Rising has announced an epic 2024 program of new music, art and performance that’s set to ignite Melbourne/Naarm this June.
Theg 2024 program, featuring 105 events, more than 480 artists, 23 new commissions, 6 world premieres, and 8 Australian premieres, set to take the city as a stage as winter begins from 1-16 June.
Across sixteen nights, spanning three epic weekends, RISING will stretch down the spine of Swanston St and beyond as large scale installations, free public events and world-class contemporary music, theatre and dance, ignite the city’s streets, venues and hidden spaces.
Historic arcades and back alleys will come alive with art exhibitions, performances, micro-bars, art and dance classes. A transformed Melbourne Town Hall hosts a sprawling day party across the King’s Birthday long weekend. Epic and ethereal sound works echo from the Birrarung through the CBD, St Paul’s Cathedral becomes a site of mass music making, and First Nations art goes large at Fed Square.
Transforming the city
In 2024 RISING invites audiences to see Melbourne in a new light and experience the city’s transformed landmarks and hidden gems, from its labyrinthine laneways to its iconic gathering spaces.
Highlights include:
- Fed Square will transform into a vibrant forum of First Peoples’ art, politics, and cosmic connections with The Blak Infinite — an expansive free exhibition and public program at the heart of the festival.
- Along the Birrarung, First Nations soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham AO and audio artists Byron Scullin and Thomas Supple’s monumental sound work The Rivers Sing returns to RISING. It offers a nightly pause at dusk that blends field recordings with human voices, echoing waterway singing traditions.
- International dance-floor phenomena, SHOUSE, will conduct a rapturous coming together. In Communitas the duo invites over a thousand participants to form a mass-choir as they sing, dance and make sound vibrations for vibration’s sake bdneath the hallowed vaulted ceilings of St Paul’s Cathedral.
- Melbourne Art Trams return, breaking free from a dedicated theme, curator Jarra Karalinar Steel has selected works that embrace artistic freedom, unleashing a kaleidoscope of narratives, styles, and perspectives reflecting the vibrant essence of First Peoples culture, art, and design.
- In 2013, artist Richard Bell (Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang Gurang) debuted Pay the Rent in Melbourne/Naarm—a digital sign with rapidly accumulating numbers. The staggering sum, zooming upwards in red digits, represents the calculated debt owed to First Nations people by the Australian Government since Federation in 1901. It’s over a decade since the work was first displayed. Now returns to Naarm for RISING, spanning the facade of State Library Victoria.
- The festival’s pulsing hub and nightly social club Night Trade, made easy by Up, returns in 2024. This time, it delves deep into Melbourne’s hidden history as it sprawls across the network of laneways underneath the Capitol Theatre and connects through to Howey Place.
Music
From Melbourne icons The Dirty Three in their first hometown shows in 14 years, to Western Sydney drill trailblazers OneFour, US hip hop icon Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) performing two sets including a headlining show at PICA (Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts), and the singular Swedish electro-popsinger and producer Fever Ray, in Australia for the first time, RISING’s contemporary music program will take over the CBD’s most iconic venues, weaving together a diverse lineup of the best musical talents from across Australia and the globe.
Highlights include:
- Day Tripper co-presented with Triple R is RISING’s day party takeover of Melbourne Town Hall and surrounding venues.
- In his second RISING performance, and fresh from performing at Paris Fashion Week in January, is Yasiin Bey will pay tribute to his favourite tracks by the late, great rapper’s rapper MF Doom.
- The 24 Hour Rock Show in the Capitol with a new, free line up of back-to-back music documentaries. Drop in, drop out, or settle in for the full 24 hours.
- Hear My Eyes return to RISING with Hear My Eyes: Hellraiser. They’ll bring together one of the most respected and audacioushouse and techno musicians, Hieroglyphic Being AKA Jamal Moss in collaboration with Melbourne’s own composer and visual artist Robin Fox to reframe the 1987 extra-dimensional horror classic Hellraiser, with an all new score and live laser performance, in the grandeur of the Melbourne Town Hall.
- DJ and producer Moktar and friends blending club and techno with traditional Arabic instrumentation, offering a unique sound that pays homage to his Egyptian-Australian heritage.
- In their first-ever Australian performances, Fever Ray, the solo project of Sweden’s Karin Dreijer of The Knife.
- US pop star Sky Ferreira is jetting her way to RISING—and Australia for the first time since 2015. She’ll bring her blend of pop and heavy metal heart to the intimate upstairs space at The Forum in what’s sure to be the hot-ticket performance of the festival.
- Yves Tumor the enigmatic multi-instrumentalist and producer based in Turin, Italy returns to Australia, showcasing a groundbreaking mix of rock, psychedelia, and electronica.
- Closing out the festival, Melbourne icons The Dirty Three make their long-awaited return, offering transcendent live performances that melds rock, jazz, and folk into captivating instrumentals.
- American indie-rock veterans Blonde Redhead return with their first album in nine years, bringing their artful blend of noise-rock and pop to the Melbourne Town Hall.
- Iranian-Swedish sensation and Prince mentee, Snoh Aalegra, known for her cinematic soul, takes the Forum stage for RISING.
Theatre, dance and performance
RISING’s theatre, dance, and performance program features world premieres, epic new commissions and works that challenge, entertain, and provoke:
- At Melbourne Town Hall, ILBIJERRI Theatre Company present Big Name NoBlankets, a rock ‘n’ roll story celebrating the trailblazing music icons, Warumpi Band and inspired by tales from founding member Sammy Tjapanangka Butcher.
- An illusionist’s dinner party becomes an absurd meditation on human consumption in FOOD, an Australian premiere at MTC Lawler, from poetic illusionist and master clown from New York, Geoff Sobelle.
- Chapter One of the Cadela Força Trilogy: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, sees Brazilian artist and director Carolina Bianchi travel through time and states of consciousness to confront a vision of hell.
- 8/8/8 is a durational performance work, a utopian, maximalist epic of experimental performance from Melbourne theatre-makers Harriet Gillies and Marcus McKenzie.
- In a world premiere presentation from Lucy Guerin Inc, One Single Action (in an ocean of everything) sees dance duo Amber McCartney and Geoffrey Watson ride the internal and external rifts in a world fraught with interference.
- Stretch the hamstrings. Strap on the protective headgear. Tune the snare and apply the bow resin. ONE SONG HISTOIRE(S) DU THÉÂTRE IV is an utterly frenzied rock concert spiked with lactic acid. The brainchild of Flemish artist Miet Warlop, it’s one song performed over and over by a squad of musicians. At the same time, they run an obstacle course of balance beams, treadmills and trampolines—until they almost collapse from exhaustion.
- Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre present The First Bad Man – a performative book club that lives the fiction of Miranda July’s debauched classic.
- UK comedian, writer and theatre maker Daniel Kitson is putting on a show at MTC Lawler called Collaborator: A Work in Progress.
- In Burnout Paradise at Malthouse, endorphin levels surge early, and harriedeuphoria takes hold, as four performers from Pony Cam Theatre Collective run over 15km on treadmills, manically multi-tasking before burn-out sets in.
- In a new RISING commission, ECLIPSE at Melbourne Town Hall, a war is raging between two of Naarm’s fiercest kweens CERULEAN and Stone Motherless Cold with special guests from across the multiverse.
- S. Shakthidharan’s acclaimed Sri Lankan-Australian saga, the multi-award winning Counting and Cracking, makes its long awaited Victorian debut at RISING, co-presented with University of Melbourne Arts and Culture (UMAC) at the new Union Theatre.
- At the Immigration Museum, enter the innermost realm of iconic Melbourne dance company Chunky Move’s latest work where the walls quiver, and time contorts. You, Beauty is a cavernous and intimate performance experience that moves between hard exteriors and soft interiors.
- Arkadia, Melanie Lane’s new dance opera at Substation, invites audiences to stepthrough a wishing well into a utopian realm.
- In partnership with the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Out Loud is a free, new exhibition featuring the newly complete archive of the late Australian maverick photographer, Rennie Ellis. Best known for his fly-on-the-wall photography of celebrities, models, nightclubs and Australian suburbia.
