Melbourne doesn't give up its secrets easily. This festival is delving below its surface
The more traditional performing arts program held its own, too. International theatre threw up some creative engagement with Shakespeare. Peru's Teatro de la Plaza offered a fierce and joyful deconstruction of Hamlet from an ensemble of actors with Down syndrome, on par with our own Back to Back Theatre, while the experimental UK company Forced Entertainment pared Shakespeare down to the bone, condensing the plots of the Bard's complete works into hour-long episodes, narrated by a single performer using only household items.
I found the disarming break-up show Heartbreak Hotel from Aotearoa New Zealand oddly comforting in its curated messiness and was pleased to see some hotly anticipated Australian theatre.
The follow-up to Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan's The Wrong Gods, didn't have the same epic sweep as the previous play, but it certainly held the stage with poised intensity. Set in a remote valley in India, this tale of environmental and economic disaster, and resistance to it, laid bare the incommensurable values of global capitalism and indigenous ways of life with dramatic economy and four charismatic performances.
It had a gravitas that the hell-bound comedy of cultural collision from Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui, LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches), did everything in its power to avoid … with flamboyant lo-fi success. Performance from Latin America had been radically underrepresented in Melbourne until Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi's searing Cadela Força Trilogy (Bitch Power Trilogy) at last year's Rising.
That work found a radical companion in Kill Me, from Argentine choreographer Marina Otero – a piece of autobiographical avant-garde dance theatre which transformed naked outrage and mental ill-health into a frenetic carnival of deranged theatricality.
Contemporary dance shone as a vehicle for otherwise silenced or inexpressible lived experience. Botis Seva's BLKDOG combined street dance with haunting and vigorous modern choreography, embodying the struggle against abjection in the face of the surreal recursions of childhood trauma.
Indigenous resistance was powerfully alive in Joel Bray's MONOLITH, a brilliant work for five women that played with the pareidolia of seeing human figures in ancient rock formations. Starting with hallucinatory living tableaux of bodies slowly writhing and intertwined with each other, suggesting connection between ancestors and Country, the piece shifted to embrace steely defiance in the face of colonialism and discrimination, with an ambiguously symbolic, yet sensual, finale that returned us to a vision of shared humanity over atomised individualism. Our dance critic, Andrew Fuhrmann, gave it five stars. He wasn't wrong.
It is impossible to see everything at Rising – I was out almost every night and barely touched the sides of the huge music program – but I did catch Beth Gibbons at Hamer Hall. Best known for her work with trip-hop pioneers Portishead, the ethereal Gibbons held us spellbound with a set from her 2024 solo album and indulged fans with the Portishead classic, Glory Box, at encore. My bucket list is shorter now.
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No one could deny that Rising has experienced growing pains. It was interrupted by the pandemic, which wreaked havoc on Melbourne , and looked like the awkward child of Dark Mofo and some half-realised international arts festival as it tried to find its feet.
It is true, too, that Rising doesn't have the same clear raison d'etre as arts festivals in cities such as Perth or Adelaide. Remote places tend to have bigger and more distinguished festivals out of cultural necessity. Still, in 2025, Melbourne can be proud to embrace a festival that gives every sign of having matured into an assured, aesthetically distinctive and culturally diverse event, with both popular and underground appeal.
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