The full performance program for Asia TOPA (Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts) has been unveiled. Returning after a five-year hiatus and taking place from 20 February – 10 March 2025, Asia TOPA will bring the very best of Asia-Pacific arts, culture and ideas to Naarm/Melbourne.
A joint initiative of Arts Centre Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund, and supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, Asia TOPA is a city-wide celebration taking place over three weeks. It includes collaborations and partnerships with cultural innovators from across the Asia-Pacific region including Taipei Performing Arts Center, Singapore’s The Esplanade and Japan’s Aichi Prefectural Art Theater.
Centred at Arts Centre Melbourne in the heart of the city, Asia TOPA will see many of Naarm Melbourne’s leading community spaces and cultural institutions – including the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Fed Square, Footscray Community Arts and Bunjil Place – host captivating events and incredible new performances.
The triennial is made up of three public programming streams: Performance, Nightlife and Knowledge. The headline program for Asia TOPA, the Performance stream features 33 performances, of which 18 are world premieres and 18 have been commissioned as new works by Asia TOPA and Arts Centre Melbourne. Performance is generously supported by Principal Partner Playking Foundation.
Highlights of the performance program include: Milestone an unmissable triennial opening night performance at Hamer Hall celebrating the work of William Yang, one of Australia’s pioneering Asian-Australian creatives; U>N>I>T>E>D a new international dance and music collaboration at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl and Gapu Ŋupan (Chasing the Rainbow), a groundbreaking cross-cultural collaboration featuring First Nations artists from Arnhem Land and Taiwan.
Asia TOPA’s Nightlife program – a late-night collision of contemporary art and club culture – will be announced next month on 10 December 2024. The triennial’s Knowledge program – artist-in-conversation and workshop events – will be announced on 14 January 2025.
ASIA TOPA – PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
Asia TOPA opens with Milestone (20 February 2025) a landmark new commission and a one-night-only event at Hamer Hall by one of Australia’s most celebrated artists and photographers, William Yang.
Having reached his milestone 80th birthday, the pioneering artist reflects on his extraordinary life in this new performance.
Yang’s iconic photographs and captivating stories are complemented by an original score from internationally-acclaimed Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin – a long-time friend and collaborator of Yang’s – and will be performed live on stage by Kats-Chernin and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Yang, a legend of Asia-Pacific performance, looks back on his vast archive of photography, contemplating five decades of social change and sharing his stories of immigration, sexuality, creativity and family. Prior to its Melbourne performance, Milestone will premiere at Sydney Festival.
MUSIC
In a world premiere, Ane Ta Abia (8 March 2025) brings together musicians and singers from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia for a special one-off choral concert at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse. A collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra’s Papua New Guinean-Australian Artistic Director Aaron Choulai and PNG’s Tatana Village Choir (Choulai’s home village). With music rarely heard outside of these communities, Ane Ta Abia brings together a 12-member choir from Tatana, eight members of the Australian Art Orchestra and a series of short films.
Created by award-winning composer and guzheng artist Mindy Meng Wang and sound technologist and composer Monica Lim, Opera for the Dead (祭歌) (21 – 23 February 2025) is a new work inspired by Chinese mourning rituals but speaks to our common experiences of death, mourning and ancestry.
Presented at Spacrsity of Melbourne (VCA), the immersive music and visual experience highlights the beauty within anguish and finds humour in the macabre.
Sunny Kim’s Ensemble Ochaye presents a new sonically immersive performance Water Song (7 March 2025) inspired by our most precious resource – water. For one night only at the Melbourne Recital Centre some of Australia’s most adventurous musicians and performers will blend Korean, Chinese, Iranian and western instruments to create a richly textured soundscape that transcends boundaries.
Created by Tamil–Australian electronic composer, Vijay Thillaimuthu, Oblation (4 – 8 March 2025) draws on chanting practices and explores the relationship between vibration and geometry, mantra and mandala. Featuring singing, lasers, projections, vibrations and incorporating traditional melodies and rhythms from South India and Sri Lanka, Oblation is an evocative sonic and visual world premiere at The Substation.
DANCE
Chunky Move’s highly anticipated and ambitious spectacle U>N>I>T>E>D (27 February – 2 March 2025) will premiere on the iconic Sidney Myer Music Bowl stage. Set to gamelan-infused, Javanese trance-inspired techno beats and wearing upcycled exoskeleton costumes, six dancers are transformed into post-human tech-adorned mythological beings.
This landmark work is a major international collaboration with Javanese experimental techno group Gabber Modus Operandi, Bali-based streetwear label Future Loundry and world leaders in animatronic design, Naarm/Melbourne based Creature Technology Co.
SAUNIGA (6 – 8 March 2025) is a new work in development from critically acclaimed Queer Indigenous arts collective FAFSWAG at Arts Centre Melbourne’s The Show Room. Recalling the sacred connections between spirits (Aitu) or the old world and the lives of their Samoan descendants, SAUNIGA poses curious reflections on our relationship with animals and the environment, told through a Samoan world view.
The presentation at Asia TOPA shares excerpts from early development of the work and is presented in partnership with Creative New Zealand and Factory International, Manchester. The finished work will have its world premiere in Manchester in summer 2025.
Pulau (Island) (22 – 23 February 2025) is a site-specific response to Yayoi Kusama’s iconic body of work by Australian/Javanese choreographer and performer Melanie Lane. Commissioned for Asia TOPA and the NGV’s landmark Yayoi Kusama exhibition, Pulau (Island) will be performed in the NGV’s Great Hall beneath Kusama’s seminal installation, Dots Obsession 1996/2024.
The dance piece is a reflection on Lane’s encounter with the work of Kusama, whose obsession with the obliteration of the body and immersive worldbuilding echo that of Lane’s own choreographic work.
Acclaimed Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo will present the Australian premiere of Lapse (6 – 8 March 2025) a captivating dance and live music piece that responds to the increasing chaos of our times. Staged at The Martin Myer Arena, University of Melbourne (VCA), Suryodarmo collaborates with a remarkable group of artists from Indonesia, Singapore and Taiwan, including live music by Yuen Chee Wai.
Internationally renowned as a performance art pioneer, Suryordarmo will also present two performance lectures at Dancehouse surveying her groundbreaking body of work during the triennial.
With dance, body percussion, syncopated rhythm and stunning visuals Bunyi Bunyi Bumi (23 – 24 February 2025) reimagines Australian-Asian relationships, shifting between Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islands and Acehnese stories, woven from ancient songlines, mythological pasts and anticolonial perspectives.
Legendary choreographer raymond d. blanco and celebrated performance maker Dr. Priya Srinivasan join forces with the celebrated visual artist Vernon Ah Kee to unite Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Tamil and Indonesian artists at Bunjil Place in a joyous rebuke of colonial amnesia.
THEATRE
Ultra-cute content steals the spotlight in the endearing new performance premiere Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet (21 – 23 February 2025) at Arts Centre Melbourne’s The Show Room. Beijing and Utrecht-based theatre maker and artist Ran Chen brings her fascination with cute animal videos to Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet for a limited season full of heart, humour and biting cultural insight.
Landing at Malthouse is A Nightime Travesty (19 – 22 February 2025), an epic First Nations vaudevillian musical nightmare that is equal parts sardonic, cheeky and heartbreaking. A Nightime Travesty is a non-stop riot of music, parody and political punch by A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION.
Now directed by Stephen Nicolazzo (Loaded), leading independent artists Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard (CHASE) bring a revamped version of the smash-hit production that brought audiences to their feet at every one of its sold-out performances at YIRRAMBOI Festival in 2023.
At Southbank Theatre comes The Robot Dog (1 – 19 March 2025, Melbourne Theatre Company), a cheeky comedy set in an all-too-believable future. A collaboration between Hong Kong-born multi disciplinary artist Roshelle Yee Pui Fong and Luritja writer and technologist Matthew Ngamurarri Heffernan with director Amy Sole (Blak in the Room), The Robot Dog sinks its teeth into some of the most provocative and challenging questions of our time.
One Day We’ll Understand (27 February – 1 March 2025) is a new multimedia performance exploring memory, inheritance and the family history of visual artist Sim Chi Yin at Footscray Community Arts.
Led by a Singaporean-Australian creative team, One Day We’ll Understand combines haunting imagery with narration, archival footage and a driving live score by percussionist Cheryl Ong, giving voice to Sim’s multiple personas as artist, historian, writer, mother and granddaughter.
MULTI-ARTFORM
The previously announced public art participation project and 9th Betty Amsden Participation Program Home Bound will premiere during the festival. Renowned multi-disciplinary artists Daniel Kok (Singapore/Berlin) and Luke George (Naarm/Melbourne) will lead different communities from across Naarm/Melbourne to help create a huge woven installation on Arts Centre Melbourne’s forecourt.
Premiering at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse theatre, Gapu Ŋgupan (Chasing the Rainbow) (26 February – 1 March 2025) is a powerful and joyous new First Nations commission that rekindles ancient ancestral connections between Yolŋu, Paiwan and Amis artists from North East Arnhem Land and Taiwan.
Featuring song, dance, atmospheric sound design and large-scale visuals, this extraordinary cross cultural collaboration was created over a period of four years. Transporting audiences onto Country, Gapu Ŋgupan resounds with pride in culture and imagines a stronger, First Nations-led future.
Bread, Circuses and Home (28 February – 10 March 2025) is a free public installation and mini-festival at Fed Square by innovative Delhi–based duo Jiten Thukral (Jalandhar, Punjab) and Sumir Tagra (New Delhi).
A vibrant display of Punjabi folk music, radio programming and interactive game plays, Bread, Circuses and Home is a celebration of the unique ways that cultures adapt, survive and transform in the wake of international migration. Bread, Circuses and Home is a collaboration between AsiaTOPA, Fed Square, the artists and Naarm/Melbourne’s diverse Punjabi communities.
Throughout Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne’s Theatres Building (under the Spire) will be animated beyond the theatres, with free contemporary performances throughout the building’s foyers and non-theatre spaces.
Sonik Ekologies (27 February – 1 March 2025) is an intimate listening experience curated by experimental music and contemporary performance makers Liquid Architecture. The eighth version of Rakini Devi’s The Female Pope (27 – 28 February 2025), an interactive work that invites petitions and meditative encounters with Devi’s hybrid persona, inspired by the 10th century Pope Joan and The Hindu Goddess Kali.
A curated exhibition developed in association with the Australian Performing Arts Collection of the zoot suits of Aotearoa supergroup Split Enz will be on display at Arts Centre Melbourne throughout Asia TOPA. Accompanying the exhibition, multidisciplinary practice and fashion activism arts collective the Pacific Sisters will bring the pieces to life with special performance Frocktivation (1 March 2025).
Led by legendary Naarm/Melbourne artist Yumi Umiumare, ButohBAR 番狂わせ OUT of ORDER II (5 – 9 March 2025) is a surreal nightclub experience at Abbotsford Convent where cabaret collides with chaos. The evening thrillingly throws back to a time when Butoh ruled Japan’s nightclubs and strip joints in the 1970s and 1980s with a new line-up of local and international talent, including Japanese Butoh master Atsushi Takenouchi.
In Fire Drill Scenario (6 – 9 March 2025), South Korean choreographer and artist Geumhyung Jeong investigates the excitement, and real-life risks that artists and audiences take when partaking in live performance experiences. With meticulous detail and dry wit, Geumhyung Jeong choreographs Arts House’s safety instructions.
VR & MIXED REALITY
The previously announced mixed reality concert experience KAGAMI (19 February – 16 March 2025) will have its Southern Hemisphere (and Melbourne exclusive) premiere at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The groundbreaking show is a collaboration between full dimensional film pioneers Tin Drum and the late legendary Japanese composer, pianist, record producer and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Sensing Dark Matter (20 February – 1 March 2025) at Science Gallery Melbourne allows participants the opportunity to have a close encounter with one of the most mysterious forces in the cosmos – dark matter.
To create the atmospheric virtual reality experience that merges art and science, celebrated Taiwanese artist Su Wenchi and her team of collaborators worked with leading scientists at the University of Melbourne and embarked on a residency at a laboratory one kilometre underground in regional Victoria.
VISUAL ARTS
Kinship, ritual, adornment and activism are masterfully woven together in FROCK A WHANAUN GATANGA (8 December 2024 – 9 March 2025), an exhibition and workshop series by legendary Tagata Moana (People of the Pacific) art collective, the Pacific Sisters. Bunjil Place Gallery will transform into a vibrant, welcoming space that celebrates and honours the shared histories of First Peoples and Moana Peoples.
Asia TOPA is pleased to partner with the NGV on the presentation of the ambitious world premiere exhibition Yayoi Kusama (15 December 2025 – 21 April 2025), celebrating the illustrious career of iconic contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama.
Spanning eight-decades of Kusama’s work, the unmissable exhibition is also one of the most comprehensive retrospectives of the artist’s work ever presented globally.
Science Gallery Melbourne’s SCI-FI: Mythologies Transformed (until 23 May 2025) offers fresh insights on the lines connecting science fiction with ancient philosophy and mythologies. Adopting Western science fiction paradigms, such as parallel worlds and interdimensional travel, as a starting point, SCI–FI explores science fiction’s possible roots in Asian philosophy and spirituality. Shown in Australia for the first time, this narrative is expanded to incorporate First Nations perspectives and knowledges.
Chronotopia (27 February – 1 March 2025) is a specially curated exhibition accompanying Sim Chi Yin’s Asia TOPA performance One Day We’ll Understand. Sim’s works reappropriate 19th and 20th Century Magic Lantern slides – once used for scientific, colonial or Christian missionary lectures and projections – to conjure an imaginary landscape melding the cosmos and historical South-East Asia.
Middle of a Moment (20 February – 12 April 2025) is renowned artist, composer and curator Aki Onda’s first-ever survey exhibition in Australia. Curated by Lawrence English at The Substation, Middle of a Moment presents several major works from Onda including his extraordinary collection of handbells, as well Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking to Me, a poetic work that forms a trace of language through air.
CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
Goldfish (26 February – 2 March 2025) is a ground–breaking collaboration between celebrated Tasmanian puppetry company Terrapin and Japan’s Aichi Prefectural Art Theater presenting at Arts House.
Featuring performers from Australia and Japan, a solo puppeteer performs a fable and through constantly shifting imagery the story moves between the abstract and the literal as fiction becomes fact. The show does not travel with a set. Instead, a new set is made for each season using the materials of disaster recovery unique to each place.
Fed Square will host multiple activations with Shadows in Twin Cities (20 February – 10 March), bringing together children from Jeonju Korea and Naarm/Melbourne, enabling them to converse without words. From artists Gijong Yoo (Korea) and Jessica Wilson (Australia), Shadows in Twin Cities will feature large-scale video installations taking place simultaneously in both Naarm/Melbourne and Jeonju.
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