Melbourne’s new Rising festival offers freedom to choose

Artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek have put together a stimulating theatre program but the outdoor events may leave visitors cold.

Gideon Obarzanek, artist Paul Yore and Hannah Fox with Yore’s sculpture at Golden Square, Seeing is Believing but Feeling is the Truth. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

On paper, White Night Melbourne and the Melbourne International Arts Festival would be an improbable match. White Night was a free, outdoor and very popular event, drawing 718,000 visitors into Melbourne’s CBD across three winter nights in 2019. The Melbourne Festival had a ticketed program of performing arts and other events. With Rising, Melbourne’s newest festival, artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek have simply wrapped one around the other.

Like sister festivals in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, the Melbourne Festival in the past was obsessed with exclusives, commissions and premieres with a beady eye for the interstate tourist dollar.

In the new configuration, Obarzanek and Fox have been able to pick and choose more freely, programming exquisitely refined and “run in” shows from around the country, such as Marrugeku’s Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk) and Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. They have sat alongside Rising commissions (such as Malthouse Theatre’s The Return), and international touring works such as 21 Pornographies (which premiered in Germany) and Working on my Night Moves (New Zealand).

Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen. Picture: Bea Borgers

This is a popular move for Melburnians who care more about the quality of a work than its age or place of origin, or the pecking order of a national or international tour.

Mette Ingvartsen’s 21 Pornographies premiered five years ago, in Essen, and is one of the most provocative works in the international repertoire. Despite its not-for-the-squeamish content – Ingvartsen wears nothing but socks for much of the show – it’s a mysterious and rather beautiful monologue, evocative and thought provoking.

21 Pornographies is routinely billed as a piece about the pervasiveness of porn in the modern world. But if it is about that, it is only obliquely. Ingvartsen takes as her starting point that peculiar Italian ghetto of abjection and humiliation that reached its apotheosis in Pasolini’s Salo.

She conjures appalling images, scatological images, using her voice alone. But she is a generous and engaging performer. She is a calming and caring presence when she could easily terrorise us. Even when spreadeagled, or urinating on stage, she is impossible to objectify – or dismiss. But the point remains (deliberately?) unclinched.

Late in the work, Ingvartsen passes a fluorescent tube over her body like the cold cathode lamp of a flatbed scanner. Its harsh light reveals – even highlights – what we would normally call imperfections. If it was her intention to subvert the image of the female body used to sell pretty much everything, then others (like Atlanta Eke in Monster Body, at Dance House in 2012) have done it better. But I doubt they’ve done it so coolly.

An image from Working on my Night Moves, by Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan. Picture: Andi Crown

While the performing arts ­program of Rising has apparently thrived, the same cannot be said for the outdoor part. The shift to ­pay-per-view, and the dilution of the programming over time (12 days instead of White Night’s three) and space (several discrete venues ­instead of the one grand location) has strangled the golden goose.

If The Wilds at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl had been free, it would have been a mildly annoying ­time-waster. At $22 for adults, it feels like a trap for tourists and ice skaters.

Uptown, a drafty and rundown multi-level carpark in Chinatown is an astonishingly poor venue for media art. For any art, really.

Installations like Tabita Rezaire’s Ultra Wet Recapitulation rely on the spoken word soundtrack being comprehensible, otherwise it simply lands as a sequence of striking but disconnected images.

People gravitated to the rooftop bar and chose to engage with each other rather than with the art.

Rising continues in Melbourne until Sunday. The Wilds is open until June 19.