Has Melbourne’s biggest arts festival finally taken off?

We all know Melbourne’s Rising festival had a baptism of fire – deferred by the pandemic in 2020 and cancelled by lockdown after one day in 2021. As a replacement for both White Night and our International Arts Festival, it struggled in its first full program in 2022, and again last year, to carve out a coherent identity and role for itself in the city’s cultural life.

Has it finally, five years in, achieved lift-off?

The first chapter of Carolina Bianchi’s Cadela Força Trilogy (Bitch Power Trilogy) was a standout of the festival. Credit: Christophe Raynaud

There’s every sign it has. According to a release from Rising, this year brought in 680,000 festival attendees. With a beefed-up performing arts program, it was the first year that Rising felt more than a poor shadow of an international arts festival, and the spirit of White Night was preserved in subtle and unexpected ways.

Artistic directors Gideon Obarzanek and Hannah Fox seem to have refined what might best be preserved from predecessor events, while appealing by necessity to a younger, more alternative and adventurous demographic - let’s call it the Dark MOFO-factor. Dark MOFO itself was reduced to little more than a nude swim and a rave this year, and even if it had gone ahead in full, cost-of-living pressures might have encouraged a staycation anyway.

This year’s Rising was responsive to audiences feeling the pinch, offering free events in and around the CBD. At sunset each day, you could wander down to the banks of the Yarra for The Rivers Sing, where the voice of Indigenous opera luminary Deborah Cheetham Fraillon was amplified for blocks, entrancing passers-by.

The Blak Infinite at Federation Square curated Indigenous art experiences spanning First Peoples’ cosmology and politics, from Richard Bell’s installation EMBASSY, inspired by the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, to immersive nighttime projections and storytelling.

Communitas saw a 1000-strong choir of random volunteers gathering at St Paul’s Cathedral on the final weekend of Rising.Credit: Wayne Taylor

There was an art party after dark, Night Trade, tucked away down the city’s obscure laneways, and an anthemic festival moment with Communitas, a 1000-strong choir of random volunteers gathering at St Paul’s Cathedral on the final weekend, led by SHOUSE and Deep Soulful Sweats in an uplifting feat of participatory dance and song.

The live music program has had consistent strength and depth of field for all the Rising festivals so far, and 2024 was no exception. Highlights for me included RRR’s Day Tripper event, a kind of eclectic day-club broadcast live, and the magnetic eccentricity of Swedish electropop maverick Fever Ray in concert at Hamer Hall. My personal regret from the massive line up of international and local acts was not catching the sounds of the Sahara at the sold-out gig from Grammy Award-winning Tuareg band Tinariwen.

Facing very slim pickings for two years running, Rising had much to do to keep Melbourne theatregoers happy. It delivered a bumper program.

A fist-pumping Indigenous musical from Ilbijerri Theatre, Big Name, No Blankets, told the story of the Warumpi Band, the first rock band to sing using Aboriginal language. Expect a film, honestly. It’s the most uplifting, big-hearted, and charismatic First Nations musical since the very first one, Bran Nue Dae, in 1990.

Big Name, No Blankets is a joyful musical, soundtracked by the work of the Warumpi Band.Credit: Brett Boardman

Melbourne audiences have also been waiting for many years to see S. Shakthidharan’s elegant and free-flowing epic, Counting and Cracking, an intergenerational saga following a Tamil family forced to flee their homeland for Sydney.

That it was staged in the Union Theatre at the University of Melbourne confused me, as an alumnus who remembers a pokey, rundown little venue in the Student Union. Audiences take note: it is now a state-of-the-art theatre in a spanking new arts centre, with an ambitious public program overseen by Virginia Lovett, former executive producer at the MTC.

Daniel Kitson’s audience-participation hatefest, Collaborator , was a cathartic experiment. The First Bad Man gave us camp, post-dramatic satire on a book club reading a Miranda July novel. Justin Shoulder’s ANITO was an astonishing piece of illusionistic visual theatre, recreating the evolution of life on Earth, dinosaurs and all.

And if you missed staying up all night at White Night, 8/8/8 Rest gave you the chance at a hallucinatory durational performance deep within the bowels of the Arts Centre.

The beautifully composed Gurr Era Op is like a sea breeze: it blows strong and tastes fresh.Credit: Prudence Upton

The standout international theatre of the festival, the first chapter of Carolina Bianchi’s Cadela Força Trilogy (Bitch Power Trilogy), brought some much-needed Latin American performance into the mix. Yes, the show made headlines for its controversial gambit – Bianchi ingests a date rape drug on stage and falls unconscious – but as an artistic response to rape, this was one of the most fiercely intelligent and daring pieces of performance art I’ve seen.

Not every art form appeared well-served this year. My colleague, dance critic Andrew Fuhrmann, had a mild gripe about an underwhelming program of contemporary dance dominated by the usual suspects, while praising the vibrant Torres Strait Islander dance trio’s Gurr Era Op.

As a veteran festival observer, I’d say this is inevitable. The Melbourne International Arts Festival was always a carousel of complaint, with artistic directors choosing to focus on one discipline at greater depth each year. Theatre finally got a red-hot go at Rising, after two years of being overshadowed by dance. Seems fair.

What isn’t fair is that the Allan government has failed to lock in funding for Rising in the medium term. Future audiences will pay if bureaucrats continue to dither, as many international acts and local commissions require years of planning to arrive on the festival stage. It’s a silly thing to do, just as our winter arts festival seems to have found its feet and been embraced by the city.

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