Rising Festival
Opening night, Melbourne, June 1

Laser shows over the Yarra. Ice-skating under colourful projections at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. A digital arts hub tucked away in a Chinatown car park. The Rising festival opened on Wednesday evening with a selection of events that might have drawn large crowds in an ideal world – but as winter descended with full force, early signs of the city actively embracing the festival were hard to find.

Getting the fest off the ground has been an extended ordeal. The pandemic reduced Melbourne from cultural capital to city under siege and Rising was caught out twice: postponed in 2020, it opened for one day before lockdown in 2021. Melburnians haven’t experienced either Rising or the arts festivals it replaced – the International Arts Festival and White Night – in almost three years.

Foul weather diminished the 2019 White Night, and unsurprisingly Wednesday’s bitter cold and driving rain kept midweek crowds at bay. Together with the lingering chilling effect of the pandemic it gave Rising’s opening night the air of an under-attended party.

Early Wednesday night, as Robin Fox’s Monochord streaked the Yarra River with an eerie wash of fountains and green lasers, passersby walked along blithe to the spectacle. Only a modest group of smartphone-wielding diehards lined Princes Bridge to witness it.

Winter ice-skating at the Myer Music Bowl is a cherished tradition, though I’m not sure doing it under inflatable alien sculptures and projections, with a live choir singing pop favourites from the ’80s and ’90s, really adds much to the experience. The attempt to create an outdoor hub may also have misjudged numbers, if the lonely food trucks and sparsely populated bars were anything to go by.

A similar vibe clung to Golden Square. Transforming a Chinatown carpark into a funhouse of digital art and installation is an appealing idea, but only a few works stood out: Guan Xiao’s Weather Forecast offered a slick and entrancing video art triptych that rewired time to a pounding techno soundtrack, and a neon chapel to materialism on the roof has an authentic White Night feel.

Yet there were too many half-hearted oddities that looked like bad rave decor – without the compensating pleasures of a dance floor – and, it seemed, as many bar staff ready to pour a consoling drink as there were things to see in the digital art gallery.