The first attempt to launch Melbourne’s Rising festival – an amalgamation of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and White Night – was cancelled in 2020 due to the first coronavirus wave. The second attempt lasted just one day, when the Victorian government enforced a seven-day lockdown; within five days, it was extended and the festival was shut down entirely.
So is the third time the charm? On Thursday, Rising announced its 2022 program, which includes 801 artists – including 685 Australian artists, mostly Victorian – presenting 84 projects, including 14 world and 16 Australian premieres.
When Rising was cancelled last year, more than 750 Victorian artists had been ready to present 133 projects – including 36 world premieres. Festival co-directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek were “devastated” on their behalf, but there was not enough time to pick up the phone to everyone.
“We had a big email list to give everyone the same message at the same time,” Fox says. “Cancelling a festival is as much work as putting one on. We really didn’t have the capacity to have those one-on-one conversations [until] a little while later.”
Obarzanek says that for some artists, “this would have been the fifth, eighth, tenth cancellation” during the various restrictions and lockdowns.
“We were devastated, but we knew we were on to a good thing,” he says. “We ran three public art pieces that became a beacon along the [Birrarung/Yarra] river – Wandering Stars, The Rivers Sing, and Maree Clark’s work Ancestral Memory on Hamer Hall – that we got permission to run throughout the lockdown, and which became a great place of solace for Melburnians.”
Now for their third attempt, Fox and Obarzanek are crossing from pandemic darkness into a new light. Throughout the festival, there will be a new city beacon from sunset until late as artist Robin Fox’s audiovisual installation Birrarung Monochord shoots powerful beams from Immigration Bridge in the west and Birrarung Marr park in the east. “Lasers of this power have never been used in Victoria before,” says Obarzanek.
International musicians including Scottish band Arab Strap, British singer Baxter Dury, US singer Lucy Dacus and soul musician Masego will take part in the festival, as will Australia’s rapper Tkay Maidza, punk musician Ed Kuepper and drummer Jim White.
Malthouse theatre, whose seasons were severely impacted by lockdowns, has a strong showing at Rising, especially of First Nations works. These include the premiere of The Return, about the pillaging of ancestral remains, a First Nations cast including Jimi Bani, Ghenoa Gela and Guy Simon; and a one-woman show from Elaine Crombie, Janet’s Vagrant Love.
At Arts House, dance company Marrugeku will finally bring Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk) to Melbourne, in which nine culturally diverse performers explore the idea of Australia as a nation of jailers, with input from Yawuru law man Senator Pat Dodson and Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani. Also at Arts House’s Meat Market venue, Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s 21 pornographies is a one-woman show exploring power and submission.
At the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Emmy-winning Australian film-maker Lynette Wallworth will give a live performance lecture called How To Live (After you Die), which had been programmed last year; the film version premiered at Sundance in January. In both versions, Wallworth recounts her teens and early adulthood as part of a radical Christian cult, referencing “the increasing lobbying power of evangelicalism”, says Obarzanek, “and its influence in current popular politics, specifically in regards to Trump, and probably in regards to [Scott] Morrison as well”.
The Golden Square program will return to Chinatown with artist Paul Yore creating Seeing is Believing, a rooftop structure that riffs on shrines, funhouses and megachurches. Taiwanese artist Sui Hui Yu’s The White Waters reinterprets a Ming dynasty folk story through a lens of queer and Taiwanese history. And US artist Jenny Holzer’s text-based projections I Conjure, cancelled last year, will return, beamed on to the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre building.
Few of the previously announced shows have been dumped entirely; others, such as This, by David Woods of Ridiculusmus fame, have been pushed back. The challenge for artists creating new shows is that they must now compete with a backlog of postponed events. There are fewer projects planned in 2022 than 2021, largely because some works have since premiered at festivals in cities with fewer restrictions than Melbourne – and others are still regrouping.
Rising runs from 1 to 12 June across venues in Melbourne
