RISING 2025

Image: LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches), J Wyld

RISING, Melbourne’s winter festival of new art, music and performance, has unveiled its 2025 program featuring; 65 events, 327artists, 15 new commissions, 9 world premieres, 5 Australian and 10 Victorian, returning to showcase the city over two epic weekends from Wednesday 4th to Sunday 15th June.

Over 12 nights, RISING transforms the CBD into a playground of music, theatre and dance and public performances. Take a swing at mini golf reimagined as art, lose yourself in a storm of kinetic lasers, groove to Punjabibeats at Fed Square or compete in the ultimate challenge of doing literally nothing.

Continuing RISING’s legacy of unlocking hidden corners of the city, the 2025 program will spill into laneways, arcades, underground basements and grand theatres showcasing a lineup of world-class international and local artists, in a city-wide celebration of Naarm, now.

Image: Hedwig and the Angry Inch 

RISING is about breaking conventions - bringing wild, intimate, and unexpected creativity into the heart of Melbourne,” said RISING Co-Artistic Directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek. We are a festival of art music and performance that is proudly challenging and uncompromisingly inclusive. This year, audiences are invited to navigate a storm of lasers in the prismatic fantasy of the Capitol Theatre, swim through a composition of tactile sound in the City Baths, join in an audio-visual experiment deep under the ground of our town square or compete in the defiant act of doing nothing.”

Minister for Creative Industries Colin Brooks says, “This winter RISING festival is set to dazzle and surprise us, transforming Melbourne’s iconic spaces with creativity – from a mini-golf inspired exhibition in the Flinders Street Station Ballroom to laser beams in the Capitol Theatre and a massive participatory music event at Melbourne Town Hall that will get the city singing and dancing. There’s also a huge offering of music, theatre, dance, showcasing our incredible local talent alongside a big line-up of international acts. There are plenty of ways to get involved and plenty of reasons to visit Melbourne this winter.”

https://2025.rising.melbourne/

THEATRE, DANCE & PERFORMANCE

RISING’s theatre, dance, and performance program brings bold reimaginings, genre-defying spectacles, and deeply personal works to the stage.

International Performances

Image: Kill Me. Marina Caputo

• Kill Me – Argentine choreographer Marina Otero blurs the lines between art and life in this raw, fearless work about mental health, mortality and artistic survival. A mix of grand dance sequences and aching vulnerability, it’s part of her lifelong Remember to Live series. (Melbourne Theatre Company)
• BLKDOG – Botis Seva’s Olivier Award-winning hip-hop masterpiece arrives direct from the West End. A visceral, high-energy work with a pounding score by Torben Lars, featuring hooded dancers moving through a hallucinatory world of violence and longing. (Arts Centre Melbourne)
• The Wrong Gods – Visionary playwright S. Shakthidharan (Counting and Cracking) returns with a new play about family, freedom, and the cost of a devil’s bargain in a remote Indian valley. (Arts Centre Melbourne)
• HAMLET – Peru’s Teatro La Plaza reimagines Shakespeare with a neurodiverse cast, blending film, rap and raw emotion. This radical adaptation flips the classic tale on its head to explore identity, community, and self-expression. (Union Theatre)
• Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare – Six performers from Forced Entertainment retell all of Shakespeare’s plays using household objects—salt and pepper as royalty, a bottle of Dettol as the nurse—in a clever, lo-fi reimagining of classic theatre. (Guild Theatre, University of Melbourne)
• The Butterfly Who Flew into the Rave – New Zealand-Aotearoa’s club legends Oli Mathiesen, Lucy Lynch, and Sharvon Mortimer distill the highs and lows of a three-day rave into an electrifying one-hour dance work, pulsing with underground club styles and relentless energy. (Buxton Contemporary)
• Heartbreak Hotel – A hilariously offbeat exploration of heartbreak by acclaimed Aotearoa New Zealand company EBKM. Karin McCracken, backed by an iconic breakup soundtrack (Elvis, Celine, and the greats), humorously dissects love’s messy aftermath with help from her shape-shifting co-star Simon Leary. (Arts Centre Melbourne)
• The ACT – Choreographer Amrita Hepi and writer Tilly Lawless explore the intersections of dance and sex work, examining the body as both a professional vessel and personal expression. Set to Daniel Janatsch’s baroque sound design and directed by Mish Grigor, this intimate, provocative piece blurs the lines between desire and performance. (Chunky Move Studio)

Australian Performances

Image: Monolith

• MONOLITH – A striking, politically charged dance work where five performers embody acts of resistance and survival. Through movement, sound, and striking visuals, they explore themes of colonisation, deforestation and the fight to exist. (Joel Bray Dance)
• MICKEY – Brooke Stamp’s deeply personal and ever-evolving solo dance work cracks open the creative process, layering movement with spoken-word recordings and live sound distortion by experimental composer Daniel Janatsch. A raw, real-time exploration of the dancer’s psyche. (Brooke Stamp)
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch – Seann Miley Moore stars in a bold revival of the cult rock musical, chronicling the journey of a genderqueer East German performer. Featuring a live band and styling by queer fashion icons Nicol & Ford, this production channels the show’s punk spirit into 2025. (Athenaeum Theatre)
• The Chronicles – Stephanie Lake’s large-scale dance work is a sweeping meditation on time, change, and resilience. Twelve of Australia’s top contemporary dancers, a children’s choir, and a powerful electro-acoustic score by Robin Fox bring this hypnotic, high-energy piece to life. (Arts Centre Melbourne)
• Pigeons – Speak Percussion’s latest experiment in sound and movement pits musicians against robotic trap machines launching hundreds of clay targets. Dressed as birds, the performers dodge, weave, and create music in a chaotic, high-stakes battle between human and machine. (Melbourne Recital Centre)
• LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches) – Playwrights Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong craft a darkly comic buddy adventure about tradition, friendship and Chinese mythology. As two friends hold a vigil for their grandfathers, they’re unexpectedly dragged into the 18 levels of Chinese hell. (Lawler Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company)
• POV – From re:group performance collective, this innovative live docu-drama follows 11-year-old aspiring filmmaker Bub as she directs two unrehearsed actors playing her parents each night. With no rehearsals and a constantly shifting script, the performance captures the unpredictability of memory, family dynamics and a child’s attempt to make sense of a fractured past. (Arts Centre Melbourne)