After being cancelled in 2020 and 2021, Melbourne's RISING festival is finally here. It's the first major arts festival the city has hosted since 2019. We venture into the frosty night air to discover how this festival tries to subvert expectations and capture new audiences.

We meet the artistic directors, watch passers-by become part of the action in The Invisible Opera, meet ordinary people rehearsing for a massive dance work, encounter new work from Marrugeku and examine social taboos with choreographer Mette Ingvarten.

At RISING, the arts take the chill off winter

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Darren Yap has been a part of some huge moments in Australian performing arts history, from acting in Miss Saigon to being on the directorial team for the Sydney 2000 closing ceremony. Now he's using his talents to bringing new Asian Australian work to the stage.

Also, we meet artists behind a surge of Asian Australian plays on our mainstages right now and Neil Armfield joins us to pay tribute to the English theatre director Peter Brook, famous for his reinvention of contemporary theatre.

'It became very woke' — An Asian Australian director embraces 'elder' status

British author Benjamin Myers says he likes to be on the margins as a writer and his latest novel, The Perfect Golden Circle, is about the crop circles that appeared in 1989 in the English countryside and explores the type of people who created them.

Also Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell explain their genre-bending book, Mothertongues and Noongar author, Claire G Coleman's mysterious and unsettling book, Enclave, set in a walled Australian city.

'I guess I'm a weirdo' — Benjamin Myers on crop circles and being a loner

It’s time to Get up, stand up, show up- the theme for NAIDOC week 2022. 

Stop Everything presents highlights celebrating the depth of talent from First Nations creatives working in music, television and theatre.

BL is joined by BARKAA, a Malyangapa Barkindji woman from Western New South Wales signed to Briggs’ Bad Apples Music label to talk about the Blak Matriarchy she belongs to.

BL + BW dig into the ABC show, All My Friends are Racist with co stars, Davey Thomson and Tuuli Narkle and award winning screenwriter, Kodie Bedford, discusses the AMC+ original series Firebite, a supernatural series set in an underground mining town in central Australia where First Nations vampire slayers battle a colony of white vampires.



Show notes:

BARKAA: https://www.barkaa.com.au/


Stop Everything with BARKAA: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/barkaa-blak-matriarchy/13636952

Stop Everything with Davey Thomson and Tuuli Narkle: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/all-my-friends-are-racist/13503708

Stop Everything with Kodie Bedford: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/kodie-bedford-joe-rogan/13749530

Highlights: Barkaa, Firebite and All my friends are racist

For NAIDOC Week we're joined by Warren H. Williams, co-creator & star of a unique and stunningly shot new crime series, True Colours, NITV's first foray into longform drama, and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt, who talks about Warriors on the Field, a celebration of Indigenous Australia and its long-standing history and connection with Australian football. Two exciting directors from Finland will also be along.....Juho Kuosmanen and Mikko Myllylahti, for a conversation about Finnish storytelling and their new films, the Cannes winning Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen), and The Woodcutter Story (Mikko Myllylahti), both set to screen in Australia. Plus, Sunil and a very special guest are on the red carpet for the premiere of Thor: Love and Thunder and put some questions to Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth.

NAIDOC Week + two exciting directors from Finland + on the red carpet with Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi

Richard Bell is one of the few individual artists curated into Documenta 15, the highly-anticipated global survey of contemporary art. This year, for the first time, it’s been dominated by artists and collectives from the Global South. But the historic takeover has been eclipsed by a media storm ignited by what appears to be a Jewish caricature in a mural painted by Indonesian artist group Taring Padi, since taken down. 

Queensland-born sculptor Sebastian di Mauro who now calls Delaware home, discusses his obsession with materiality and his new exhibition featuring appliquéd army blankets based on the arcane imagery on American dollar notes. 

And we discover the little-known painter Edward Brezinski who lived on the fringes of the hyperactive 1980s New York art scene that produced Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His desperate bid for fame is charted in the new documentary Make Me Famous which also offers a fascinating insight into the ecosystem of the art business.

At RISING, the arts take the chill off winter

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