As we stand in the packed foyer of Melbourne Town Hall, waiting for Mette Ingvartsen's The Dancing Public to start, Richard leans over to me. "You can tell who's had COVID," he says. We are both wearing N95s; most of the audience are not masked. It is a riotous crush of people, yelling and hugging.
In the main hall, the Danish choreographer tells us that tonight we will all be dancing. And we do, joining in with Ingvartsen's dancing as she moves through the crowd, narrating our need to dance. It feels freeing to be moving together like this. Then, the tone shifts: continuously moving, Ingvartsen begins to narrate stories of mass hysteria, where whole villages started to uncontrollably, unstoppably dance together. No one quite knows how to react.
Rising reports there are 225 events over June 1-12 (and a couple extending beyond that date), in theatres and public spaces – but it's the works taking place in public space that I find myself most drawn to. What is most interesting about this new festival is the ways it weaves itself into the fabric of Melbourne.
At times, this year's Rising feels like a city exhaling. It was meant to be the third festival, a new offering combining the Melbourne International Arts Festival and White Night that was announced in 2019. The first festival was a casualty of 2020's COVID restrictions; the second opened for one night before it, too, was shut down by COVID lockdowns.
But here we are in a foyer of mostly unmasked people getting ready to dance the night away.
Finally, after two false starts, Rising has fully risen.
Later in the festival, as I stand over The Hole at Birrarung Marr above the Yarra and watch audience members and artists dig a hole (they will refill it a few nights later), Dan smiles at me and says, "I've had a few moments this week where I've looked around and asked: 'Are we back?'"
It does feel like the city and its arts are back.
While the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year was defined by COVID cancellations – half the shows I booked to see were cancelled – Rising seems almost immune. Only one show I am scheduled to see is cancelled; the rest all go on. One show I see asks the audience to wear masks; for the others, masks are optional — and the exception.
As is often the case at festivals, some of the most beautiful moments of Rising were the unexpected discoveries.
At Golden Square, a car park in the centre of Chinatown that has been turned into a gallery of video works, I walk out of a room and come across opera singer Scotty So, slowly making their way through the space while singing an incongruously high soprano – I later read in the program notes that So is lip-syncing. There is also a bombastic parade in celebration of the moon; at the end, someone reads to us a poem about the moon written by local year 3 students. And Paul Yore's neon crush of bright lights and tacky ephemera grows richer the more time you spend staring at it: it feels like a shrine to Melbourne's post-lockdown self.
As Becci and I make our way onto the roof of the car park, we see a snaking line heading towards a door, and a staff member asks if we want to join. We unexpectedly find ourselves among the crowd watching The White Waters, a thrilling immersive piece from Taiwanese choreographer Su Hui Yu, performed that night by Melbourne dancer Te Francesca. The crush of bodies moves around the space, as Francesca moves with a rage that gently simmers and then explodes.
I also find beauty in the unexpected discoveries I watch others stumble upon, as small interventions change the shape of the city.
It's the crowds of people who gather along the bridges along the Yarra to see Robin Fox's lightshow. It's the children who excitedly yell "They're burning a piano!" when they pass Annea Lockwood's Piano Burning (there are several literally titled works in the festival) on their way to the football – and it's the father who drolly says, "I guess they're not classical music fans."
It's the five-year-old who peppers artist Malcolm Whittaker with questions at The Hole, unsatisfied with the central concept of digging a hole just to fill it in later. "But you're digging a hole deeper," she says. "Why are you digging a hole deeper now?" Her mum jumps in to dig, against her daughter's protests.
It's the people in the State Library working away at their laptops in the same room as Back to Back Theatre's Single Channel Video, a delightfully small work about the value of objects we hold on to; a mix between Antiques Roadshow and primary school show-and-tell.
It's even the drum-banging "Freedom" protesters whose march on a Saturday afternoon exactly coincides with the start of Sophia Brous's public performance piece The Invisible Opera. We are sitting in stands in Federation Square as the sounds of the public space feed to us through headphones, a voice directing where we should look. Seeing an audience, the protesting drummers come up into the square and unwittingly become a thunderous part of this small and gentle show. In a work that asks us to sit and observe this public space, we watch but are also watched.
These moments are so small – and precious because they are small. But I am acutely aware that their smallness means they would have been missed by so many.
Unlike a festival such as White Night, which took over the city and its arts institutions, Rising seems to quietly fold itself into the gaps.
There are some missteps, possibly teething issues that would have been ironed out if this was, in fact, the third festival.
Still Lives, in which five Australian rules football players are to be strung up in the NGV re-creating an iconic mark, is scheduled in the program to run from 2pm to 6pm. As I walk towards the gallery at 4.45pm, I can tell the work is over by the waves of people walking up St Kilda Road.
Kaleidoscope is billed as an evolution of Keith Courtney's House of Mirrors, a popular feature of the final Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2019. This new work is sold as taking the hall of mirrors and adding in a kaleidoscope of colours. When I attend on an overcast afternoon, you can see the coloured lights strung above our heads – but they can't compete with the bright white light from the clouds above, and they make no impact on the space below.
At The Wilds, we spend almost as much time arranging tickets and walking the long walk from the ticket booth to the entrance as we do inside. It is a cold, sparsely populated Friday night and it feels as if there are nearly as many bar staff as patrons; there are certainly more bars than artworks. The inflated aliens are underwhelming; when a choir appears above the ice-skaters, it is a nice divertissement but little else.
The Wilds has over-promised and underdelivered: a tricky place for one of the centrepieces of the program.
Rising is a smaller festival than its predecessors. Certainly, you can't imagine White Night-level crowds now. And while Rising does have a smattering of international artists, they are no longer the focus. Instead, the biggest works in the program are from Australian artists.
The theatre program is headlined by Eryn Jean Norvill's tour de force in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The visual arts headliner is Patricia Piccinini, whose installation at the Flinders Street railway station was part of the 2021 festival and is still running. In the dance program there is Stephanie Lake's exhilarating Manifesto, pairing nine drummers with nine dancers, and Marrugeku's Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk) which reportedly sold out after the rapturous response on opening night – I couldn't get a ticket.
These brilliant headline shows would all stand up at the centre of any international festival program, but even so, my experience is really dominated by the little moments of surprise and joy — moments that feel serendipitous. I feel conscious of how lucky we were to see The White Waters, which is easy to miss in the program online and wasn't signposted at Golden Square; to coincide with the protesters at The Invisible Opera; cross paths with the five-year-old interrogator at The Hole.
Rising suffers, perhaps, because it sits in the shadows of White Night and Melbourne Festival, when it is really something entirely new. It is smaller than its previous counterparts, but also gentler. Perhaps this gentle cradling is what we need right now.
The Wilds, a centrepiece of Rising, closes on Sunday June 19. The Picture of Dorian Gray runs until July 31 at Arts Centre Melbourne.
