RISING has earned a reputation for bringing bold, strange, challenging and truly beautiful international acts into their program, and 2026 is no exception.
RISING features masked dolls triggering a candlelit cascade of sculptural movement. Blood, dance and the world’s end. Exploration of religion and identity with an Adidas dance-off. Anti-capitalist comedy cabaret. ‘Anti-biography’ of the politicised Arab experience.
Clear the calendar. These are the top picks for dance, theatre and some things much more unusual in RISING’s global performance lineup.
RISING
- When: 27 May-8 June
- Where: Various venues across Melbourne
- Tickets here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
A Year without Summer
View this post on Instagram
- 28-31 May
- Tickets here
Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger delivers musical comedy with a scalpel-edge, a body horror song-and-dance. The performance provocateur’s A Year Without Summer is equal parts moving and unsettling.
Fresh from representing Austria at the Venice Biennale, where her installation Seaworld Venice, featuring performers suspended naked inside a giant bronze bell, flooding the Austrian Pavilion with dystopian visions of climate catastrophe, is currently one of the most talked-about and widely shared works of the entire exhibition, she brings that same fearless, boundary-dissolving physicality to Melbourne.
From 1816’s catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, coexistent with the conception of Mary Shelley’s monster, to our present world teetering on the edge of a self-made techno-apocalypse, Holzinger digs her claws into the world of medical science, destruction and creation.
We witness new monsters, robots prowling the stage, the hungry, spewing beast of AI, the bioengineering of new bodies. Sex, death, blood, and still we dance and sing.
Musical theatre for the world’s end.
In mixed German and English (with English subtitles), you will be drawn on a time-jump journey of spectacular doom, here at the edge of apocalypse.
Monopol Magazine named Holzinger the most influential artist of the year. Right now, she may be the most talked-about director in Europe.
FYI: 16+ performance, those aged 16-18 need to be accompanied by parent or guardian. Includes nudity, simulated self-injury, explicit sexual depictions, simulated bodily fluids, needles, strobe lights, haze, loud music and smoking.
Voyage Into Infinity
- 4-5 June
- Tickets here
Brooklyn-based Narcissister is one of the most enigmatic artists of our era.
Her films have premiered at Sundance and her work has toured festivals, nightclubs and galleries worldwide for two decades. This is her first visit to Australia.
Eternally masked, whirling through costumes, genders, cultural signifiers overlaid on her African American/Sephardic Jewish identity, Narcissister comes to RISING with a performance installation of staggering proportions.
Three Lolita-like dolls set magnificent machines in motion before the live audience. Magic meets the Rube Goldberg machine and objects cascade, collide, twist and tumble. An arresting performance orchestrated by a mysterious living caricature.
By candlelight, the world moves and collapses.
The huge set and seating will take place on the entire floor of Festival Hall for two nights only.
An incredible, rare opportunity to experience Narcissister’s unpredictable art here, in the flesh.
FYI: 16+ only. Nudity, fire, pyrotechnics, flashing lights and haze.
Hard to be Soft: a Belfast Prayer
View this post on Instagram
- 27-30 May
- Tickets here
Presented as part of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft: a Belfast Prayer is an explosive contemporary piece exploring lives of the Northern Irish capital. In four episodes, we are taken into the human experience of the everyday, its people and passions, conflicts and cultural identity.
Choreographed with a deft touch, yet passionate in its vignettes and swagger. The mingled influences of club culture and European avant garde draw together, with music by DJ David Holmes (whose credits include Killing Eve and Ocean’s Eleven). Religion, trauma, machismo and raw emotion are entwined in a work of furious, superb skill and empathy.
The Guardian named it the number one UK dance show of 2019. Doherty has since won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale Danza.
FYI: Not recommended for under 14, themes of violence, substance abuse and suicide, with partial nudity.
Nowhere
View this post on Instagram
- 2-6 June
- Tickets here
In his one man show Nowhere, Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, United 93, Green Zone, The Crown) explores his modern Arab identity and the events that have defined it, from the Egyptian revolution to 9/11 and Gaza, through a multimedia show that has earned critical acclaim.
In Abdalla’s identity and body, the political and personal are inextricably entwined, agency is a fraught idea and belonging feels contingent and precarious. Ultimately, it’s more than Abdalla’s “anti-biography”: it’s a heartfelt, impassioned message for peace in a world at war.
Five stars at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025, where it was one of the most talked-about shows of the festival.
FYI: Recommended for 14+, with strong language and distressing scenes, as well as loud music and flashing lights.
we come to collect: a flirtation with capitalism
- 27 May – 7 June
- Tickets here
Sharp, incisive, unexpected, fabulous. In we come to collect, Jenn Kidwell and ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox burst onto stage to skewer global capitalism and all its dreadful follies in this hilarious, chaotic art-comedy.
A carnivalesque dive into the topics of our time, it weaves stand-up and performance art into a snarling, splendid manifesto in leopard-print. From darkness in the state of our world comes delight – at least, for a night.
Kidwell is an Obie Award-winning artist whose previous show Underground Railroad Game swept the awards circuit, and won the Edinburgh Fringe First Award in 2018.
FYI: This one’s for ages 12 and up. ASL-Auslan interpreted performances on Saturdays.
For all things RISING, head here.
Beat is a proud media partner of RISING.
