RISING, Melbourne’s premiere festival for dance, music, and performing arts, is returning for another knock-out year with a lineup of homegrown talent and international visionaries.
From the intimate confessions of sex workers to Shakespeare reimagined with household objects, RISING is smashing through artistic boundaries with the subtlety of a strobe-lit rave.
Taking place at venues across the city from 4-15 June 2025, this year’s roster of performers is sure to get your feet tapping, your eyes widened, and your mind expanded by every medium of interactive and visual arts going this side of the equator.
Below are a collection of works that expand our understanding of performance art. With so much to choose from, here’s our breakdown of some boundary-defying performances from this year’s RISING program.
RISING 2025
- Melbourne’s major winter festival has a stunning 2025 program
- It contains 65 events, 327 artists, 15 new commissions, nine world premieres
- RISING will run from Wednesday 4 June to Sunday 15 June
- View the full program here
- Rising Multi Pass: Save 15% if you book three or more eligible events
Explore Melbourne’s latest arts and stage news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
ECSTASY
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- The Substation (1 Market Street, Newport VIC 3015)
- 11 – 14 June
- Get tickets here
Marcus Whale’s Ecstasy merges outdoor rave energy with Christian mysticism in a rapturous Melbourne premiere at RISING festival.
This visceral performance takes place in the round, inviting audiences to become enraptured in a seductive void where dance-ritual and sound create a space beyond conventional experience. Expanding on Whale’s 2024 album, Ecstasy reaches operatic scale through cascading sub-bass, choral drone and choreography that investigates the reckless abandonment of rave culture. Inspired by Saint Teresa of Avila’s mystical experiences, the Gadigal Land/Sydney artist enmeshes queer performance with baroque pageantry in a journey toward ekstasis—the state of being “outside oneself.”
The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave
- Buxton Contemporary (Southbank Blvd & Dodds Street, Southbank VIC 3006)
- 12 – 14 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Choreographed by queer Kiwi dancer Oli Mathiesen, this high-impact endurance event is a microcosm of the innovative nature of RISING’s performance program, condensing the ecstasy and intensity of a three-day rave event into a single 90-minute performance.
Designed to provide a sense of catharsis outside the drudgery of the day-to-day rat race, the troupe of NZ dancers behind The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave invite you to experience the euphoria of 5am rave culture (and still end up in bed before sunrise).
Hedwig & The Angry Inch
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- Athenaeum Theatre (188 Collins Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000)
- 13 – 26 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Bringing a performance heralded as “nothing short of astounding” (Australian Arts Review), multi-talented star of stage and screen Seann Miley Moore is set to raise the roof with their incredible range and volume, as the titular Hedwig at the centre of this gender-bending punk rocker.
BLKDOG
- The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
- 4 – 7 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Direct from the West End and here to take your breath away, class-leading British choreographer Botis Seva is serving up a unique experience in dance as raw, unfiltered life experience.
BLKDOG takes audiences through a dark, entrancing underworld of smog, strobe lights, and a life story communicated in a hypnotic display of speed and strength. Branded as a hip-hop exorcism, BLKDOG transcends dance norms, promising an interpretive dance show unlike any other before or since.
Heartbreak Hotel
- The Showroom, Arts Centre Melbourne
- 10 – 22 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Wellington-based dramatic company EBKM are bringing their newest cathartic comedy direct to Melbourne, fresh from a smash-hit run at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Offering plenty of (painfully) relatable explorations into what heartbreak does to the body and soul, punters can expect a front-seat view of how it feels to get over an ex – or not – with finely tuned comedy sketches and a good lashing of wit.
A hilarious, deep reflection on the healing process following a split from your Number One, and the bare human need for connection with others.
Kill Me
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- The Sumner, Southbank Theatre
- 5 – 8 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Gleefully blurring the lines between art and life, Argentine choreographer Marina Otero is taking audiences into a deep dive of her personal life with a healthy dose of surrealism and catharsis.
Expect roller skates, Bach, Miley Cyrus, and a dash of onstage nudity for good measure. Impossible to slap a label onto, anyway, Marina posits the show is about mental health, “so it enters the inclusive agenda of the art market.”
Hamlet
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- Union Theatre, University of Melbourne
- 4 – 8 June 2025
- Get tickets here
One of the Bard’s greatest works for stage, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet receives a fresh revival from eight performers with Down syndrome at Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza.
In a captivating audio-visual experience which blends live performance with pre-recorded video installations, this phenomenal work places the plot’s importance on the influence of the wider community, more so than the goings-on of one particularly depressed Danish prince. It’s revolutionary.
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare
- Guild Theatre, University of Melbourne
- 6 – 15 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Keeping aboard the Shakespeare bandwagon comes an innovative new look at the Elizabethan classics: Table Top Shakespeare from theatre company Forced Entertainment.
Using everyday household objects in lieu of paid actors – notable examples being a salt and pepper shaker for a pair of European monarchs, and a bottle of Dettol taking the role of a nurse – the Complete Works offers some enjoyably lo-fi puppetry for these iconic fixtures of Western stage canon.
Expect various kitchen-based madcap exploits and a whole new way of approaching the great works of The Bard.
The Act
- Chunky Move Studios (111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006)
- 11 – 14 June 2025
- Get tickets here
Tiptoeing the delicate line between art and the upfront erotic, writer and sex worker, Tilly Lawless brings a unique collaboration with Bunjalung Ngapuhi artist Amrita Hepi, one of Melbourne’s leading lights in contemporary dance.
Working together to develop a specialised, strongly intertwined performance language that absorbs their unique ways of interpreting past experiences, The Act is their latest work, which examines the distinction between personal expression and the purchased intimacies of sex work.
An exploration of where art and the erotic are both woven of the same cloth, and how to adjust our views of one inherently in favour of the other.
RISING will be taking place in Melbourne across June 4-15 2025. View the complete performance program here. Save 15% if you book three or more eligible events with the RISING: Multi Pass.
Beat is an official media partner of RISING.
