RISING Unveils 2026 Program
Image: Exposure - Branch Nebula
RISING, Melbourne’s premier festival of music, art and performance has unveiled its full 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 over 100 events, featuring 376 artists and including 7 world premieres and 11 Australian premieres transforming the heart of Naarm/Melbourne’s centre and beyond.
Highlights of the 2026 program include Florentina Holzinger’s 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’ Kim takes 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.”
“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.”
PERFORMANCE: INTERNATIONAL AND AUSTRALIAN VOICES
RISING’s performance program brings a suite of international and Australian works interrogating identity, power, history and belonging. Spanning intimate solo works, large-scale theatrical spectacles and immersive participatory experiences, traversing revolution, capitalism, migration, memory and myth.
Image: A Year Without Summer. Florentina. Holzinger Photographer: © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
Among the international highlights, Florentina Holzinger, Europe’s hottest director, returns to Arts Centre Melbourne for RISING following the sell-out success and acclaim of her 2023 produdtion 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. Beginning in 1816, when Mount Tambora’s eruption darkened the skies and Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein, the work jolts into our own era of AI, bioengineering and end-times dread. What unfolds is an abject, razzle-dazzle spectacle delivered with Holzinger’s signature excess, audacity and dark wit. It’s a Dettol-dabbed frolic through the rot.
Image: Nowhere - Khalid Abdalla
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 —from his involvement in the Egyptian revolution, and his experience of the counter-revolution, from 9/11 to the set the of United 93. From the histories of colonialism and decolonisation to personal reflections on friendship, loss and where we are now. 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. Drawing on haunted carnival aesthetics, lo-fi magic and the raw energy of punk, Narcissister augments and disrupts familiar tropes of gender, race and desire, placing anonymous feminine bodies at the centre of a chaotic choreography of cause and effect.
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.
Image: we come to collect; a flirtation with capitalism
OBIE Award-winning Jenn Kidwell and ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox invite audiences to Art Centre Melbourne to roll in the pigsty of American consumerism with The Flea's production of we come to collect; a flirtation with capitalism. Dark, funny, incisive, and just a little bit misbehaved, Kidwell’s interrogation of capitalism and her place within it is an unforgettable, all-inclusive trip into the heart of darkness.
Presented with Footscray Community Arts, Chenturan Aran’s The Supposed To Be is a sharp, sci-fi satire that explodes the nostalgic drift of migrant storytelling. Kaye — a Sri Lankan Tamil actor and OnlyFans star — discovers she’s not just adopted but a clone, created to live out the corporate ambitions of her original, Kavitha. As clone and original face off, generational duty collides with Gen-Z chaos, and the boundaries between roleplay and reality begin to collapse. From the three-time NSW Literary Prize-nominated writer of Cut Chilli, The Supposed to Be is a fever dream of migrant compromise, authenticity and the dangerous chase to become who we think we are supposed to be.
Image: Monsteen. Photographer: Jason Lau
At SIGNAL, Arts Centre Melbourne, contemporary theatre collective Infinity presents Monsteen, a supernatural participatory theatre work created specifically for teenagers. Set in a high school world of vampires, werewolves, sirens and witches, the immersive performance invites young participants to create their own characters and enter a collaborative game of social risk. Guided by four young cast members, players build alliances, make enemies and navigate shifting friendships as tensions rise. As the story unfolds, each participant is confronted with their monstrous side — what do they see in the mirror, and can they embrace it?
AUSTRALIAN DANCE BIENNALE
2026 program sees the launch of the inaugural Australian 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.
Image: Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer
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.
Image: Defend The Throne - Royal Family Dance Crew
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.
Image: Land of 1000 Dances
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.
Image: The Forest
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.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.
Image: The Shepherds. Photographer: Tiffany Garvie
Presented with Insite Arts and Arts House, Carly Sheppard and Alisdair Macindoe’s The Shepherds is a darkly comic dance work that remakes Australian mythmaking one sheep at a time. As a lonely pair of livestock grazing in a country that “riding on the sheep’s back” (and trampling the land on the way through), they set out to find the shepherd who sealed their fate, wrangling broken ancestries and mixed inheritances along the way. Leaping between invented histories and new worlds, the work leads Australia’s colonial consequences into unfamiliar pastures — searching for more humane symbols and better endings.
Image: Glow.
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.
At The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, Sydney Dance Company presents a striking double bill pairing Antony Hamilton’s Forever & Ever with Melanie Lane’s Love Lock. Created by Hamilton alongside his brother Julian Hamilton of The Presets, Forever & Ever fuses razor-sharp choreography with pulsing techno and high-fashion aesthetics to hypnotic effect. Exploring order, chaos and the machinery of popular culture, the work unfolds as a sleek, high-voltage collision of dance and sound. Inspired by the power of love stories, Melanie Lane’s bold new work Love Lock deconstructs love songs to revel in the fantasies and collective experiences of diverse cultures. With costumes by Akira Isogawa and a score by UK electronic artist Clark, it’s a dance that summons a pulsing and transfixing energy. A journey that celebrates the binding ability of dance to move, warn and empower.
Image: Into The Woods
At University Of Melbourne Arts Precinct (Guild Theatre), presented with UMAC, Melanie Lane presents a second RISING work, Into the Woods, a visceral duet that reclaims the stories of women lost to witch hunts, moving between fact and fiction, tragedy and horror. Inspired by historical accounts of torture-induced confessions, Lane reconstructs fragments of women accused of sorcery across Europe, Australia and Indonesia, reimagining them through choreography and video into a dark, unsettling underworld where suspicion and myth take hold.
Dancehouse becomes a key hub of the Biennale, hosting a suite of works that probe the body as a site of resistance, fracture and transformation.
Branch Nebula’s Exposure sees acclaimed performance artists Latai Taumoepeau and Mirabelle Wouters writhe in deep pits of domestic detritus, investigating the body’s relationship to systems of power. Slicked with oil and lit by microwave buzz, steel bedframes scrape and whitegoods clank as toxins ooze through an ugly-beautiful landscape. Framed by Taumoepeau’s Tongan cultural knowledge, the ageing female body is laid bare as a site of force and resilience, submitting to increasingly surreal states of material pressure and environmental instability.
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.
Image: Red
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.
Image: Sissy Ball. Photographer: Anna Hay
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.
MUSIC
Presented with Triple R, Day Tripper returns as RISING’s festival-within-a-festival, one ticket to ride and higher than ever before. Taking over Max Watt’s and Melbourne Town Hall, the multi-room marathon opens back rooms, balconies and portals for a stacked mixtape of live music and performance.
Kae Tempest leads the charge, the English recording artist, poet and playwright whose five critically acclaimed albums have reshaped contemporary spoken word, arriving with their latest record Self-Titled, described by The Guardian as “a rich, compelling and timely record”. They’re joined by visionary poet and musician Saul Williams, whose genre-defying blend of hip hop, industrial rock and radical lyricism has influenced alternative music for over two decades.
From Chicago, spiritual jazz pioneer Kahlil El’Zabar brings over five decades of reinvention — a musician who has played alongside Nina Simone, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Dizzy Gillespie, blending jazz, blues, R&B and gospel with African folk and dance traditions. Jamaican roots legends The Congos carry the transcendent harmonies of Heart of the Congos, their 1977 masterpiece forged with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, while Christchurch’s beloved Flying Nun stalwarts The Bats bring sweet, connective pop alive with jangle and drive. Copenhagen raven Elias B Rønnenfelt steps out from Iceage to straddle folk, post punk and cloud rap in woozy spiral, while Manhattan’s hottest band, Chanel Beads conjure paranoid pop with oblique melodies and off-kilter production, blissed-out ambience spiked with raw intensity. New York-born, Berlin-based Discovery Zone threads aching hooks through dreamy digital bricolage, and SAICOBAB — sitar master Yoshida Daikiti alongside avant-rock icons from The Boredoms — bend Indian raga drones through experimental Japanese rock with wild immediacy. Jazmine Mary, now flying the flag for a new generation of Flying Nun artists, holds the room in atmospheric, candle-lit indie folk intimacy.
Elsewhere in the sprawling music program, in a world premiere presentation for RISING, Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey honours the legacy of one of the most influential voices in modern music, Gil Scott-Heron. American keyboardist, flautist, singer and production legend Brian Jackson — Scott-Heron’s closest collaborator and co-architect of classics including “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Winter in America”. Joining Jackson is hip hop icon Yasiin Bey, making his third trip to our shores for RISING. Revisiting the radical poetry, jazz-inflected soul and political fire that reshaped generations, the performance celebrates Scott-Heron’s body of work in a way that feels as urgent and resonant now as ever. More than a retrospective, it’s a live reckoning with music that shaped generations.
RISING continues its run of bringing Brooklyn rap royalty to the city, with an appearance from The Queen B herself, Lil’ Kim (pictured right). She’s here to celebrate Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M.—two multiplatium, masterpiece records that ushered in the millennium of rap. After leaving home in her teens, Lil’ Kim started out as a freestyler, inspired the likes of MC Lyte and the Lady of Range. It wasn’t long before she became the breakout star of Junior M.A.F.I.A.—the New York crew formed by Notorious B.I.G. On these first two LPs she moulded herself as the fantasy and the nightmare—a sex positive sensation who demanded pleasure and spiked huge club cuts with caustic lyrics and incisive wit.
Afrobeat royalty comes to Melbourne’s Hamer Hall as Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 carry forward the formidable legacy of Fela Kuti. Stepping up to lead his father’s legendary ensemble at just 14, Seun has preserved its political fire and breakneck funk across six albums, introducing shades of soul and jazz along the way. On stage, he commands with explosive presence, driving rapid-fire brass, bouncy guitar lines and syncopated grooves drawn from Egypt 80 classics and their latest release, Heaviest Yet (Lays the Crownless Head).
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. Silences hang, timbres build to a resonant din, and the architecture itself seems to answer back. A pre-performance conversation with Dr Joel Stern offers deeper insight into Chacon’s expansive, genre-defying practice.
Image: Cate Le Bon
Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon arrives at Melbourne Town Hall with her surrealist pop mastery — groove-laden, liquid and lush. Emerging from the freak folk energy of the late noughties, she has refined and expanded her sound palette to become a go-to producer for indie’s top-tier raconteurs, including Dry Cleaning, Wilco, St Vincent and Deerhunter. Her latest album Michelangelo Dying, featuring an otherworldly duet with John Cale, lifts heartache into heady textural plains of dream pop with steady melodic bass, flanged guitars, swaying horns and synth lines that swirl like dawn.
Saint Levant brings his breakthrough Arabic sounds to Melbourne Town Hall for RISING as part of his debut Australian tour. Born in Jerusalem, Marwan Abdelhamid began performing in sweaty basements, rapping about Palestinian resistance before his single ‘Very Few Friends’ propelled his “New Wave Arab” sound onto the international stage: from Coachella to the Paris Olympia. Singing in Arabic, English and French, his debut album Deira, named in memory of the hotel designed by his father on the Gazan coast, blends North African and Arab influences with rock, hip hop and R&B, while his latest EP Love Letters is a dedication to love in all its forms.
Emerging from Toronto’s 2010s cold wave revival, TR/ST built a cult following on glitching synths and dark, hypnotic hooks — songs that felt like last drinks and fog-machine glances. Now the solo project of Robert Alfons, TR/ST has grown deeper and sleeker, with latest album Performance marking his most danceable evolution yet: industrial, dark and sweat-slicked, driven by throbbing bass and synths that crackle like an electrical storm. On his first trip to Australia, TR/ST envelops Hamer Hall in a mammoth, laser-fed live show spanning his entire catalogue.
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.
Legendary MC Saul Williams and his percussionist-producer comrade Carlos Niño land at the Melbourne Recital Centre to perform their angry and eloquent set of jazz-poetry. Created with members of LA jazz’s new guard under black walnut trees and oaks in Coldwater Canyon National Park, the collaboration marked a return for Williams to older Black oral traditions. His words sprawl like a cosmic vista, lifted by Niño’s septet in electro-acoustic improvisation — shakers, gongs and woodwinds rising and falling with the power of the verse, calling us to “air it out and let it breathe”.
UK producer Daniel Avery is an auteur of otherworldly club bangers and he’s coming to RISING to turn Melbourne Town Hall into a giant rave room. Delivering the “gimmick-free machine funk” that defined his breakthrough album Drone Logic, Avery blends garage, acid house, electro and techno. His music is massive yet meticulously crafted. From ambient and industrial excursions to his latest release Tremors, and its club-focused Midnight Versions, he continues to shape dark dancefloor dynamism into something immersive, expansive and transportive.
North Carolina alt-country outfit Wednesday will take to the Max Watt’s stage with their slacker poetics, gnarly riffs and an unmistakable Asheville twang. Fronted by Karly Hartzman, the group spins tales of grocery store sushi, junkyards, dusty dive bars and youthful misgiving with empathy and narrative flair. Their latest album Bleeds, which has achieved global acclaim and is undoubtedly among their best, sees Southern gothic storytelling collide with an invigorated hybrid of shoegaze and country — lapsteel glinting through fuzz, grunge riffs surging and bluegrass tumbling down the road.
Image: Dry Cleaning
Rage bait, domestic labour, retractable legs and scabs on her head: Florence Shaw’s talk-sung dispatches land at The Forum as Dry Cleaning bring their off-kilter London art-rock to RISING. Each verse feels like a diorama or seared-in sense-memory, soundtracked by groove-conscious post-punk that sidewinds around her. Their latest album Secret Love expands on the sonic terrain of Stumpwork, splicing disjointed funk and atmospheric synths into their art-rock romping, with Shaw’s ennui and overload rendered more vivid than ever.
UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood heads underground to Max Watt’s with a live show steeped in low-end experimentation. Producer, remixer and patriarch of the influential On-U Sound label, Sherwood has spent more than four decades reshaping dub through collaborations with icons including Prince Far I, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mikey Dread, and production work spanning The Slits, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode and Blur. At RISING, he brings that cult-defining sound to the basement stage, where deep dub grooves and seismic basslines take centre stage.
In addition to his Day Tripper performance, Kahil El’Zabar heads to the Yarra Valley for An Afternoon of Rhythm & Wine at Giant Steps Healesville. In this rare intimate session at the winery’s tasting room, the jazz legend and Ethnic Heritage Ensemble founder shares stories and songs from more than 50 years of music-making, weaving percussion, voice and memory into a journey through jazz, R&B, funk, gospel and African musical traditions.
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.
With an intimate capacity of 50 people, the Listening Room instils records and performances with an elevated audio quality and richness, via the specially designed Pitt & Giblin sound system.
After hours, the room hosts one-off listening party sessions from RISING artists who you wouldn’t usually get to see up close, curated by Yasmine Sharaf, presenter of Tripe R’s Cease + Desist and a specialist in underground sounds. The festival lineup spans electro-femme pioneer Nicole Skeltys (Artificial/B(If)Tek);Severed Heads architect Tom Ellard and his future-facing tape loops and found sounds; Rotterdam party-starter Rotational digging from Algerian synth-pop to deep-cut wave; dub-techno trailblazer Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel and Hard Wax; and archival collaborators Penrith Miers, whose work threads Aboriginal songlines through contemporary expression.
Tickets to the Listening Room are free, but balloted. Entry to the ballot is eligible via a Reverb exhibition ticket.
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. A sensory overload tucked below the city above, Bass Lounge draws from global club sounds while staying rooted in Melbourne’s nocturnal pulse.
And there will be more chances to party at another RISING edition of the State Library Up Late, a Naarm Soirée over at the Abbotsford Convent to celebrate the launch of the Lindsay Melbourne City Guide, and the opening night of The VInyl Factory: Reverb.
RISING 2026
27 May - 08 June
rising.melbourne
RISING is Melbourne/Naarm’s flagship festival of new art, music and performance held at the beginning of winter each year.
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