RISING 2026 Expands City-Wide Program With Major Dance, Music And First Peoples Projects Across Melbourne Featuring The Royal Family Dance Crew, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 And Lady Shaka
by Paul Cashmere
Melbourne’s RISING 2026 festival has unveiled a major expansion of its city-wide program running from 27 May to 8 June 2026, adding large-scale public events, club nights, First Peoples-led art projects and international music performances across key inner-city precincts. Among the headline additions is God Save The Queens, a free Pasifika block party led by global street dance collective The Royal Family Dance Crew, transforming the city centre into an open-air dancefloor on Saturday 7 June.
The announcement also confirms the return of Bass-heavy late-night programming at Chinatown’s Paramount Food Court, expanded participatory dance initiatives, and new First Peoples creative works spanning trams, workshops and public installations.
The latest RISING expansion positions the festival as a hybrid cultural engine where club culture, contemporary performance and First Peoples storytelling converge in shared public space. With Melbourne continuing to evolve its identity as a global night-time and arts city, the 2026 program extends beyond traditional venues into transport networks, civic architecture and street-level gatherings.
The inclusion of international DJs such as Lady Shaka alongside emerging Australian First Peoples artists and interdisciplinary collectives reflects a broader industry shift toward cross-genre programming and community-led curation, particularly within festival frameworks seeking to bridge nightlife culture and public art.
At the centre of the announcement is God Save The Queens, a large-scale Pasifika block party led by The Royal Family Dance Crew. The event blends performance and participation, with audiences invited onto the floor as choreography dissolves into collective movement. The program also features artists including Jess B, Lady Shaka, HALF QUEEN, Rubi Du, and Kween Kong, with performances designed to move between club aesthetics, street dance and Pasifika cultural expression.
A key late-night activation, Bass Lounge, returns beneath Chinatown’s Paramount Food Court, operating as an after-dark hub across select nights. Programming includes DJs such as Nicolini, Artificial (Nicole Skeltys), Kidskin, and selectors including Ed Kent, Bridget Small, and Emelyne. The space is designed as a continuous sound environment running into the early hours.
On 5 June, the Bass Lounge program expands further with layered sets blending experimental club forms, hyper-rhythmic bass structures and genre-dissolving DJ collaborations.
The First Peoples program continues its city-wide presence through Land Of 1000 Dances, reopening the historic Flinders Street Station Ballroom as a participatory dance academy. The initiative includes workshops spanning ballet, jazz, voguing, Polyswagg and contemporary forms, delivered by artists and crews from across Melbourne’s metropolitan and regional communities.
International Afrobeats figure Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 will perform at Hamer Hall, supported by Naarm’s Public Opinion Afro Orchestra, continuing a long-standing dialogue between African diaspora sounds and contemporary Australian rhythm culture.
RISING has steadily developed as one of Australia’s most experimental festival platforms, merging visual art, music and public intervention. Since its inception, it has increasingly focused on decentralised programming, pushing performances into non-traditional environments including transport infrastructure, civic spaces and retail precincts.
The 2026 expansion deepens that trajectory, particularly through the First Peoples program, which includes Melbourne Art Trams curated by Taungurung woman Kateten Buuren. The initiative transforms six trams into moving public artworks, extending visibility across the city’s transport network for up to 12 months.
Legacy works also feature senior Wada Wurrung artist Marlene Gilson OAM, whose reinterpretations of Country-based storytelling connect historical narrative with contemporary public art practice.
This direction aligns with a global festival trend toward participatory cultural models, where audiences are no longer passive observers but active contributors within performance ecosystems. RISING’s integration of dance education, club culture and First Peoples-led frameworks reflects that shift.
While the expansion of free public programming has been widely viewed as a strength of the festival model, large-scale activations in civic spaces often raise logistical considerations around crowd management, accessibility and cultural framing.
Community-led programming, particularly within First Peoples contexts, also carries expectations around cultural authority and long-term representation rather than one-off presentation. RISING’s continued partnerships with First Peoples curators and artists suggest an attempt to embed continuity rather than seasonal engagement, though the balance between festival-scale spectacle and community ownership remains an ongoing conversation within the sector.
Similarly, the integration of club culture into public infrastructure raises questions about sustainability, licensing and the future of late-night cultural economies in Melbourne’s inner city.
With the full RISING 2026 program now expanding across multiple precincts, attention turns to how audiences will move between structured venues, open-air dance floors and transport-based art installations. The festival continues to position itself as a living network of performance rather than a fixed event schedule, with additional programming announcements expected closer to opening night.
As Melbourne prepares for another large-scale winter arts takeover, RISING 2026 is shaping up as one of its most geographically dispersed and culturally layered editions to date.
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