RISING 2025

This June, Rising Festival returns to transform Melbourne’s CBD. Over 12 nights, the festival will stage 65 events featuring 327 artists, 15 new commissions and nine world premieres. The program spans a vast spectrum of content, styles of theatre and – perhaps most distinctly – venues. All united by a shared goal of creating a palpable Rising presence in the city, which, despite the program’s size, is no small feat. “It’s a loud city with a lot going on,” says Rising’s Head of Event Design, Matthew Adey. “The biggest challenge logistically is trying to make sure we can get as many sites as possible visually noticed throughout the festival.”

The earliest iteration of Rising ran in 2022 – after a false start that was Covid-cancelled in ‘21 – and included a festival hub at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. “A huge site with a strong architectural presence”, it was a difficult venue to make a mark on. They moved from SMMB to the St Paul’s Cathedral car park – “we went from a huge amount of space to not enough” – before landing at Howey Place in the CBD. Positioned behind Melbourne Town Hall at an intersection of laneways and flanked by both the Capitol and Max Watts’ theatres, ‘Night Trade’ runs over the entire festival featuring permanent installations and various performances. “The whole precinct gets involved,” says Adey. “We take up several shop fronts with different installations.”

First step to transforming Howey Place was to consider how it is experienced on a regular basis and how to subvert that. Adey will be turning off all existing lighting and using bumped in fixtures to saturate spaces and create ambience. In festivals past he has relied more on décore, which required bumping in and out at both ends of the day. Truss with fixtures can remain in the air for the duration of the festival. Night Trade will also feature a series of one metre by half metre screens. A fully connected installation of video content that has been created using TouchDesigner and Blender video software. The screens are the ROE Visual Vanish, which Adey describes as “an incredible piece of technology that I cannot get enough of.” He praises their light weight, brightness, transparency and numerous possible configurations, including curves.

While Adey is making use of current and new technology, with grandMA3 consoles for control and even using AI tools to grab images he can then manipulate in TouchDesigner, like any good craftsman, he doesn’t discount the classics. “I’m using a lot more golden tungsten style lighting to bring back a bit of warmth and being very specific about that.” One of the stages at Night Trade will feature tungsten lamps exclusively. Combined with a gold curtain, Adey describes it as an “holistic installation.”

The festival also hosts numerous shows, homegrown and international, that come with existing designers and preconceived designs. But a remounted show is not to be mistaken as an easier endeavour for the team. With limited access to the city’s traditional theatres – due to the size of the program and also the timelines that commercial theatres run to – Rising’s production manager, Mikkel Mynster, is tasked with creating performance spaces in non-conventional venues, “it’s easily the most challenging part of the job,” he says.

One example is Mickey by Brooke Stamp, which was last performed at Carriageworks in Sydney as part of LiveWorks festival. During Rising it will be performed at Buxton Contemporary gallery space. The lighting design is simple with four ARRI SkyPanel lights for colour saturation and a couple of PAR cans to fill in side light, but even still it has presented challenges in the new venue. There are pillars intruding in the performance space and the ceiling is lower than at Carriageworks, although luckily it does have rigging points. “We’re going to hang some scaff pipes to rig lights on,” says Mynster. “Use floor stands for speakers. Try to keep it as light touch as possible.” Mynster says that both artists who will be performing in Buxton Contemporary – the other being another dance-performance hybrid, The Butterfly Who Flew into the Rave – are very open to the idea of not being in a theatre.

This gets to the real art of Mynster’s job, beyond hiring gear and booking venues – negotiating with artists. “What is the idea you’re trying to communicate, how do we communicate that idea in this different context. What is important about your work and what is less important.” This task is even more gargantuan when you consider the range of companies and artists Mynster is working with. “We have shows coming from all over the world and from different stratas of theatre. Budget theatre where designs are led by scraping together whatever equipment is at hand and cutting edge modern shows using the latest moving lights.”

This range in programming is one reason Mynster says it is hard to spot trends in what gear designers are using, although he notes that he is seeing a lot more LED than when the festival started. As our conversation progresses, however, I think I spot a trend – screens.

One of Mynster’s highlights for the festival is POV – a live docu-drama being staged at Art Centre Melbourne’s newest venue, The Show Room. “It makes great use of a small amount of technology,” says Mynster. “There are four TV monitors that get used as part of the show.” Another highlight is a production of Hamlet by Peruvian theatre company, Teatro La Plaza, that is performed by an entirely neurodivergent cast and features a giant video wall.

Adey’s highlight, in addition to Night Trade, is Day Tripper. A festival within the festival that runs day and night at Melbourne Town Hall featuring live music, DJs and contemporary dance. Using similar tools and design principals that he has for Night Trade, he uses the opportunity working with different artists to explore technology and create production designs that respond to Melbourne Town Hall.

Whether Adey will succeed in taking over Town Hall or the city at large remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that Rising will be noticed.

Rising runs from 04 – 15 June.

---

Main image: Night Trade. Photo Credit: Tamarah Scott