RISING is back to warm up Melbourne this winter with more than 100 creative events taking place across Melbourne’s CBD.
Showcasing the work of 376 artists, the Victorian Government backed festival includes art exhibitions and installations, performances and live music as well as immersive creative experiences.
This year’s festival presents the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale. RISING was selected by Creative Australia to deliver this major new national platform showcasing the strength and diversity of Australian and international dance.
The Australian Dance Biennale will be a jam-packed program of extraordinary national and international dance works at theatres, public spaces and club nights around the city.
Australian Dance Biennale highlights:
- Chunky Move’s milestone work Glow returns in a rare revival, twenty years after its pioneering fusion of dance and interactive technology first premiered.
- Lucy Guerin Inc premieres The Forest, a new dance work that draws on our deep, enduring connection to trees.
- Land of 1000 Dances, will see the reopening of the historic Flinders Street Station Ballroom transformed into a living dance academy offering public classes.
- 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.
Off the dancefloor, RISING will present an expansive program of amazing music gigs, jaw dropping theatre, exhibitions, projections, performances, and so much more.
RISING highlights:
- ACMI will host a major exhibition, The Vinyl Factory: Reverb – a multi-sensory journey into sound, featuring immerse works that dive into different eras of music and celebrates vinyl culture.
- Curated by Taungurung woman Kate ten Buuren, this year’s First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams celebrates the power of Blak imagination and presents artworks by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists with connections to Victoria. Six trams will be transformed into moving canvases across the city, launching during RISING and remaining on the network for 12 months.
- For the third time, Daytripper, RISING’s festival-within-a-festival, returns featuring eight hours of music performance and art, spanning across Melbourne Town Hall and Max Watt’s.
- A number of high-profile music acts will perform during RISING including Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson and Yasiin Bey, Lil’ Kim, Wednesday and Cate Le Bon.
- Actor, writer and director Khalid Abdalla (best known for his roles in The Crown and The Kite Runner) brings his moving and playful “anti-biography” Nowhere to Malthouse Theatre.
- Voyage Into Infinity will transform Festival Hall with a giant installation of ladders, planks, pylons and swinging objects
- Austrian director, choreographer and performance artist, Florentina Holzinger’s latest epic, A Year Without Summer, is a riotous feminist musical-comedy that cuts into medical science, mortality and the monsters we engineer in the name of progress.
Free events include:
- The Royal Family Dance Crew will present a free all-ages party amplifying Pasifika music, dance and culture set to ignite Feb Square at sunset.
- Barkindji artist Kent Morris presents FLOWERlower POWERower in City Square, an immersive sculptural work centred on the murnong (yam daisy).
- And each night, Hamer Hall’s façade becomes a canvas for Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back, RISING’s annual large-scale First Peoples projection.
RISING runs until 8 June 2026. For more information and to book tickets visit 2026.rising.melbourne/