Melbourne’s Rising festival fulfils its artistic and popular promise

Melbourne’s Rising festival of art, music and performance has plenty to amuse and provoke.

You Beauty, a Chunky Move production at Melbourne's Rising Festival. Picture: Gianna Rizzo.

Thirty people sit expectantly around a stage that has been turned into a super-sized dining table set with crystal wine glasses, cutlery and dinner plates. However, the only person eating will be the waiter Geoff Sobelle, a New York illusionist and creator of this ingenious and unsettling one-man show, simply titled Food.

A highlight of Rising, Melbourne’s flagship winter arts festival, Food is equal parts magic show and absurdist interrogation of the history of food production. Sobelle traces a narrative arc from the days when humans picked mangoes and bananas from trees, to our era of picking anything we want from a supermarket shelf, and asks hard questions about the environmental costs of such convenience.

How the hell does he do it and how far will he go? You can’t help but ask yourself this during an extended gross out/gluttony scene, as Sobelle gulps downs five apples, a bunch of celery (whole, of course), several bowls of rice, a raw fish, a rare steak and on it goes until he also chows down on his credit card and dollar bills. This orgy of excess is overly long, yet Sobelle memorably puts his body on the line to demonstrate how we are addicted to consuming far more than we need.

Like an evolving magic routine, the vast dining table morphs into an Arctic ice field and a pristine wilderness and home for bison. A wheat field gives rise to a vast trucking route, which engenders townships, oilfields and thickets of high-rise buildings. For the finale, our dinner host conjures a masterful vanishing act that drives home his point about how the overproduction and over-consumption of food are likely to kill us and our planet. This final flourish is worth the price of admission alone.

Rising’s co-artistic director Gideon Obarzanek says Food is “one of the most extraordinary one-person shows I have seen in the last 10 years”. Obarzanek – who bared all for the cameras to publicise life drawing session she has programmed – says this 16-day festival incorporates more than 120 music, art and performance events and is focused on “the newness of things”.

“We do use the city as a canvas,’’ he says, pointing to free performances including Acid Brass – a mash-up of acid house and traditional brass band music played by Victorian community bands – and The Rivers Sing, a seven-minute audio work, partly created by Indigenous composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, that rings out hauntingly at dusk along the banks of the Yarra River for the duration of the festival.

A must-see free show is Melbourne Out Loud, a survey of work by the late Melbourne photographer Rennie Ellis at the State Library Victoria. Ellis had a larrikin spirit and an eye for telling human detail, and the library holds the biggest public collection of his work.

This exhibition comprises well-known and previously unseen images that speak to Ellis’s astonishing versatility – he was at the AFL grand final one day, and snapping Madonna and Grace Jones in their high-camp glory the next. He was also a master of comic juxtaposition: his portraits include an exhausted family trudging through Moomba Festival with three adult-sized blow-up King Kongs in tow, and drag queens towering over adiminutive security guard.

Ellis also captured the rawness of 1970s youth culture – a young woman at a pop festival wears nothing but a spiked leather collar and bikini pants amid fully clothed fans, while images of the Vietnam/women’s rights/antinuclear and land rights marches that colonised entire city blocks in the ’70s and ’80s expose the political fault-lines of those times. This writer’s only gripe about this excellent survey is that many of Ellis’s best shots of Melbourne are confined to a digital slide show: how much better it would be if we could also contemplate them on the wall, as the incisive works of art they clearly are?

Meanwhile, in a beautiful, ballroom sized space at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum, audiences are led inside a gigantic inflatable, that variously resembles white clouds or swelling seas. We are midway through Chunky Move’s new show, You, Beauty and the two dancers (Samakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario) have been swallowed whole by the inflatable, following their lyrical pas de deux.

Inside the inflatable, the dynamic between the dancers changes – Sidhu chases Nazario aggressively until harmony is regained when he starts playing a portable keyboard. While both dancers are assured and elegant and Antony Hamilton’s choreography is often lovely to watch, this is a work in which a novel concept (that menacing inflatable) often overwhelms the content.

Taj Pigram, who stars in the musical Big Name, No Blankets at Melbourne's Rising Festival. Picture: James Henry

From Federation Square to galleries and theatres, Rising offers an ambitious Indigenous program. Installations in Federation Square include Richard Bell’s updated version of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, and Michael Cook’s Invasion series. With a filmic, sci-fi feel, this series posits a reversal of colonial history, with Australian native animals and Indigenous women invading London, much to the horror of the locals. It’s a comic provocation that asks: what if the colonised had been the colonisers?

The standout Indigenous event at Rising this year is the foot-stomping musical, Big Name, No Blankets, which premiered in Sydney in January and which tracks the rise of the Warumpi Band, the first Aboriginal rock group to perform using traditional languages.

This fusion of the band’s desert reggae hits and Andrea James’ straight-from-the-heart storytelling is co-commissioned by Rising and Sydney Festival and will tour to Brisbane, Perth, Darwin and South Australia.

Founding band member Sammy Butcher travelled from Papunya, Northern Territory, to attend the Victorian opening at the Melbourne Town Hall. As the elder shivered in the cold, he declared: “The cast – they’re doing a good job.’’

The Warumpi crew started out playing music on a flour drum and milk tin at Papunya and would eventually tour to other desert communities, interstate and overseas, producing enduring hits including Jailanguru Pakurnu, My Island Home and Blackfella/Whitefella.

While the cast and musical’s backing band are impressive, much of the credit for getting the initially reserved Melbourne crowd on its feet should go to Taj Pigram, who portrays the band’s frontman with a strutting, Hutchence like charisma, whether he is belting out a rock riff, using clap sticks or crooning My Island Home.

Another key Rising event was the Victorian premiere of Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan’s and Eamon Flak’s acclaimed epic that traces the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war on a politically prominent Tamil family who emigrate to Australia. Melbourne is home to more Sri Lankans than any other Australian city, and it was great to see this community out in force at the performance Review attended.

This well-travelled show – it tours to New York in September – spans five decades and four generations, and is a moving, inventive and deeply humane story of war, family ties, exile and resilience.

The Melbourne production is anchored by a blistering performance from Nadie Kammallaweera, who conveys how her character’s maternal ferocity has been forged by the traumas of her youth. She plays the older Radha, who is stunned to learn that a loved one she assumed was long dead, is very much alive.

Part carnival, part festival, Rising attracted thousands of people to Melbourne’s city centre in 2023. Given its strong performances, it is likely to repeat that feat again.

Rosemary Neill flew to Melbourne with the festival’s assistance