Cathedral parties and world-class art: Rising festival is a winner in Melbourne

A life-affirming party in a cathedral, a marathon musical gymnasium and theatrical pieces of delicacy and pathos. Has Melbourne’s Rising festival got the balance right?

Communitas by Shouse in Melbourne’s Anglican cathedral. Picture: Mandy Wu

It may have been the final weekend of Melbourne’s Rising festival, but the party hadn’t truly started until they pushed back the pews at St Paul’s.

Melbourne’s towering Anglican cathedral opposite Federation Square on Saturday was the centre of the festival’s ever-expanding universe, hosting a grand mass – of sorts – for more than 1000 people.

Rising Fest celebrations

Communitas, a secular dance and song project by Melbourne electronic duo Shouse (Jack Madin and Ed Service), saw the cathedral transformed into a buoyant moshpit of chorus and choreography. The pair conducted a band of 100 musicians and singers and a heaving mass of punters, who had been required to undertake a workshop to learn dance moves and lyrics before entry, filling the cavernous church with spirituality and soul of a very different kind. Melbourne dance troupe Deep Soulful Sweats formed mini-congregations of participants, who swelled and swarmed around the space like so many denominations before converging in an ecstatic denouement of dance and raised hands to the chanted words “I can feel it … rising”. Once the performance was complete, participants hugged. Many were in tears. “It’s like going to church without all the f...ing guilt,” one woman was overheard saying. Once Communitas – a brilliant and pure festival show – was complete, the audience was excommunicated to the street, and as dusk fell, a luminous neon sign above Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station reminded us why we were here: Rising.

Communitas by Shouse in St Paul’s Cathedral. Picture: Shannyn Higgins

The two-week event, which superseded the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the more niche White Night Festival, has taken some time to transition. Conceived by directors Gideon Orbazanek and Hannah Fox, it had been due to launch in 2020. Covid put paid to that notion, and it launched in 2022. The switch from MIAF’s traditional October spring events to a midwinter June jamboree has been anything but seamless. But 2024’s event had the mix just right. Brand recognition is strong in the Victorian capital – perhaps more than many state festivals – and the shift in demographic is palpable.

Some 680,000 festivalgoers attended this year’s event, up from 630,000 the previous year. Organisers said Rising’s visitor targets had been beaten in the event’s first week, and its city-centre hub in the Capitol theatre precinct was abuzz with the kind of hip arts crowd of which most festivals only dream.

Rising festival directors Gideon Obarzanek and Hannah Fox. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Perhaps it’s the Dark Mofo effect (Fox is, after all, is a former associate creative director there), but with MONA’s midwinter arts festival taking a hiatus in what seems to be an attempt to wrest more funding from the Tasmanian government, Rising has stepped into the breach. Its Night Trade after-dark precinct in the historically bohemian Capitol Arcade was full of revellers on Friday and Saturday evenings. Punters made themselves at home in micro bars and restaurants; others sardined themselves into pop-up karaoke joints, danced in the street to a shopfront DJ bathed in red light or strolled through British artist Jeffrey Deller’s provocative mini art show In the Future Everyone Will be Cancelled for 15 Minutes. Down the city’s Coles Book Arcade – which once claimed the southern hemisphere’s largest book shop – alongside a phalanx of garbage bins and graffitied walls was Stage Door, a small live music concert space where on Saturday night Los Angeles jazz pianist Kiefer was playing to a dedicated audience of fans.

Despite the festival’s increasing creative self-assurance, however, its future remains under a cloud, with a five-year State Government funding agreement yet to be secured. Reportedly that contract with Creative Victoria and Visit Victoria had been due to be renewed in December last year. Further, the festival posted deficits of three-quarters of a million dollars for each 2022 and 2023.

Night Trade at Rising festival was a hit with punters

In a climate where festival cancellations seem to be de rigeur, Rising’s is a concerning (non-)

development.

Unfortunately, Orbazanek’s and Fox’s final weekend opened on Friday softly. Indian magician Suhani Shah, while a YouTube megastar (she has 5 million-odd subscribers) and no doubt a hit with the significant Indian diaspora in the Victorian capital, seemed out of place. Engaging as the performer is, her show – all mind tricks and handkerchiefs – lacked the nuance and artistic sensibility of Scott Silven, who performed similar tricks in a smaller venue at the erstwhile Melbourne festival in 2019. Still, in the name of bums-on-seats, Shah’s Capitol Theatre show will likely be seen as a winner for the festival’s bottom line.

On Saturday, Richard Bell’s ever-important Tent Embassy saw a steady stream of visitors to Federation Square to witness talks by Indigenous artists and leaders and video works as part of the festival Blak Infinite collaborations.

One of Rising’s great strengths has always been its focus on local talents, and prominent Melbourne choreographer Lucy Guerin did not disappoint on Saturday. Her latest work, One Single Action, performed at Chunky Move’s studio in the city’s arts precinct, featured two dancers: Geoffrey Watson and Amber. They were a picture of athletic synchronicity and supple humanity in high-vis, battling the relentless march of time and the draconian pressure of the daily grind. The piece rises in tension until one of the pair is forced to commit the titular single act. Its consequences reverberate through the piece, a delicate, visceral and moving work. Guerin’s choreography here is breathtaking, and the performers don’t miss.

Geoffrey Watson and Amber McCartney in One Single Action, choreographed by Lucy Guerin.

If Guerin’s work was a cautionary tale about our capacity for chaos, then the real thing was playing out over at the Town Hall in Flemish artist Miet Warlop’s brilliant show One Song.

A three-legged tracksuit-sporting announcer sits smiling in an empty bleacher, overlooking a gymnasium whose various stations – a balance beam, trampoline, treadmill, sit-up mat – are accompanied by musical instruments: violin, drums, keyboard, double bass. A microphone and metronome also await human input. Soon enough, a quintet of gym-ready athletes – and a pompom-wielding male cheerleader in a short skirt – begin their marathon. They will, for an hour, play the same song and exercise at the same time.

One Song, by Miet Warlop, at Rising festival.

The female violinist ascends the beam, and begins to play while performing leg extensions and slow pirouettes; the percussionist sprints between a series of drums around the stage; a prostrate double bassist performs sit-ups as he plays each note on his instrument, which lies on its side between his legs; the keyboardist must jump on his trampoline to reach the keys; and the singer runs and runs on that treadmill, a Monaghetti with a microphone. All the while the metronome ticks and the tempo accelerates. The performers follow suit. The result is a beautifully absurd piece of not just theatre, but of endurance and musicality, and a reminder perhaps of the need to slow down every once in a while.

Over at the State Library of Victoria, an excellent exhibition of the work of Walkley-winning photojournalist Barat Ali Batoor saw a steady stream of visitors. Batoor famously became the victim of death threats after writing a piece for The Washington Post on child prostitution in his home country of Afghanistan and was forced to flee. His heartrending and touching photographs of an asylum seeker’s journey is an excellent show, and deserves to be seen widely.

Searching for Sanctuary, an exhibition by Barat Ali Batoor, was at the State Library as part of Rising.

Pan Pan Theatre’s The First Bad Man – based on Miranda July’s famous novel – was playing over at the Capitol’s Salon, while S. Shakthidharan’s world-beating festival favourite Counting and Cracking was a sellout at the Union Theatre.

But the final act of the festival for 2024 belonged to a triumvirate of hometown heroes: the Dirty Three. Victorians Warren Ellis, Jim White and Mick Turner – famously Nick Cave’s favourite live band – set the Forum alight as they performed a herculean four-hour set on the Melbourne leg of their national tour.

As the post-rock instrumental group’s marathon concert drew to a euphoric climax, violinist Ellis – all elbows and flailing horsehair – spat into a bucket and gazed out into the throng.

“Thankyou, f … ng Melbourne.”

With Mofo having gone quiet across Bass Strait, Melbourne has taken the midwinter mantel and run with it. With Orbazanek and Fox in their element, the government should come to the party, and soon. As cultural jamborees around the country disappear from view, Rising is – as its name suggests – a festival in the ascendant.

Tim Douglas travelled to Melbourne with the assistance of Visit Victoria.