Festival
Rising’s first week is proof that the Melbourne festival is now fully grounded in the diversity of the city’s culture, with complementary international acts. By Alison Croggon.
Melburnians are out for Rising Festival 2025
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how idyllic the weather in the weeks beforehand, no matter when it’s scheduled in the calendar, a major arts festival in Melbourne is a summoning charm for the rain gods. And so it came to pass in 2025: Rising opened and lo! the clouds all loured about our houses.
Yet Melburnians are made of resilient stuff. The plunging temperatures did nothing to deter the crowd of families – perhaps about 4000 people’s worth of umbrellas – who packed into Federation Square on an icy Friday for the free event Blockbuster. It featured some of Pakistan’s biggest superstars, among them Faris Shafi, who has stirred controversy by condemning religious hypocrisy in his country and whose viral hit “Blockbuster” has 65 million views on YouTube. He was joined by, among others, Annural Khalid, Spotify Pakistan’s most-streamed female artist of 2024, and the legendary producer and musician Xulfi (Zulfiqar Jabbar Khan).
Blockbuster was the epitome of a superb public event: slickly produced, with enough inner heat to drive out the winter cold. Wending my way through the crowd, I thought, not for the first time, of Peter Dutton’s absurd claim that Melburnians were too afraid to go to the shops. It seemed that everyone was out, eating, drinking, footballing and, of course, seeing art.
My slice through Rising’s first week showed how well the festival has grounded since its first, uncertain, pandemic years. It offered a well-chosen menu that gave a taste of the huge diversity of local and international contemporary performance.
At the modest end of vaulting ambition, Forced Entertainment, the titans of British experimental theatre, brought their Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. Directed by Tim Etchells and performed by all seven company members, it’s pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: the 36 canonical plays, each told by a single actor with a cast of ordinary household objects. By the time this review comes out there will be time to see the remaining nine, which include Othello, Richard III and The Tempest. The season closes June 15, and if I were you, I’d see at least one.
I chose Coriolanus, not only because I like the play but because it’s one of Shakespeare’s more challenging. Our narrator is Jerry Killick, who we find onstage before the titular table. On either side of him are stacks of metal shelving loaded with objects, each neatly labelled with the name of the play they belong to, and Killick is gathering those for Coriolanus: a tarnished trophy cup, a showy silver candlestick, various batteries, bottles of household cleaning liquids and so on.
What follows is a masterclass in storytelling. This kind of adaptation exposes Shakespeare’s brilliance as a dramaturg and narrator. It’s the simplest of conceits, perhaps itself conceived at a kitchen table when someone decided to tell someone else what happened in a play, reaching as one does for the condiments and crockery to represent different characters.
Killick plunges us headfirst into scene one, where the plebians of Rome are fomenting riot against the Capitol because they are starving and the patricians are taking all the food and reselling it at inflated prices. After the smooth-tongued senator Menenius (the aforesaid silver candlestick) calms the crowd, another patrician, Caius (the battered trophy cup), later to be named Coriolanus for his psychotically violent conquest of the city of Corioles, abuses the plebians as ignorant dogs, confirming his place as public enemy No.1.
Across the hour-long performance, Killick takes us through the tragedy of a career soldier who cannot negotiate political compromise. Raised by his ambitious mother, Volumnia (an imposing silver coffee pot), to be the acme of masculine violence, Coriolanus almost single-handedly puts down the revolt of the neighbouring Volsces. When Coriolanus is promoted to consul after his martial victory, his macho pride won’t permit him to beg the plebians for their favour, as is the tradition in Rome, and disaster inevitably follows.
Performed with all the intimacy of a domestic setting, the play attains the clarity that makes its contemporary resonances clear: economic and political inequity, how a military state socialises and exploits its people, the price of violent masculinity. They preserve Volumnia’s proud boast about Coriolanus’s son tearing a butterfly to pieces with his teeth, just like his father, and it retains its shock.
It’s astounding how much you end up investing in those objects – they are the characters – and how well this stripped-back narration invokes the emotional responses embedded in the original play. You are held in the moment by the skill, transparency and thought of the performance. It demonstrates how little – and how much – you need to make compelling theatre.
Joel Bray’s new dance work, Monolith, at Arts House, is equally compelling. In the days after I saw it, one person told me they thought it was brilliant for the first 40 minutes and then fell off, while another said they thought the first half was lacklustre but the second was fantastic. Me, I liked it all the way through.
Choreographed for five female dancers, it’s set to an insistent score by Matthias Schack-Arnott that moves organically from slow, brooding electronica to ecstatic beats. The monoliths of the title are sites of ceremony and meaning in Indigenous culture around the country: in an interview for Dance Life, Bray cites Gaanha-bula in Wiradjuri Country. All these spectacular geological formations are wound with stories, often creation myths, and here Bray and the dancers enact them as deeply feminine forces of resistance against colonialist destruction.
Watching this show feels like moving through different kinds of time, from the geological time of rocks and tectonic plates to the organic ecstasy of human gods or godly humans. As the audience enters the venue, the dancers are onstage, draped around a sculptural metal construction by Jake Preval that is scarcely visible in Katie Sfetkidis’s low lighting. At first you’re not sure the dim shape is dancers, but as they begin to stir they reveal themselves, emerging in movement that suggests continental drift or lava flow and evolves – literally, I think – to the emergence of animals, birds and human spirits.
The five dancers move like different limbs of one organism, as if they’re all bound by the same mind. They reveal Bray’s confident command of theatrical rhythm and chorus work: some of the sequences in the second half are genuinely thrilling. I haven’t seen anything quite like Monolith before and don’t quite have the language to describe what it is, which is also exciting.
Marina Otero’s Kill Me is all human time, albeit at a frenetic pace. The third in an autobiographical series called Remember to Live – the others are Fuck Me (2020) and Love Me (2022) – it explores Otero’s experience of a breakdown and diagnosis with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The cast of five dancers and a singer includes a man who wears underpants with pubic hair glued on to obscure his gender and who is the spirit of Nijinsky, and other women diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses, mostly BPD but also bipolar disorder. One woman has no diagnosis but is, on the other hand, the daughter of Lacanian psychologists.
The work begins with a 15-minute video montage, projected onto a scrim, of footage that Otero recorded of her life and which narrates her breakdown and the initial premise of the show, before introducing the work as being created by a “bunch of lunatics”. The scrim then lifts to the live performance – five naked women in high heels and black gloves strutting around the stage holding guns. It moves through a series of unpredictable, often hilarious, set pieces – songs, monologues, movement – that don’t so much tell a story as accumulate into a picture of the means of production of art, and the mental and emotional chaos of BPD and obsessive romantic love.
Through all its bedlam and often intentional obscurity, Kill Me somehow retains a coherent core, perhaps because of its poetic repetitions of images or motifs. This is performance that takes no prisoners: it’s often deeply uncomfortable in its raw exposition of subjective experience. Despite its constant, perhaps neurotic undermining of emotional connection, it’s strangely and deeply moving.
Rising continues until June 15.
ARTS DIARY
THEATRE Legends (of the Golden Arches)
Southbank Theatre, Naarm/Melbourne, until June 28
OPERA Aphrodite
Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until June 30
EXHIBITION Night Fishing with Ancestors – Karrabing Film Collective
Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Fremantle, until July 27
CERAMICS ingkwia tjaiya, lyaartinya tjaiya (old way, new way)
Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until October 26
SCULPTURE Arcangelo Sassolino: in the end, the beginning
Museum of Old and New Art, nipaluna/Hobart, until April 6, 2026
LAST CHANCE
VISUAL ART Hear Us. See Us. Know Our Names.
Sidespace Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart, until June 15
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Rising’s stars".
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