What PSpace are seeing at RISING
A new festival in Victoria’s culture calendar, RISING is a surge of art, music, performance and ceremony in the heart of Melbourne. Boasting an expansive and exciting lineup, from June 1 - 12, this festival covers everything you could want, and also things you never knew you needed. Here is what PSpace are seeing at RISING:
BANG STOP
Jim White and Emmett Kelly with Jo Lloyd
1 June
Free
Opening the festival, BANG STOP sees music and dance strike a balance between perpetual stasis and perpetual motion. RISING's Artist in Residence, Jim White and long-term collaborator and guitarist Emmett Kelly (aka The Double) are joined by brand-new collaborator Jo Lloyd. White and Kelly deliver countless uninvented rock songs while choreographer Jo Lloyd and her dancers create and loop intricate patterns, working against and with the sound.
JURRUNGU NGAN-GA (STRAIGHT TALK)
Marrugeku
1-11 June
$45-50
Dance as resistance. Challenging yet joyful, Jurrungu Ngan-ga — meaning ‘straight talk’— is a provocative new dance theatre work by Marrugeku which confronts Australia’s shameful fixation with incarceration. The mesmerising multimedia production is a frank conversation with the Australian psyche, exposing the deep-seated fears holding us back from truth and justice.
Through movement, spoken word, installation and a powerful musical soundscape, the cast draws on intersecting yet distinct cultural experiences (Indigenous, immigrant, people seeking asylum, transgender and settler) to ask: who really is in prison here?
WORKING ON MY NIGHT MOVES
Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan
2-4 June
$36-40
Spitting you out of a tornado’s vortex into an other-worldly place of manipulated light and tinfoil, WOMNM is is an intergalactic Wizard of Oz. Following an unhinged Dorothy—and the celestial bodies she meets along the way— this work is a playful experiment in building feminist futures and a communal expedition to the star-cloaked corners of deep space.
WURUKUR DJUANDUK BALAG — ANCESTORS ARE CALLING (MELBOURNE)
Dr Lou Bennett AM (Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung)
3 June
$40-45
Accompanied by a string quartet, First Peoples collaborators sing in multiple languages. Composed in multiple First Peoples languages by Dr Lou Bennett AM (Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung), the song-based work responds to the cultural belongings of First Peoples held in the Melbourne Museum collections. It speaks to the living culture of the objects, that are alive with the spirit and energy of the Country and the people from which they came.
STILL LIVES : MELBOURNE
Luke George and Daniel Kok
5 June
Free
Still Lives sees the artists work with five Australian Rules players to capture a moment in time bound by rope. In the recreation of a spectacular mark from football history, the players are transformed into living sculptures. As spectators gather in the Great Hall of the NGV to witness the process of creating this suspended tableau, the connection between art and sport, the players and the game they love, and the powerful influence of football becomes an object of interrogation.
HIJRA'H
Rianto
9-12 June
$45-50
HIJRA’H explores the history and culture of the Indonesian island Sulawesi. In the island’s people and history, renowned dancer and choreographer Rianto uncovers gender expression in dance forms dating back to pre-Islam animism, where transgender spiritual figures were greatly valued. With acclaimed filmmaker Garin Nugroho, collaborator and vocalist Cahwati Sugiarto and Sulawesi performance maker Abdi Karya, they mine the rich seam between traditional and contemporary culture, and between male and female.
THE INVISIBLE OPERA
Sophia Brous with Lara Thoms, Samara Hersch and Faye Driscoll
10-11 June
$36-40
Slip on a set of headphones and step into a world conducted by a disembodied libretto, narrating an omniscient vision of the micro dramas, private enterprise and influence of surveillance in a town square. As the everyday action of Federation Square unfolds, a voice and an all-seeing eye seemingly choreograph and narrate the environment in real time, instantly bringing into question, what is real and who is watching.
SET PIECE
Anna Breckon and Nat Randall
10-12 June
$45-50
As an original commissioner of Set Piece, we are absolutely thrilled to see it be a part of RISING. Catch this incredible work where queer intimacy and fantasy meet 1950s pulp fiction in a genre-bending technical feat of screen and stage.
