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The pioneering female rapper Lil’ Kim, the vomit-inducing performance artist Florentina Holzinger, and the first ever Australian Dance Biennale are among the lineup for the 2026 Rising festival, which is staged around Melbourne each winter.
Lil’ Kim, who last played in Australia in 2011, will perform at Melbourne’s Festival Hall to celebrate her landmark multiplatinum records Hard Core – which turns 30 this year – and The Notorious KIM.
Rising’s artistic director and chief executive, Hannah Fox, said the 51-year-old rapper, who broke out as a member of Junior MAFIA and was mentored by the Notorious BIG, was on “a really exciting return to form”.
“Hard Core and Notorious KIM really did carve a path – there are so many women rappers and femcees now who absolutely followed in her tiny footsteps, her funked-up, sex-positive vibe,” Fox said. “No one was calling her a feminist icon in the 90s. I don’t know if we’d have got tracks like WAP without her. She really is a trailblazer.”
Other spoken word artists coming to Rising include Kae Tempest, a poet whose latest album Self Titled is an “irrepressibly joyous” celebration of the trans community. The rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) and the musician Brian Jackson will celebrate the life and career of Gil Scott-Heron, the influential spoken word artist and Jackson’s longtime collaborator.
Music acts in the program include the septugenarian multi-instrumentalist Kahil El’Zabar, who has played with Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder; the singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon; French-Senegalese neo-soul singer Anaiis; the electronic artist TR/ST; the Palestinian rapper Saint Levant; and the US band Wednesday.
Raven Chacon, a First Nations composer from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, will stage his Pulitzer-winning work Voiceless Mass in St Paul’s Cathedral on opening weekend. “It might not be such an obvious one in the program, but I think it’s going to be a really fantastic [night],” Fox said.
The pioneering Jamaican reggae group the Congos will also make a rare appearance, after having played Glastonbury last year, while Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat musician and son of Fela Kuti, will perform with his father’s band Egypt 80 at Hamer Hall.
Holzinger, the gleefully gross-out Austrian performer who memorably staged her “bloody ballet” Tanz at Rising two years ago, will be back with her musical A Year Without Summer. Set in the year 1816, the famous “year without summer” after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the show about biohacking and ageing has been a huge hit in Europe with tickets for the Berlin dates selling out in minutes. In Stuttgart, her opera Sancta left 18 audience members needing treatment for severe nausea, and caused the concertmaster to faint.
“Florentina would probably hate me saying this, but there is a tenderness in this work, in amongst all the iconoclastic feminist body horror spectacle, which is really beautiful,” Fox said. “It is about our quest for endless youth and immortality, alongside this unhinged belief that we can invent our way through climate disaster.”
Rising will also stage the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, to celebrate contemporary dance from all over the country and internationally. This will include a pop-up dance academy called Land of a 1,000 Dances in the Flinders Street Ballroom, where the public will be able to attend classes on ballet, bootscooting, jive, TikTok choreography and even the Melbourne Shuffle, a rave dance that began in the city in the late 1980s.
The Aotearoa hip-hop group Royal Family Dance Crew, who have won the World Hip Hop Championship three times in a row and choreographed the Super Bowl, Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, will lead the public in a free dance event at Federation Square in addition to their already sold-out show at Hamer Hall.
Other dance groups in the biennale include Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc and Northern Irish dancer Oona Doherty.
