Melbourne's RISING Festival Announces Diverse 2024 Lineup with Over 480 Artists
RISING 2024 ● Photo Credit: RISING Festival
MELBOURNE, Australia, March 12, 2024 (VSNewsNetwork.com) - The RISING Festival, a Melbourne festival designed to celebrate new music, art, and performance, has announced its ambitious program for 2024. From June 1-16, the festival will feature 105 events and showcase the talents of more than 480 artists, including 23 new commissions, six world premieres, and eight Australian premieres. The festival is set to transform Melbourne into a vibrant stage for cultural expression as winter begins.
Over the course of 16 nights and three weekends, RISING will present a diverse array of large-scale installations, free public events, and contemporary music, theatre, and dance performances. The festival aims to engage the city’s streets, venues, and hidden spaces, offering unique experiences to residents and visitors alike.
Co-artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek highlighted the inclusive nature of the festival, stating, “RISING 2024 is a festival that belongs to Naarm, Melbourne. Some of the most exciting voices in art, music, and performance offer moments of catharsis and reflection with mass music making in a church or summoning the cosmos in our town square. The most important part is coming together to be thrilled, bemused, shaken, or delighted.”
A centerpiece of the festival is The Blak Infinite, an expansive free exhibition and public program at Federation Square, focusing on First Peoples' art, politics, and cosmic connections. This initiative, presented in partnership with MAPCO and curated by Kimberley Moulton (Yorta Yorta) and Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung), aims to provide a platform for Indigenous voices and perspectives.
Additionally, the festival will feature The Rivers Sing, a sound work by First Nations soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham AO, and audio artists Byron Scullin and Thomas Supple, designed to envelop the city in sound each night at dusk. Nighttime projections will also illuminate Federation Square with stories of Sky Country and the cosmos.
In a special Australian-exclusive world premiere, the international dance group SHOUSE will lead a performance involving over a thousand participants in St Paul’s Cathedral. The music lineup includes a mix of local and international acts, such as Melbourne's own The Dirty Three, Western Sydney's OneFour, U.S. hip hop icon Yasiin Bey, and Swedish electro-pop artist Fever Ray.
The performance program features notable works like ILBIJERRI Theatre Company's Big Name No Blankets, FOOD by Geoff Sobelle, and the first chapter of the Cadela Força Trilogy by Carolina Bianchi.
Early access tickets for the festival are now available, inviting the public to explore the full program and engage with the artistic offerings. For more information, visit www.rising.melbourne.
Source: RISING Festival via Newswire
