RISING
2025 Program Showcasing 12 days of Explosive New art, Music and Performance
RISING, Melbourne’s rapturous winter festival of new art, music and performance, today unveils its 2025 program featuring; 65 events, 327 artists, 15 new commissions, 9 world premieres, 5 Australian and 10 Victorian, returning to showcase the city in all its moon-lit glory over two epic weekends from Wednesday 4th to Sunday 15th June.
Over 12 nights, RISING transforms the CBD into a pulsating 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 Punjabi beats 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 expansive 2025 program will spill into laneways, arcades, underground basements and grand theatres showcasing an unmissable lineup of worldclass international and local artists, in a city-wide celebration of Naarm, now.
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.”
International Performances
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 directly 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 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)
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
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. This is an undeniable new work from Wiradjuri artist Joel Bray that echoes and honours generations of protest and rebellion. (Arts House)
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. (Buxton Contemporary)
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)
Last and First Men – Neon Dance presents a stunning and unique contemporary dance performance set to the backdrop of Jóhannsson’s 16mm black and white film, with narration from Tilda Swinton and original score composed by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, who will provide a live immersive audio experience for RISING. (Melbourne Recital Centre)
Ecstasy – Live, loud, visceral and taking place in the round, Ecstasy invites us to stretch into this seductive void. To shake free and become enraptured, inside the unknowable. This new piece from Gadigal land/Sydney-based producer, vocalist and performer Marcus Whale, is a choreographic investigation into the reckless abandonment of the rave—a reach into the place where dance floor heat goes beyond the beyond. (The Substation)
