The fantastic Ms Fox rises to the occasion

When meeting Rising’s artistic director Hannah Fox for lunch in April, I didn’t know Austrian performance artist Florentina Holzinger, whom Fox had programmed for this year’s festival.

Since then, Holzinger has become the hottest ticket at the Venice Biennale, wowing audiences with a work in the Austrian pavilion. Hanging upside down in a giant bell, half naked, she physically swings to strike the bell’s edge, her body – literally – sounding an alarm.

A month before the global Italian event – often characterised as the Olympics of the arts – Fox and I are dining at Manze, a Mauritian-inspired restaurant in North Melbourne. She’s eaten here once and was very keen to return. Its relaxed vibe, excellent staff and fabulous, interesting food make it conducive to stretching out.

We opt for the ‘short’ express lunch, which includes several courses, plus an extra entree, the abalone skewers, which sound too good to resist; a glass of pinot gris each and we’re sorted.

Seated in a front corner of the restaurant, facing the street, Fox tells me Holzinger creates “these huge, feminist, body horror, spectacle works”.

“She really has set a new precedent for what can happen on the grand stages of a theatre, who’s invited to stand on those stages alongside her, and who the audience is,” she says. “I was absolutely blown away the first time I saw her work. To look around … it felt completely different who was sitting in that room, completely different to what you’d experience in your average theatre audience.”

Soon after we arrive, the chef sends out two taro fritters with habanero sauce, on the house. Are you OK with spice? I ask.

“I’m a bit of a spice fiend actually,” Fox says, trying to stab one of the balls. Just as she tries to, it goes flying across the table and lands on the floor. “I missed that – oh my god, what a start.”

It’s a perfect, slapstick moment that kicks off a very relaxed, enjoyable lunch; Fox is a great conversationalist, warm, funny and clever. At Melbourne Festival from 2008 to 2013, and then associate creative director of Dark Mofo from 2013 to 2019, she has programmed all genres, but music has always been her main bag.

Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival was her first big arts event. “I knew about [Adelaide] Fringe parade as a kid but that was the limit of my understanding. I was really into music and started out putting on DIY music events when I was really young. Probably too young,” she says with a laugh, adding that first was also when she was 16.

Kosky’s festival, she says, “really opened my eyes, wider than was comfortable for me at the time”.

“But I can absolutely draw a straight line from that experience, you know,” she says. “I got to see [American sexologist and performer] Annie Sprinkle, I saw [UK-based] DV8 Physical Theatre and their production Enter Achilles, about toxic masculinity, a word I didn’t understand at that time, and I was 18, so it really changed me. And we’re offering that option, just to present an invitation that’s broad enough … I always think, what’s the widest possible doorway we can make, and then, where are we guiding people to? Where’s that secondary offer and third offer?”

When our photographer arrives, he comments on Fox’s Sade T-shirt, which I’ve also admired. The R&B artist best known for the album Smooth Operator in 1984 has been on high rotation for me lately, and for my 16-year-old (who discovered her separate to me).

“[Sade is] really back in the zeitgeist and she’s actually putting out a new record,” Fox says. “I was hoping she would tour again but I’ve been told there’s absolutely no way.

“Her attitude towards trans youth and some of the charity work she’s done around that has really spoken to another generation and put her on the radar.”

There’s a whole new generation of fans flocking to Sade’s work, which reflects the way people listen to music now. Fox says someone quite young at her work recently asked if she’d heard of “this new band Talking Heads”.

It just popped into their algorithm, and they just took it as being current, Fox says.

The 48-year-old grew up in the country near Onkaparinga, south of Adelaide. Her parents are passionate divers and would take her on night dives as a teenager. “Which I’m pretty sure was illegal but it was really fun,” she says with a laugh. “So terrifying, surrounded by the abyss and there’s just a bit of light.

“They would go to particular caves within a reef and you would see a lot. They’re in their late 70s now and still in the ocean every day.”

I’m impressed by the night cave diving, although it’s not something I would ever contemplate. Fox says she’d now be terrified. “It’s interesting how courage changes as you get older. I was really fearless about nature in general as a kid and now, whenever I get in the ocean – even in the bath – I can hear the Jaws soundtrack. I’m a real wimp.”

To some extent, we agree, it’s about awareness of risk, a concept we’re a lot less conscious about as kids. “I guess it’s awareness of death,” Fox says, with a laugh.

With perfect timing, the snapper with kohlrabi arrives, as well as the abalone skewers and a sweet-and-spicy fruit salad with a Creole tamarind jam; each dish is so pretty it looks like an artwork.

‘Every single time, the thing that I thought was going to be a no-brainer is really difficult. And the thing that I thought was going to be a challenge goes beautifully. That’s the addictive nature of it.’

Hannah Fox, Rising artistic director

Once featured in the Day On A Plate column in Sunday Life magazine, Fox says a small detail generated “the most feedback I’ve ever had from any press I’d ever done in my life”.

“I think I confessed to having weed gummies or something,” she says. “My mother-in-law was like, do you?!”

Rising was born in 2019 as an amalgam of the Melbourne Festival – before that the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and before that, from 1986 until 2003, Spoleto – and White Night, a popular mass event in the CBD.

For Fox and Gideon Obarzanek – until this year, Fox’s co-artistic director at Rising – one challenge was starting the new event “off the back of two legacy events, that was so completely different”. This year, she takes the reins solo and adds CEO to her title.

As a contemporary arts festival, Rising has a very broad brief and covers all genres of the arts. In 2022, a magical exhibition of Patricia Piccinini’s work was shown in Flinders Street Station, including the ballroom. It was inspired programming, opening up this storied space to Melburnians. In 2023, those same rooms housed Shadow Spirit, an extraordinary range of First Nations work, curated by Yorta Yorta woman Kimberley Moulton.

Musical highlights this year include Lil’ Kim, North Carolinian band Wednesday, indie pop star Saint Levant, Seun Kuti (the son of Nigerian legend Fela Kuti) and Egypt 80, Welsh songstress Cate Le Bon, and a big, day-long festa within the festa at the Melbourne Town Hall, called Daytripper.

There is a big dance component, lots of theatre, all manner of visual arts – including Kent Morris’ Flower Power in the freshly revamped City Square – plus art trams, guided tours, talks and more. Participatory events are a trademark of the 12-day event, as are many free offerings.

Until February, Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei’s show 1154 Days, based on her experience of being wrongly imprisoned in China, was on the theatre line-up. According to Rising, it was dropped for financial reasons. Speaking this month, Lei argued she was censored, citing pressure from the Chinese government; the show will be staged at Arts House and opens this week.

This year, the Rising team includes Moulton, responsible for exhibitions; Wiradjuri woman Hayley Percy as senior curator, music; Taungurung woman Kate ten Buuren as the First Peoples Melbourne art trams curator; and Obarzanek becomes senior curator, performance and Australian Dance Biennale director. Rising fellow Yasmine Sharaf is also a music curator.

People have got to experience the festival for themselves, Fox says. “Over time, I am seeing a growing sense of ownership from Melbourne and that’s the ultimate goal. This needs to be owned by the city – it’s not mine, it wasn’t Gideon’s, it’s not anyone’s who works at Rising. It belongs to Melbourne and I’m seeing that shift over time. But I think people forget how long that takes. When I was working at Dark Mofo, for the first four years it was a pretty small, intimate event. For the first one, we sold 1500 tickets.”

There was, of course, one other significant challenge no one had expected. Just as the Rising festival was about to launch in 2020, it was called off due to the pandemic.

Then, heartbreakingly, in 2021, it opened for one night. “And that was it – we all went home,” Fox says.

As devastating as that was, some works continued. “We still had The Rivers Sing, led by Deborah Cheetham, going throughout the following few weeks, and Maree Clarke and Mitch Mahoney had a video work called Ancestral Memories. And there was that giant eel on the river as well by the Lantern Company.

“I was spending a lot of time there on the bridge with Deborah, just listening to her voice echoing out across this city, full and silent,” Fox says. “And it felt profound, like a lament that was at the scale that was appropriate for what everyone was experiencing here and everywhere.”

She recalls people coming into the city, “walking around experiencing this was this very strange, eerie, ethereal, gentle beginning that I still think about all the time, every time I’m standing on that bridge”.

Fox is fascinated by the way people can happen upon art and festival events without necessarily having an invitation to join or get involved. We’re always looking at ways to do that, she says, and it happens in big and small ways.

In 2022, the line-up included a project by The Hole Collective: “We dig art holes” is their mantra.

“It was literally a group of artists digging a hole and asking the public to get involved and help them … people wandering by, and some people would come to it deliberately,” Fox says.

“I couldn’t believe how many people got deeply invested in digging this hole. Dads, tradies, gardening enthusiasts, other artists, who asked no questions. [It was] like art masquerading as hard yakka. [Everyone] just got in the hole, shoulder to shoulder, digging with artists, having these breathless conversations for hours – and then eventually refilled that hole. That was the end of it. It felt like perfect metaphor for what we were experiencing at the time of building these things and taking them down.”

The Rising door is always open to anyone, Fox says; she hopes the program reflects that. Having created festivals for about two decades, she is delighted to say: “It always surprises me, every single year.

“Every single time, the thing that I thought was going to be a no-brainer is really difficult. And the thing that I thought was going to be a challenge goes beautifully. That’s the addictive nature of it – you’re constantly seeking to perfect something that’s actually made by hundreds of hands and thousands of decisions, and, ultimately, the public tells you what’s working.”

Rising Festival runs until June 8.

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