RISING 2026 launches this week, and the festival's first week is stacked with dance, theatre, live music and art.
Running across Melbourne from 27 May to 8 June, RISING 2026 lands with characteristic ambition, filling arts centres, cathedrals, libraries, community halls and shopping centres with a program that ranges from the deeply ceremonial to the outright bizarre.
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to dive in, that moment is now.
RISING 2026
- When: 27 May to 8 June 2026
- Where: Various venues across Melbourne
- Full program here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
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The festival opens on the Hamer Hall façade with Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back, an ongoing series running 27 May to 8 June that uses the building’s exterior as a canvas for First Peoples dance.
Kicking things off are films by the Djirri Djirri Wurundjeri Women’s Dance Group, Traditional Custodians of Naarm, featuring the Wominjeka Welcome dance filmed beneath the giant Mountain Ash trees of the Victorian alpine region, alongside a work honouring Bulin Bulin, the lyrebird and keeper of language to Wurundjeri people.
The series also features Midéegaadi, a monumental multichannel video work by internationally recognised Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, a piece that lit up Times Square in 2025, now reimagined for Naarm.
That same work anchors the festival’s opening at Fed Square, where Midéegaadi plays across three nights from 28 to 30 May, turning the open-air space into a gathering point. There’ll be heaters, hot chocolates, beanbags, deck chairs and a sausage sizzle from Killara Foundation celebrating First Nations flavours and native ingredients. It’s free, it’s outdoors, and it’s probably the warmest (literally) RISING has ever started.
Theatre and performance
Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger, who brought TANZ to RISING in 2023, returns with A Year Without Summer, playing at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne from 28 to 31 May.
It’s a wild ride that kicks off in 1816 in the aftermath of the Mount Tambora volcanic eruption, then catapults into the anxious present, a musical-comedy about medical science, mortality and monsters, complete with a giant inflatable womb. Classic Holzinger. Get onto it fast, as tickets are sure to sell out.
Baltimore theatre-maker Jenn Kidwell brings We Come to Collect: a flirtation, with capitalism to The Showroom at Arts Centre Melbourne from 27 May to 7 June.
Co-created with ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox, it’s a leopard-printed, carnivalesque performance art-comedy that takes the myths of American economic might, turns them upside down and shakes them until the absurdity falls out, touching on time, race, desire, shame and Flava Flav along the way.
Irish choreographer Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft: a Belfast Prayer arrives at the Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse from 27 to 30 May. Across four episodes, Doherty channels Belfast’s simmering undercurrent of conflict through explosive, club-influenced dance, with music from DJ David Holmes (you’ll know his work from Killing Eve and Ocean’s Eleven). It’s part of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, curated and hosted by RISING.
Also part of the Dance Biennale, The Supposed to Be runs from 27 May to 6 June at Footscray Community Arts. It’s a Griffin Award-nominated work from writer Chenturan Aran, a sharp, sci-fi-inflected piece of theatre about a Sri Lankan Tamil woman who discovers she’s a clone, built to live out someone else’s ambitions. It’ll be weird, funny and political in the best way.
Brian Lipson’s one-person show A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, playing at Trades Hall’s Old Council Chambers from 28 May to 7 June, takes audiences into the book-lined study of Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, polymath, fingerprinting pioneer and, troublingly, the father of eugenics. It’s a dark comedy that pokes at the blind spots of empiricism, restaged here to reckon with the post-truth present.
Gigs, gigs, gigs
On the music front, the week opens with Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey, a world premiere at The Forum on 28 May.
Brian Jackson, the jazz pianist who spent nine years and nine albums with Gil Scott-Heron blending civil rights poetry with fluid funk, is joined by Yasiin Bey in a celebration of that foundational body of work. This is Bey’s third consecutive RISING appearance, after MF Doom and Black Star, and probably his most soulful yet. A handful of tickets remain, so don’t sit on it.
On 29 May, Library Up Late: Rebel Heart transforms State Library Victoria into an after-dark playground, with performances across the Dome (now a Sonic Temple), the Ian Potter Queen’s Hall and The Quad, where DJ JNETT kicks off with an Italo Disco set before Elbain takes over with electro and Y2K-infused sounds.
Artists Barry William Hale, Bundit Puangthong, Dr Chandrabhanu and Dr Deanne Gilson will also be in conversation in the Redmond Barry Reading Room.
Bass Lounge opens the same night, 29 May, running both Fridays during RISING, beneath the Paramount Food Court. Week one sees Rotterdam-based DJ Rotational spin everything from Algerian synth-pop to crazy wave, alongside a live set from Brussels producer Naomie Klaus and sets from Kidskin, Front Page Leslie and Zalina. Tickets are cheaper to buy online ahead of the night, so plan accordingly.
On 30 May, Raven Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Voiceless Mass lands at St Paul’s Cathedral. The piece, composed for organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and sine waves, was written by Chacon, a Diné composer and the first ever Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
It’s a sonic reckoning with colonial power and silenced voices, performed within one of the city’s most loaded architectural spaces. Online tickets have sold out, but you can line up on the day and try your luck.
Also on 30 May, Lil’ Kim heads to Festival Hall for a landmark tour celebrating Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M., two records that didn’t just succeed in hip hop, they rewrote what was possible within it. Supported by Dutty Worldwide, Naarm DJ and Gunai/Kurnai, Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri woman Sky Thomas (Soju Gang), it’s shaping up to be one of the biggest nights of the festival.
Dance Biennale
In the Dance Biennale program, Exposure runs from 27 to 30 May at Dancehouse, where performance artists Latai Taumoepeau and Mirabelle Wouters submerge themselves in pits of domestic detritus, steel bedframes, whitegoods and oozing toxins, to interrogate the ageing female body as a site of resilience and force. It’s confronting and it’s meant to be.
Glow, Chunky Move’s landmark 2006 work fusing dance and interactive technology, returns to Chunky Move Studios from 27 to 31 May. Originally created by RISING’s own artistic director Gideon Obarzanek, the piece allows a single dancer to trigger and control music, lighting and animation in real time.
It’s performed here by original cast member Sara Black alongside current Chunky Move dancer Melissa Pham and independent artist Layla Meadows.
And tucked inside Emporium Melbourne from 27 May through to 21 June, Furby Chorus and FRIENDs is exactly what it sounds like, a congregation of Furbies and robotic companions from Yukai Engineering, living inside a sculptural world designed by studio BOWL’s Ryohei Murakami, waiting to unexpectedly erupt to life.
Presented by the National Communication Museum as part of the Dance Biennale, it’s free to discover in the heart of the city.
Whether it’s delightful or deeply unsettling is kind of the point.
For more information, head here.
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