All Rise: Melbourne Transformed into a Playground of Music, Dance and Radical Imagination for RISING 2026

Melbourne is about to come alive in ways you’ve never seen before.

From 27 May to 8 June, the city becomes a stage, a canvas, a pulsating organism as RISING 2026 unfurls an audacious, boundary-defying festival of music, dance, art, and performance. Sprawling across theatres, town halls, railway ballrooms, civic squares, and galleries, this year’s program promises over 100 events featuring 376 artists — including seven world premieres and eleven Australian premieres — in a dizzying celebration of movement, sound, and spectacle.

RISING

When: 27 May – 08 June 2026

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around the region here.

 

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At the heart of RISING 2026 is the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, a sprawling new platform that celebrates the diversity and vitality of dance. From intimate studio performances to arena-scale spectacles, from mass-participation moments to late-night club floors, it’s a city-wide invitation to unlock new joys in movement. Historic sites are reborn: the Flinders Street Ballroom, a dance hall built in 1910, reopens as a living academy, offering everything from ballet and jazz to Bollywood, vogueing, and Polyswagg. Led by Victorian dance legends and world champions, these classes reconnect the city to one of Melbourne’s most mythical spaces, letting anyone take the floor and reclaim the joy of communal movement.

The Royal Family Dance Crew, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s street-dance royalty, bring their high-voltage, arena-scale Defend the Throne performance to Hamer Hall, while also taking over Fed Square with a free, public dance event. Founded by choreographer Parris Goebel, the three-time World Hip Hop Championship-winning crew has defined global pop culture choreography for over a decade. Their Polyswagg style — instinctive, raw, and fiercely communal — will sweep the city, from sunset performances to mass participation workshops that invite Melburnians to move as one.

Dance and performance continue to push boundaries across the city. Northern Ireland’s Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer, choreographed by Oona Doherty, offers a white-hot exploration of Belfast’s conflict and resilience. Across four episodes, Doherty fuses meditative stillness with explosive physicality, set inside a gleaming cage and driven by a propulsive score from DJ David Holmes. In Brooklyn, Narcissister constructs a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg-like spectacle in Voyage Into Infinity, at The Substation, placing masked performers at the centre of a chaotic choreography of gender, race, and desire.

Melbourne theatre legend Brian Lipson returns with A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, a dazzling solo exploration of the 19th-century polymath Sir Francis Galton — inventor, intellectual, and father of discredited eugenics theories. Khalid Abdalla’s UK anti-biography Nowhere, at Malthouse Theatre, intertwines personal history with global upheavals, from the Egyptian revolution to the aftermath of 9/11, blending multimedia, song, and dance into a playful yet urgent meditation on belonging. Carly Sheppard and Alisdair Macindoe’s The Shepherds, presented with Arts House, darkly remakes Australian myth one sheep at a time, negotiating broken ancestries and colonial legacies with humour and inventiveness.

The Biennale also presents striking explorations of body, memory, and resistance. Lucy Guerin Inc’s The Forest is a hallucinatory journey into our connection with trees, myth, and the non-human world. Melanie Lane offers two works: Love Lock, inspired by the power of love stories and featuring costumes by Akira Isogawa and a score by UK electronic artist Clark, and Into the Woods, a visceral duet reconstructing the fates of women lost to witch hunts. Branch Nebula’s Exposure, starring Latai Taumoepeau and Mirabelle Wouters, interrogates the ageing female body within surreal, domestic, and environmental landscapes, while Martin Hansen’s Frankie reassembles the body as a Frankenstein-like metaphor for incompleteness. RED, by Dancenorth, returns after a full festival season, depicting life inside a shrinking translucent orb as a metaphor for planetary and social fragility.

The Biennale culminates in Sissy Ball at Melbourne Town Hall, a flamboyant celebration of ballroom culture curated by Kianna Loubiton Oricci. Thousands of attendees will witness and participate in voguing competitions, reveling in a spectacle of drama, fantasy, and unapologetic self-expression. Dance, resistance, ritual, and survival converge in a festival that demands movement — from the feet to the imagination.

If dance animates the body, music drives the pulse of RISING. Day Tripper, the festival’s multi-room marathon, transforms Max Watt’s and Melbourne Town Hall into a labyrinth of sound and performance, featuring Kae Tempest, Saul Williams, Kahlil El’Zabar, The Congos, The Bats, Elias B Rønnenfelt, Chanel Beads, Discovery Zone, SAICOBAB, and emerging artist Jazmine Mary. From jazz, punk, Afrobeat, and neo-folk to dream pop and experimental electronic music, Day Tripper is a stacked, multi-generational mixtape of global sound.

RISING 2026 also celebrates the legacies of music icons. Lil’ Kim returns to Melbourne to commemorate her seminal albums Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M., while Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey revisits Scott-Heron’s revolutionary poetry and jazz-inflected soul. Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 bring Fela Kuti’s indomitable Afrobeat energy to Hamer Hall, and Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon offers surrealist pop mastery at Melbourne Town Hall. Other highlights include Saint Levant’s Arabic-infused sounds, TR/ST’s industrial synth show, Dry Cleaning’s off-kilter art-rock, Wednesday’s alt-country storytelling, and Daniel Avery’s club-infused techno spectacle.

 

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Immersive musical experiences continue at The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at ACMI, featuring works by Stan Douglas, Carsten Nicolai, William Kentridge, Jeremy Deller, Virgil Abloh, and more, while the Listening Room offers intimate, ballot-based sessions curated by Triple R presenter Yasmine Sharaf. Late-night clubbing thrives at Bass Lounge, a subterranean Chinatown hotspot fusing DJs, live performance, private karaoke, and global club sounds.

Public works and city transformations are central to RISING’s ethos. FLOWER POWER by Barkindji artist Kent Morris celebrates the murnong, connecting ancestral ecology, resilience, and cultural reclamation. Hamer Hall’s façade hosts Calling Country: The Land Speaks Back, centring Indigenous perspectives through large-scale projections by local and international First Peoples artists, including Cannupa Hanska Luger. The First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams, curated by Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren, bring Blak imagination to the streets, transforming six trams into moving canvases for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Melbourne Science Gallery presents EMERGENCE(Y), exploring human and non-human adaptation through sound, coral, fungal fashion, vertical farms, and AI-generated visions of a future archaeological wasteland.

With ahm Health Services as a major partner offering concierge services, itineraries, and exclusive experiences, RISING 2026 promises not just a festival, but a city-wide transformation: a network of movement, sound, art, and imagination that stretches from cathedral to club, ballroom to basement, theatre to public square.

Tickets go on general sale 16 March, with early bird options for subscribers. Prepare to immerse yourself in a Melbourne reimagined — a city pulsing with rhythm, spectacle, and possibility. RISING 2026 is not merely a festival; it is a living, breathing invitation to witness, participate, and rise with the extraordinary.

Explore the full RISING 2026 program here.