Melbourne's winter festival is in full swing, and the program is as good as it's ever been.

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The Rising Festival Round Up

28 May, 2026

Words by:

Sarah Palmieri

Melbourne's winter arts festival is moving through its annual run, but there's still plenty of time to catch some of the best shows on the program.

It’s taken time for Melbourne to develop a winter culture, but RISING has been a big part of building it. The annual art and cultural festival runs each year across the city, bringing together some of the most compelling voices in contemporary art and performance, from established names to the ones you’ll be telling people you saw before they got huge. It was designed to pull people out into the cold months, to remind us that there’s a life beyond the wine bar, beyond the pull of the couch and the delivery app. Previous years have drawn in Thundercat, Ethel Cain, Moses Sumney and Sampa the Great, bringing the city to life.

This year, they’re back with a program equally stacked. Running from May 27 to June 8, RISING spreads across Melbourne’s most iconic venues, from the Malthouse Theatre to Max Watts and ACMI. There’s an exhibition celebrating the history and culture of vinyl that includes a massive foam structure designed by the late Virgil Abloh, and the program opens with Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s confronting ‘A Year Without Summer’. It is Melbourne’s very own Biennale.

Knowing where to go when a program is this big can be its own kind of paralysis. So we’ve pulled out a handful of shows that we think are unmissable.

NOWHERE, 2-7 JUNE AT MALTHOUSE THEATRE

Khalid Abdalla is probably best known to most people through The Kite Runner, United 93, and more recently The Crown. What’s less known is that he has spent years at the intersection of art and political life, including being present at the frontlines of the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and living through the counter-revolution that followed. Nowhere draws all of that into a single, solo performance that moves across film, song, archive, and dance. It covers colonialism, decolonisation, friendship, loss, and the ongoing violence in Gaza since October 7. It picked up five stars at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and was one of the most talked about shows of the festival. Abdalla refuses to let the personal and political sit in separate rooms. They are the same story, told by the same body, on the same stage, in a sincere and compelling plea for peace.

 

SEUN KUTI AND EGYPT 80, JUNE 5TH AT HAMER HALL

When Fela Kuti died in 1997, his son Seun was fourteen years old. He picked up the saxophone and stepped in front of his father’s band, Egypt 80, and has been there ever since. Considering Fela’s monumental legacy, this might be an almost incomprehensible thing to take on at that age, and what makes it more remarkable is that he hasn’t simply preserved the sound, he has kept pushing it. Across six albums the band has brought in threads of soul and jazz, collaborated with Brian Eno, Yasiin Bey and Sampa the Great, and kept the politics burning underneath all of it. Their latest record, Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head), is the set they’ll be bringing to Hamer Hall. Local afrobeat outfit Public Opinion Afro Orchestra open the night. It is going to be loud, and joyful, and political all at once

 

SISSY BALL 8: THE DOLL HOUSE, SUNDAY JUNE 7TH AT MELBOURNE TOWN HALL

Sissy Ball started in Australia in 2018, founded by Legendary Mother Bhenji Juicy Couture, and is widely credited with igniting the Oceania Kiki Ballroom scene into what it is today. Now in its eighth iteration and curated by Mother Kianna Loubiton Oricci of the International House of Nina Oricci, it lands at Melbourne Town Hall as the closing night of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale. The ball is a direct homage to the Black and Latinx trans women who built ballroom culture when the world outside of it offered them very little. Houses from across the Southern Hemisphere will compete across categories for trophies and grand prizes. It is presented with Cypher Culture in association with Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. If you have never been to a ball before, this is the one.

 

A YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER, MAY 28-31 AT ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE

Florentina Holzinger last came to RISING in 2023 with TANZ, which sold out and left people talking for months. She returns with something even more ambitious. A Year Without Summer begins in 1816, the year after Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted and blanketed the sky in ash. Crops failed. The world went hungry. It was also the summer Mary Shelley, stuck indoors and staring at the dark, wrote Frankenstein. From that moment Holzinger launches the work into the present, into a world being remade by bioengineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics, and asks what it means to be a body inside all of that. It is dark comedy as much as it is horror, riotous and excessive and completely committed to its own logic. She has been described as Europe’s most exciting director working right now, and this show is why.

 

THE VINYL FACTORY: REVERB, MAY 22 – AUGUST 31ST AT ACMI

Down the stairs at ACMI sits one of the most immersive exhibitions in the city right now. Originally produced at 180 Studios in London, Reverb explores the relationship between sound and culture across art, film, and installation. The names involved are serious: Stan Douglas, Carsten Nicolai, Virgil Abloh, Gabriel Moses. There’s a dedicated listening room, enclosed spaces where film wraps itself around you in relation to poetry and the broader cultural landscape, and a set of turntables inviting you to have a go at making something entirely your own. Block an afternoon. There’ll be a great record playing in the listening room. You won’t want to rush it.

 

VOYAGE INTO INFINITY, JUNE 3-7 AT THE SUBSTATION, NEWPORT

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist who works anonymously, always masked, and has built a practice around pulling apart the way feminine bodies are costumed, fetishised, and consumed by culture. For Voyage Into Infinity, she has constructed a warehouse-sized installation at The Substation in Newport built from ladders, planks, pylons, and swinging objects, all set into motion by a cast of doll-like performers who trigger chain reactions across the space. The reference points are the hard punk of Bad Brains and the elaborate cause-and-effect logic of Rube Goldberg machines. It is chaotic, lo-fi, and pointed, the kind of brilliance that shines in a venue like The Substation.

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