by A theatergoer will be drugged unconscious on stage in Melbourne this year, in a controversial and critically acclaimed theater work about sexual violence that will have its Australian premiere at the Rising festival.
Cadela Força Triológ: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella Directed and starred by Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi, who recounts her experience of being drugged and sexually assaulted, before taking a drug on stage. When unconscious, female performers move her body around, even at one point inserting a spectrometer and camera into her vagina, with a live video feed shown to the audience in a simulated post-rape forensic examination.
“Is this ethical?” The New York Times asked about the work last year, saying that it was “extremely moving to experience this scene, knowing that the main character will not remember much of it, even in hundreds of years.” audience member”. .
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Uprising co-artistic director Gideon Obarzanek called it “one of the most extraordinary shows I’ve seen in the last 10 years”.
“It took me days to process what I had seen. What was so interesting was Bianchi’s prudence, about her position which she has reached for a long time through research on her own experience, but [also] regarding violence against women,” said Obarzanek. “The fact that she goes on this narrative journey without any physical agency – it’s very unusual.”
The Cadela Força Trilogy provoked emotional reactions in Europe, said co-director Hannah Fox, and Australian audiences would be repeatedly warned about what they were about to see.
Bianchi travels with a doctor who monitors her health and limits how often she does the show.
“I was very concerned, but it was a very cool intellectual unpacking of a very lonely subject,” Fox said. “It was very non-confrontational, in an emotional sense.”
The show is one of more than 100 events at this year’s Rising festival, which has become a staple of Melbourne’s winter arts scene, which runs from June 1-16 this year.
As in previous years, when it took over car parks and alleys, the festival will occupy the city’s under-loved spaces with events such as Day Tripper, a music and arts festival within the festival that will take place in shops and arcades abandoned, as well as the Melbourne Town Hall and Max Watt’s club. US hip hop artist Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, will perform, as will industrial musicians HTRK and 78-year-old disco legend Asha Puthli.
Returning this year is The Rivers Sing, a sound work that was installed along the Birrarung for the first time in 2021, one of the few Eiri Amach works that was able to continue when that year’s festival was stopped due to protocols Covid-19. The work sees speakers installed by the river, with First Nations soprano Deborah Cheetham playing over field recordings and human voices in music that changes every day during dusk.
Federation Square will be transformed into a free art show by The Blak Infinite, curated by Yorta Yorta artist Kimberley Moulton and Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren. Works include Richard Bell’s installation Embassy, inspired by the Aboriginal tent embassy set up in Canberra in 1972; and a series of immersive light projections at night, which will tell stories of First Nations celestial knowledge. Bell’s Pay the Rent work, a digital token showing the Australian government’s estimated debt to First Nations since 1901, has also been projected onto the State Library of Victoria.
Related: Australian Richard Bell’s unconventional art: ‘There must be a day of reckoning’
British Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller will update his work The 24 Hour Rock Show for Australia, adding new local films to his 24-hour line-up of back-to-back music documentaries that will be free to watch for Public. With Victorian brass musicians, Deller will also stage Acid Brass, a celebration of the Acid House singer performed with brass instruments in free concerts across the city.
Other musical acts include US indie rock band Blonde Redhead; Swedish electro-pop singer Fever Ray; Samoan-Australian drilling group OneFour; US pop star Sky Ferreira; and the famous Brazilian musician, Authur Verocai, who is 78 years old, whose first album from 1972 was popular among the public including MF Doom. There will be Melbourne bands, Good Morning and the Dirty Three; the latter, with Warren Ellis, will be performing their first headline shows in their hometown in 14 years.
Among the theater shows coming to Melbourne for the first time are Big Name No Blankets, the acclaimed musical celebrating the Warumpi Band, and S Shakthidharan’s award-winning Sri Lankan-Australian saga Counting and Cracking.
Arts festivals across Australia have turned to immersive experiential theater to get people out of their homes, and Uprising is no different. For Communitas, the Shouse dance duo will invite 1,000 members of the public to perform in a mass choir at St Paul’s Cathedral. US clown Geoff Sobelle will present his work Food, which places the audience around a table the size of the stage, and Sobelle will tell the history of humanity, greed and food.
“Netflix is the biggest competitor at the festivals, not each other,” Fox said. “What we’re always looking for are those experiences that can’t be replicated in any other way.”
Related: 10,000 people playing 10,000 kazoos: Melbourne’s wildly successful ‘silly and hilarious’ global event
Endurance acts are also on the cards, such as 8/8/8: The Rest, the second part of a trippy of eight-hour immersive experiences. Rest will invite audiences into the Melbourne Arts Center between the hours of 9pm and 5am to tackle capitalism.
Flemish artist Miet Warlop will present his show One Song Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV, in which a group of musicians will repeat the same song over and over again while running an obstacle course until they almost fall off their feet. together. And the Pony Cam Theater Collective will be running more than 15km on treadmills and multitasking for the audience in Burnout Paradise at the Malthouse.
Rising tickets will be on sale from midday on Tuesday.
