It’s supposed to be Melbourne’s premier cultural festival. But does it work?

Every arts festival has hits and misses, but the second full year of Melbourne’s Rising should worry any city – especially one that considers itself to be a cultural capital – for reasons that run deeper than underwhelming elements of the program.

As a major arts festival, Rising is facing an identity crisis. It lacks an articulated purpose, clashes with established interstate festivals – Dark MOFO in Hobart, VIVID in Sydney – and remains confused by the conflicting missions of White Night and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the two events it was supposed to replace.

Dance, live music and the work of First Nations creatives were the highlights of 2023’s Rising festival.Credit: Nada Zgank, Rick Clifford, Julian Rosefeldt, Jacinta Keefe Photography, Jeff Busby

Before exploring why Rising is misconceived, though, we should affirm the things it got right in 2023.

The festival sported an extensive live music program spanning a kaleidoscopic array of contemporary genres and styles.

With Gideon Obarzanek as co-artistic director, it was strong on dance for the second year in a row. And Rising was an unqualified success as a platform for the energy and diversity of First Nations creatives, who provided festival highlights across the performing and visual arts.

You still have plenty of time to catch Shadow Spirit, showing above Flinders St Station until the end of July. The immersive exhibition curates work from 14 leading First Nations artists and roves from giant bandicoots to eerie spirit worlds, from Indigenous Star Wars characters to a room suffused with the wonders of Aboriginal astronomy and metaphysics.

Buŋgul is a worthy tribute concert for the celebrated Yolngu musician Gurrumul.Credit: Tiffany Garvie

On stage, too, First Nations artists led the way in honouring the past, reimagining the future and exploring the tensions of the present.

There was Buŋgul, a worthy tribute concert to the celebrated Yolngu musician Gurrumul Yunupingu, and Daniel Riley’s Tracker, a dance theatre piece paying homage to the hard road walked by his ancestor, a Wiradjuri elder who joined the NSW Police force.

Only two plays were worth catching at Rising: Hide the Dog, a lively and educational adventure for children drawn from Maori and Aboriginal myths and traditions, and Declan Thurber Gillick’s Jacky, an intricate four-hander at the MTC, beautifully acted, following a queer First Nations sex worker struggling to navigate identity and competing responsibilities (not to mention the labyrinth of race, sex, gender expectation) in the city, far from his mob.

Art serves a profound purpose for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – the preservation and reconstruction of cultures, languages and identities stretching back many tens of thousands of years. And it made some other much-anticipated works look decadent and futile in comparison, not least Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria, an immersive artwork that colonised the Melbourne Town Hall during the festival.

Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria features bank workers breaking into wild dance.Credit: Julian Rosefeldt

If this was an attempt to create a secular, anti-capitalist art church, it had a strong whiff of pretentiousness and hypocrisy about it.

No one could deny the lushness of Rosefeldt’s cinematography, or the sonic splendour of being surrounded by a virtual community choir, but any revolutionary or euphoric potential the experience might have had was eviscerated by contradiction.

The script mashed-up intellectuals of global influence into earnest sermonising and vapid soundbites largely placed into the mouths of the marginalised – including a black taxi driver and homeless drunks. Exquisite production values lent the whole affair the air of anti-capitalist advertising bankrolled by the 1 per cent, and you couldn’t leave without walking through the show’s merch shop. Viva la revolution. Yeah, right.

Work commissioned from Melbourne’s theatre and performance artists did not remotely do justice to their strengths – some was dire beyond belief – and the lone international standout I saw was Tanz.

Tanz is billed as “part gross-out comedy, part shock-horror show, part ghost story, part superhuman dance work”.Credit: Rising

A blood-soaked feminist subversion of Romantic ballet from Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, it transformed a sedate dance class into a nightmarish circus of body horror monstered by a predatory ballet mistress; her dancers suspended from meat hooks or casually pulling bongs on stage.

But that was one show. Even the thinnest Melbourne International Arts Festival had a much broader range of leading artists from around the world to inspire and provoke audiences and artists, and the city emerges from the fallow years of the pandemic in sore need of them.

Which brings us to back to Rising’s identity crisis. Arts festivals flourish when they are tailored to serve the interests of their host cities. It’s why the smaller state capitals – Adelaide, Perth and more recently Hobart – often have the best festivals. With a sparser cultural calendar throughout the year, these events become a bigger deal. They compress cultural experience into a critical mass. They’re widely embraced by their communities. They attract visitors from interstate.

Unfortunately, the genesis of Rising was shaped by political expediency, rather than the interests of artistic communities and audiences.

It appears the Andrews government wanted to ditch the immense logistical challenge of White Night – the popular, dusk-til-dawn arts party and projection fest that saw over half-a-million people swarming into the CBD – without paying a political price for withdrawing bread and circuses from the populace. (And there’s always a price.)

The gambit worked, aided by the pandemic catastrophe, but now we’re stuck with a festival without much sense of what it’s supposed to be. In its own words, Rising is “a festival that you do, in a city that does it best: music, food, art and culture under moonlight”. That is not a purpose, it’s a hopelessly vague marketing slogan.

Melburnians haven’t witnessed an International Arts Festival or a White Night since 2019, and we are ill-served by Rising if it isn’t more responsive to our arts scene, if it doesn’t embrace – and quickly – a more developed and distinctive idea of its role in the city’s cultural life.

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