE
 
A festival that embraces Melbourne’s distinctness  — from its  hidden spaces to its landmarks reimagined, RISING in 2023 will be a chance for Victorians and visitors alike to discover the city anew. 
 
The long abandoned upper level of the city's iconic Flinders Street Station, now one of the nation's most unique arts spaces, will become home to Shadow Spirit, a new dimension of First Nations art, and the largest commissioned exhibition of contemporary First Peoples art in Victoria’s history. Curated by leading Yorta Yorta writer and curator Kimberley Moulton and presented with Metro Trains Melbourne, this landmark exhibition of national significance will see thirty of the most exciting First Peoples artists and collectives from across Australia invite visitors to traverse time and Ancestral spirit worlds, reflect on the shadows of Australia’s history and be immersed in deep systems of knowledge.
 
Opening on the first day of RISING and extending for an eight week season until July 30, Shadow Spirit sits at RISING’s spiritual and physical centre. A festival of place and time, the 2023 program will reflect this significant moment in our history, bringing First People’s work, stories and culture to the fore with 31  powerful and diverse First Peoples-led projects, spanning theatre, dance, visual art, music, food, music and more.
 
“Shadow Spirit honours the interwoven connections First Peoples hold to the spirit world and the expansive networks of knowledge that link place, people and Country.” said curator and RISING artistic associate, Kimberley Moulton, “Curating works of esteemed Elders and established practitioners alongside the next generation of First Peoples artists  will give audiences a deeply layered experience of our cultures. This is an ambitious national show that will amplify the exceptional contemporary creativity of First Peoples art in this country and take it to the people of Melbourne and the world.”

Image: 10,000 Kazoos. Photographer: Michael Pham

At Federation Square 10,000 Kazoos is exactly what its title suggests—a city-sized pied piper of absurdity, open to anyone and led by artist and composer Ciaran Frame who wants to put 10,000 biodegradable kazoos in the hands of 10,000 people for the biggest musical project Melbourne has ever seen. An all-encompassing frenzy of kazoo-thiasm, it promises to be a big, unifying, howling moment of mass participation.
 
Night Trade is RISING’s vibrant hub, in the swirl of  the festival nucleus with pop-up performances and festival feasts taking over the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral.  Presented with Up, it’s a free, fluid and ephemeral piazza of organised chaos; energetic music; shape-shfiting art, spontaneous performances, drag karaoke, and hawker-style food in collaboration with social enterprise Free to Feed. The space will be bent to the will of Puerto Rican twin brothers  Poncili Creción, aka Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, who craft surrealist puppetry and kinetic sculpture, epic in scale. They’re known to create mind-melting apparitions, control crane-sized marionettes and reality-bending constructions from found objects.

Image: Anthem.

Inside St Paul’s Cathedral itself, Anthem, the towering sound and video collaboration between artist Wu-Tsang and New Age pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland, comes to RISING straight from the Guggenheim. Free to experience across the festival, this reverent installation sees Glenn’s otherworldly voice reverberate within the Cathedral's landmark gothic architecture,  leading us through ambiguous vocal timbres, playful call-and-response, and evolving tints of ambient sound, as visual textures evolve against a billowing 25-metre-high silk screen.
 
Euphoria — a festival exclusive from Berlin-based master artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt  — will transform Melbourne Town Hall into an arena swallowed by screens. The monumental multi-channel film installation featuring Cate Blanchett as an anthropomorphic tiger explores 2000 years of capitalism, greed and the effects of unlimited economic growth. At ground level  life-sized choir of singers from Brooklyn Youth Chorus encircle viewers across 24 gigantic screens while above, five duelling jazz drummers — including the legendary Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine (Weather Report), and Grammy Award-winning drummer and composer Antonio Sánchez (Birdman 2014) — will be projected in the round. All this in time with the five theatrical vignette that loop featuring acclaimed actors like Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) and Virginia Newcomb delivering musings from some of history’s most influential economists, writers and thinkers from Snoop Dogg, Warren Buffett and Ayn Rand to Angela Davis and Mark Fisher.

THEATRE, DANCE AND PERFORMANCE
 
Set to be a showcase of theatre, dance, and performance, featuring some of the leading names in Australian and international performing arts, RISING’s 2023 program includes productions that explore themes of identity, community, and resilience.

Image: Tracker. Photographer: Pedro Greig

In Tracker, director-choregrapher Daniel Riley’s first show as Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre, dance, ceremony and oration bring the legendary story of Riley’s great-great-uncle into the now at Arts House. Telling the powerful story of Alec Riley, the Wiradjuri Elder and skilled tracker who joined the New South Wales Police Force in 1911 and served for 40 years, Tracker is performed in the round by an all First Peoples cast, and anchored firmly in present. It’s an intimate and restlessly inventive ode to shared cultural resilience across generations.
 
For the company’s diamond anniversary, Australian Ballet has commissioned two unique takes on the meaning of identity and the idea of community and the concept of art itself—past, present and future. These perspectives will come from two of Australia’s leading dance makers, Daniel Riley with his second production in the 2023 program, and Australian Ballet’s resident choreographer Alice Topp.
 
In the THE HUM Riley evokes the search for cultural perpetuity while centering on the tangible-yet-invisible connection between performers, the orchestra and audience. With a score by Deborah Cheetham AO and costumes by Taungurung fashion designer Annette Sax, it’s a never-before-seen collaboration between the Australian Dance Theatre artists and The Australian Ballet.
 
Topp’s work Paragon, is a tribute to the company’s origins, strength and evolution. Starring an intergenerational mix of emerging talent and masters from past decades, it celebrates the tapestry of artists who’ve delicately thumped the stages and shaped Australia’s ballet landscape, exploring the pursuit of perfection and the idea that pressure can form diamonds.

Image: TANZ. Photographer: Nada Žgank

At Arts Centre Melbourne, TANZ, the new work from Austrian choreographer and provocateur Florentina Holzinger, who’s been hailed the Tarantino of dance, is an abject two-act romp that plunges meat hooks through the idea of self-optimisation in the name of art, beauty and ballet. TANZ has stirred walkouts and fainting, following it’s premiere in Vienna along with its accolades and rapturous applause. It’s part gross-out comedy, part schlock-horror show, part ghost story, part superhuman dance work.

Deep in the Fitzroy Gardens Consort of the Moon is a major new sound work from Australian musicians Genevieve Lacey and Erkki Veltheim. The twilight gathering, in which audiences themselves are invited to participate, will transform a haunting, ancient melody into an elemental experience of communal listening. Inspired by the oldest known piece of notated song: an ode to Nikkal, Goddess of Orchards and Consort of the Moon, the music will echo the calls of owls, bats and cicadas—blurring lines between human and animal realms in a nocturnal metamorphosis.

At Arts House, The Dan Daw Show delves into the often-misunderstood core of care and communication inherent to BDSM culture. A joyous duet created by London-based theatre-maker Dan Daw, who was born disabled and identifies as ‘crip’, The Dan Daw Show explores intimacy, resilience, letting go and reclaiming yourself and was among The Guardian’s top five dance shows of 2022.

At Arts Centre Melbourne Playhouse, Hide The Dog is a swashbuckling First Nations comedy for all ages that sails the high seas to hide a Thylacine and strengthen the bonds between trans-Tasman spirit stories. Written by Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard (Trawlwoolway pakana) and Aotearoa writer Jamie McCaskill (Māori) it’s a tale bursting with nimble puppetry and colourful costumes and scenic projections.

Image: Robyn Archer: an Australian Songbook. Photographer: Brett Boardman.

Also at the Playhouse, Robyn Archer: an Australian Songbook sees cabaret legend Robyn Archer AO distill her wealth of music knowledge into a personal, political and provocative celebration of Australian music, taking audiences on a melodic road trip through 150 years of alternative Australian song.
 
The inspiration behind Dr G. Yunupiŋu’s album Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow) is finally brought to RISING in a hypnotic MSO-supported performance, Buŋgul. A celebration of that record’s legacy, created on Country in Northeast Arnhem Land, with the Yunupiŋu family, Buŋgul  brings together live Yolŋu dancers and songmen to present the songs, dances and paintings that inspired Djarimirri; accompanied by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; and directed by Senior Yolŋu man Don Wininba Ganambarr and Nigel Jamieson at Hamer Hall.
 
Fear, conspiracy, collapse, terror, frustration, solidarity and hope. Mud wrestling. THIS is a brutally funny, raw and unflinching response to the theme of infuriation.  Theatre-maker David Woods (Ridiculusmus, Back to Back Theatre, Sydney Dance Company, Malthouse) brings  together an alliance of collaborators to debunk pomp and power in a site-responsive work. Shut down by the pandemic in 2021, THIS has been reconceived to squelch within the confines of an abandoned power station and former corporate headquarters: the Former Richmond Power Station.
 
Making its world premiere at Arts Centre Melbourne and presented in partnership with Melbourne Theatre Company, Jacky sees Declan Furber Gillick bring his bold and dynamic voice to the stage with a sharp, quick-witted play about family, community, work and culture.
 
At the Capitol Theatre, Oh Deer! burrows into pop culture’s most beloved stories and pulls the stuffing out of the orphan trope. Movie theatres, books and comics are full of little lost orphans who depend on themselves, pluck up the courage for adventure and make a few wisecracking friends along the way. Of course, in reality, not everyone gets a happy ending. But, for one hour, experimental art collective APHIDS and director Lara Thoms make a lively new space with adults who’ve lost a parent to share some perfectly pleasant pathos, while grilling pop culture, one tissue at a time. 

Image: Masterclass - Photographer: Ste Murray.
 
Featuring the savagely comedic feminist discourse of Adrienne Truscott with the slippery dramaturgy of Brokentalkers, MASTERCLASS parodies the “great male artist” to within an inch of his life in order to uncover some difficult truths about privilege and power. Heading to Malthouse Theatre for RISING straight from Edinburgh, it’s a literate and hilarious examination of gender and power.
 
Geumhyung Jeong is one of the only women in South Korea who’s licensed to operate an excavator. In her intrepid performance lecture, Oil Pressure Vibrator, she wields that heavy machinery to break into the complexities of sexuality and desire then digs way past them, towards a place of earth-moving self-pleasure.

FREE, LOWCOST & FAMILY 
 
Ensuring that RISING is accessible to as many people as possible, there’s something for everyone with sweeping program a free or low-cost events, from a bioluminescent light show at to a celestial ice-skating experience on a super-sized rink by the river.
 
In a co-presentation with Federation Square, a heavenly cloud of lights will float like fireflies for SPARK, the creation of Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde. Designed as a flock of thousands and made from biodegradable materials, once released, the sparks form ever-shifting shoals—sublime atmospheric bioluminescence, caught in a cool night breeze. For the first four evenings of RISING, the light show will be released over Fed Square, free to be enjoyed by anyone who takes the time to look up.
 
Ice skating. It’s back. After reviving Melbourne’s beloved winter tradition last year, RISING creates a new ice-skating experience of celestial proportions, The Rink at RISING, this year bringing a new, super-sized rink to the banks of Birrarung Marr. Flanked by fairy-lit elms—audiences can follow the river trail and the scent of buttery popcorn, hot chocolate and mulled wine—towards the glow of the big top, then lace up and glide like a galactic gazelles under a solar system of glowing spheres. Opening on the first day of winter, 1 June, The Rink at RISING will run for an extended  five week season through the school holidays until 8 July.
 
Twenty three-metre tall Wallabies, bursting with impressionistic colour and personality, by Archibald Prize finalist Matthew Clarke, whose work questions the assumptions of what’s possible in art, will peek out from banks of the Birrarung. Throughout RISING the sculptures will be romping along the Birrarung (Yarra River) in full technicolor regalia. After that, they’ll be donated to state schools around Melbourne.
 
At Arts Centre Melbourne Playhouse, Hide The Dog is a swashbuckling First Nations comedy for all ages that sails the high seas to hide a Thylacine and strengthen the bonds between trans-Tasman spirit stories. Written by Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard (Trawlwoolway pakana) and Aotearoa writer Jamie McCaskill (Māori) it’s a richly realised tale bursting with nimble puppetry and colourful costumes and stunning scenic projections.

MUSIC
 
Sprawling over three of Melbourne’s iconic music venues, The Forum Theatre, Melbourne Recital Centre and Max Watt’s, RISING presents a genre-bending and international program of the most innovative acts from across the globe, spanning the USA, UK, India, Japan, South and West Africa, Canada, New Zealand and here in Australia, as well as leading edge hometown talent. 
 
The 1929-built Forum Theatre, transformed for RISING plays music mainstage with some of the most sought after global and Australian artists set to perform under the twinkling night sky of its cerulean ceiling, while upstairs Forum II plays host to a curated selection of rare, intimate one-offs.

Image: Thundercat - courtesy of the artist.
Thundercat, aka Stephen Bruner, first picked up the bass at four-years old. He practised along to the Ninja Turtles soundtrack until his dad, ex-Temptations drummer Ronald Bruner Sr, introduced him to jazz. By his teens he was playing bass with thrash legends Suicidal Tendencies. He’s spent studio time with everyone from Herbie Hancock and Erykah Badu to HAIM, Ty Dolla $ign, Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. He’ll be bringing his six-stringed bass and wide-eyed vibe to The Forum for RISING.

Image: Uncle Kutcha Edwards

Revered Mutti Mutti songman and elder, Uncle Kutcha Edwards will bring together an all-star crew for Waripa, a one-off celebration of Blak music, ceremony, tradition, and storytelling building on his Kutcha’s Carpool Koorioke television show, a soulful, funny and family sing-a-long of First Peoples anthems. The extraordinary line-up of First Peoples singers, songwriters and musicians from all over the country and Kulin Nation includes Bart Willoughby and Joe Geia (No Fixed Address), Mo’Ju, Shellie Morris, Emily Wurramura, Eleanor Dixon and Alice Skye, with many more to be announced.
 
Their first single beat the Sex Pistols to the charts. Their first album, Damned Damned Damned, invented a punk sound that was as dexterous and tuneful as it was ragged and unhinged. UK legends The Damned, the goth icons and trailblazers of punk will hit the Forum stage for RISING leading an incredible double bill with US doom metal supergroup Witch (featuring J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Kyle Thomas aka King Tuff, David Sweetapple of Teepee Records, and Aussie Graham Clise of Annihilation Time and ROT TV) supported by Melbourne experimental industrial duo Vacuum. In a word: heavy.

Japan’s madcap composer and guitar innovator, Cornelius brings a sound that’s shimmering, playful and tweaked—Shibuya style to RISING in his first Australian performance since 2014. Known for his aurally lush arrangements, sugar-fed melodies, sensuous sonic textures and a wild, cut-and-paste aesthetic, Cornelius will bring his full, sumptuous show to the Forum as part of another extraordinary RISING double bill show with Japan’s maverick of mellow Shintaro Sakamoto. In a rare live appearance, Sakamoto will draw from his richly arranged, easygoing catalogue that can thaw a windbitten winter. Rounding out the bill are Honey 2 Honey, noisemakers from Western Sydney and blended jazz, dub, krautrock, disco and R&B into what’s been described as “sophisti-pop for the Dean Blunt era”.

Image: Weyes Blood. Photographer: Neil Krug

US orchestral pop master Weyes Blood’s nostalgic futurism evokes golden sounds of the ‘70s—the songcraft of the Carpenters and the aching, baroque of Judee Sill. Riding a wave of acclaim following the release of her expansive  fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow last year, Weyes Blood comes to RISING supported by Melbourne’s genre-defying post-punk  favorite Lost Animal in his first local performance since 2016.

 
RVG’s music rattles small-minded complacency and twists majesty from the mundane. On Romy Vager’s watch, bin-diving pigeons are doves if that’s how you see them. Compared to The Church, the Go-Betweens and PJ Harvey, and hot on the heels of their anticipated new album, RVG lead an epic triple header with Danish punk rockers Iceage, and reformed Melbourne rock outfit Batrider in their first show in more than a decade.
 
Upstairs at Forum II, US singer-songwriter Ethel Cain’s promises soaring baroque pop and a slow dance through the molasses of Lynchian Americana. Raised in a Southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, Hayden Silas Anhedönia grew up with a mama who’d play hymns and Gregorian chants on CD while she cooked. By 2018, she’d invented the world of Ethel Cain—“an all-American girl trying to fit in and break out of the mould”. Drawing frequent comparison to Lana Del Rey—this is sure to be the last small show on these shores before everyone else finds out.
 
Rapper and producer Birdz and artist and cultural leader Fred Leone are cousins by family, but brothers in music. Both hail from the Ngulungbura of the Butchulla nation with Fred Leone being one of the three Butchulla songmen. Birdz & Fred Leone Present: Girra is a project the likes of which has not been seen before—a perfect pairing of Birdz's sharp, poetic, rhythmic, lyricisms fused with Aboriginal Creole and Fred's soaring vocals in both Butchulla and English. Produced by Ngarrindjeri man and multi-platinum, Aria winning producer Trials this collaboration of some of the most in-demand and talented Indigenous artists in country will have its world premiere at Forum II for RISING.
 
After fronting the cult electronic band Chromatics, Los-Angeles based artist Ruth Radelet is set to mark a new era in her career with the release of her debut solo album. This new solo chapter introduces a different side of an artist whose haunting, timeless voice and approach to songwriting draws listeners into her world and on a journey through electronic, pop, folk and rock influences. Her red-velvet-curtain voice has dueted with The Weeknd, been immortalised on the Drive soundtrack, performed in Twin Peaksand graced some of this millennium's most effortlessly cool and enduring electro-pop, now Ruth will perform her first ever Australian solo show in the enveloping space of the Forum Upstairs.
 
Ichiko Aoba builds warm, haunting gardens of song from her guitar, her voice, and her dreams. Then she shakes off the dream dust to reveal the gorgeous, delicate sound shining through. They’re fragile-yet-powerful songs, that drift like cirrus clouds and captivate like fables. Long beloved in Japan, Ichiko Aoba heads to RISING for an intimate set upstairs at the Forum. It’s elegant Japanese folk that climbs hills on the moon.
 
Yolngu manikay exist to cross vast stretches of time and space and connect to raki, the spirit that pulls all together. These songlines form the heart of Hand to Earth. Trumpeter and composer Peter Knight from the Australian Art Orchestra developed the project over more than a decade and half—travelling, listening and improvising within the spark of instant rapport between Yolngu songman Daniel Yipininy Wilfred and Korean vocalist Sunny Kim. It taps into the essence of human connection and transports the listener to previously unimagined places. They’ll be opening the Forum upstairs space for RISING in a very special performance.
 
No other songwriter can evoke the consequences of intoxicated decisions quite like Paul Kelly. For Drinking,a thematic compilation mix-tape style album, the legendary songwriter has drawn from his unmatched discography and served previously unreleased recordings to collate his favourite odes to a tipple. Now he’s immortalising the project live for the first time with a full band, in two very special shows at the Melbourne Recital Centre for RISING. 
 
It hasn’t taken long for GOOD TIME to be regarded as a crime film classic. It’s a getaway movie that comes at you like a sideways rush and grips tighter than brotherly love. The Safdies’ greasy suspense and Robert Patterson’s frenetic performance will be given a new room-rattling score in the latest Hear My Eyes series. Big Yawn’s kit-driven beats, big bass and spaced sonics, will be paired with grounded-yet-ethereal lyricism of Teether, for a new sensory experience performed live for RISING at Melbourne Recital Centre. Their musical styles go toe-to-toe with the invention and pace of movie. Strap in and get transported to the wind-bitten edge.

Max Watt’s is where the late night party is during RISING—a heaving festival music club that runs into the early hours, home to forward-thinking dance electronic, afro-beat and experimental  international and local taste-makers.

Desire Marea’s music is eclectic and avant- garde, but never cold or restless. The KwaZulu-Natal born artist is a founding member of FAKA, a Johannesburg collective known for a strand of vibrant party music cultivated in Durban called gqom. They’re coming to RISING playing post-gospel spiritual jazz with six-piece band, and a new record and as well as a new single called ‘Be Free’ to share. It’s tender, adventurous, triumphant music for the body and soul.
 
Sublime, spoken-word set to nineties house- inflected bangers and strung-out electronica, Real Lies are vocalist Kev Kharas and musical mastermind Patrick King. Kev’s half-sung, half- spoken narration has a rambling passion that’s been compared to Springsteen, while his deadpan wit’s been likened to Jarvis Cocker.
 
London-based modern synth master, electronic producer and musician Loraine James, will bring her signature-heavy sound to the Max Watt’s stage. Defined as IDM hybridised with R&B, drill, pop she features on a double bill with Indian modular synthesist, vocalist and an engineer Arushi Jain. Coming from a strong background in Indian classical music, Jain takes inspiration from her musical heritage, to blend Hindustani classical with modular synthesisers.
 
Curated by BLK ICE aka local artists Paul Gorrie, of DJ PGZ fame, and Ihab S Balla, BLACK MASS is a multi-disciplinary, shape-shifting experimental art project made up of African and Indigenous artistic duo Ihab S Balla and Paul Gorrie. The high energy dance party will fill out Max Watt’s on the public holiday eve for a late night rager.
 
Naarm-based organisation, Liquid Architecture have been a working on the experimental and interdisciplinary edge of sound research and music, for more than two decades. Committed to staging compelling, passionate shows from artists unafraid to test the precipice of what’s possible, they’re liquefying Max Watt’s for a big night of communal exploration. Join in and reach out.
 
South African music powerhouse Esa’s Afro Synth Band enlists two disco stars and a cohort of party starters in a night of afro-synth perfection and South African grooves at Max Watt’s. The UK-based DJ and band leader hailing from Cape Town, Esa has been on a global mission to revive the legacy of the South African music born during apartheid, from the ‘80s and ‘90s. For RISING, he’s invited Zanzibar-born singer composer and campaigner Mim Suleiman as well as South African disco star Kamazu to the stage.
 
Seeing out RISING with a bang, NTS—the renowned global music platform and radio station will take over Max Watt’s in an all-night closing party. Consistently at the forefront of music discovery, reshaping how musicians and fans connect across the globe broadcasting the best in underground music on a mass scale.With a huge listener presence in Melbourne, its largest audience base outside London, they’ve finally launched in Australia after a decade. We don’t know what they’ll program, but we know it will be good.

RISING: 7 – 18 June 2023
www.rising.melbourne