Rising 2026 Program Reveal: Hip-Hop Icon Lil’ Kim, Art Pop Star Cate Le Bon and More

Rising is back from May 27 to June 8 for its fifth proper edition (the first two years were interrupted by Covid) and it’s clear that artistic director Hannah Fox and her team are learning to play the hits. Rising 2026 will involve 100 events, 376 artists, seven world premieres and 11 Australian premieres. Fed Square will once again host a large-scale participatory event à la 10,000 Kazoos, Flinders Street Station Ballroom is coming alive again and “festival within a festival” Daytripper is back bringing the music with help from Triple R radio. Of course, there’s plenty more that’s new and unprecedented too. Let’s dive in.

Australian Dance Biennale

The biggest news this year is the launch of the Australian Dance Biennale, which will be held every two years from now on. Headed up by former ballet dancer and Rising co-artistic director Gideon Obarzanek, this major new platform aims to celebrate and promote dance in all its forms. In theatres, yes, but also in clubs, dance classes and public spaces. 

Leaning into its original purpose, Flinders Street Station Ballroom will reopen to host Land of 1000 Dances – a roster of dance classes led by “Victorian dance legends and world champions” covering a dizzying array of styles: Bollywood to ballet, jazz to jive, Melbourne shuffle to polyswagg.

On the topic of polyswagg, the style’s very inventor, New Zealand choreographer Parris Goebel (who’s worked with Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Rihanna) is sending her own Royal Family Dance Crew to Melbourne to host a free, all-ages Pasifika dance party at Fed Square. The crew will perform first, then break down the routine and invite the public to move with them.

Also on the program: Defend the Throne, a more formal performance at Hamer Hall, where the three-time World Hip Hop Championship-winning crew will replay some of its most iconic sets from the past 14 years, plus some newer material.

Other dance events include Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer, a homage to the Northern Irish capital by renowned choreographer Oona Doherty with a score by David Holmes (Killing Eve, Ocean’s Eleven); The Shepherds, a black comedy revisiting the colonial Australian mythology around sheep grazing; and the spectacular return of Glow, a work Obarzanek choreographed soon after co-founding dance company Chunky Move, which turned 30 last year. The 27-minute solo piece sees a single figure tracked by beams of light and will be performed by multiple people, including original Glow performer Sara Black and current Chunky Move dancer Melissa Pham.

Arts Centre Melbourne and Sydney Dance Company are joining forces to present a double-header in Forever & Ever and Love Lock. The former was created in 2018 by the the company’s current artistic director, Antony Hamilton, and features a pulsing electronic score by his brother Julian Hamilton of The Presets. The latter is a brand new work from Melanie Lane, exploring love songs and fantasies across different cultures. With costumes by renowned Australian designer Akira Isogawa and a score by eclectic UK producer Clark, it promises to be more stylish than sentimental.

The inaugural Biennale – which includes many, many more shows – will be sent off in style at Melbourne Town Hall, with local dance collective Cypher Culture putting on Sissy Ball, a joyous homage to the political and cultural roots of Ballroom culture.

Music

Daytripper, Rising’s music “festival within a festival”, is returning to Max Watts and Melbourne Town Hall with a deeply eclectic program, embracing cultural and stylistic diversity across the board. Whether you’re into jazz, dub, cold wave, Afrobeat or folk music, there’s a show for you.

There’s hip-hop icon Lil’ Kim, ethereal Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon, atmospheric electronic producer Daniel Avery, Canadian cold wave act TR/ST, US jazz legend Kahlil El’Zabar, spoken word artist Kae Tempest, poet Saul Williams, British dub veteran Adrian Sherwood and American alt-country group Wednesday.

There's also Nigerian star Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, who’s now leading his father’s band Egypt 80; multilingual Palestinian rapper Saint Levant; French-Senegalese neo-soul singer Anaiis; and more.

Outside of Daytripper, The Vinyl Factory: Reverb is an installation originally staged at London’s 180 Studios and now coming to ACMI for Rising. The free, 50-capacity, acoustically treated listening room is accessible via ballot and features a Pitt & Giblin sound system designed and manufactured in Hobart. Inside, you can explore multiple eras of music, play with remixable vinyl loops, flick through 100 archival vinyl pressings and more. After hours, the room will host listening parties curated by Yasmine Sharaf, presenter of Triple R’s Cease and Desist radio show. She’ll play cuts from the likes of Severed Heads founder Tom Ellard, Aussie “multi-genre noodler” Nicole Skeltys and dub techno pioneer Mark Ernestus.

Sharaf is also curating Bass Lounge, a nightclub hidden below a food court in Chinatown. Running from 10pm to 4am on the two Fridays during Rising, it’ll feature local DJs, international DJs and private karaoke rooms. In other words, serious afterparty vibes.

Last and absolutely not least on the music program is another ethereal show at St Paul’s Cathedral, which for the past few years has lent its cavernous architecture and sonorous acoustics to participatory choir performances. This time around it’s hosting Voiceless Mass, Raven Chacon’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition for organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and electronics, specifically written for performance in a church, employing the “openness of the large space to intone the constricted intervals of the wind and string instruments”. 

Performance

Stage shows have always been a big part of Rising, and this year is no exception. Austrian director Florentina Holzinger, whose provocative 2023 work Tanz saw some audience members walking out, is returning with a comparatively tame musical comedy A Year Without Summer, which explores the health of our bodies, identity and environment – though still with a healthy dose of nudity.

At Footscray Arts Centre, prominent Sri Lankan Tamil Australian playwright Chenturan Aran presents his latest satire, The Suppostabys. The story follows Kaye, an actor and Onlyfans star, who discovers she’s a clone created solely to benefit her progenitor. A face-off follows, unravelling questions about duty and traditions in the face of this contemporary world.

Nearby, at the Substation in Newport, original New York installation Voyage Into Infinity will transform the industrial space into a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Masked Brooklyn-based artist Narcissister is part of the machine, climbing about to trigger ladders, planks, pylons and other moving objects with help from doll-like companions. Expect a punky, lo-fi attitude coupled with haunted carnival aesthetics.

At the Malthouse, actor, writer and director Khalid Abdalla (The Crown, the Kite Runner) will bring his playful “anti-biography” Nowhere to the stage, examining his sense of unbelonging through the lens of his involvement in the Egyptian revolution and other seismic events like 9/11, which led to Abdalla’s casting as a hijacker in 2006 thriller United 93. Ultimately, though, it’s billed as an “impassioned plea for peace”.

Australian theatre veteran Brian Lipson, meanwhile, presents a solo play on the life of 19th-century figure Sir Francis Galton, a prolific inventor and polymath who created forensic fingerprinting, the stereoscopic map and teletype. Unfortunately, he’s also the man who gave us the disgraced pseudoscience of eugenics. A Large Attendance in the Antechamber takes us inside Galton’s book-lined study and inside a fantastically intelligent mind still oblivious to its prejudices.

Also worth calling out is Monsteen, a supernatural participatory theatre work aimed at young adults. Led by four young performers, the immersive world of high school vampires and werewolves invites audience members to invent their own characters – then set about building alliances and besting enemies in that particularly cliquey environment that is high school.

Rising runs from May 27 to June 8, 2026.

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