The pioneering female rapper Lil\u2019 Kim will headline both Vivid Sydney and Melbourne\u2019s Rising this year, as each festival revealed its programs on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The performances at Sydney\u2019s Carriageworks and Melbourne\u2019s Festival Hall will be Lil\u2019 Kim\u2019s first Australian shows in 15 years, celebrating her landmark multiplatinum records Hard Core \u2013 which turns 30 this year \u2013 and The Notorious KIM.<\/p>\n
Both Vivid and Rising are staged annually in winter.<\/p>\n
Rising\u2019s artistic director and chief executive, Hannah Fox, said the 51-year-old rapper, who broke out as a member of Junior MAFIA and was mentored by the Notorious BIG, was on \u201ca really exciting return to form\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHard Core and Notorious KIM really did carve a path \u2013 there are so many women rappers and femcees now who absolutely followed in her tiny footsteps, her funked-up, sex-positive vibe,\u201d Fox said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one was calling her a feminist icon in the 90s. I don\u2019t know if we\u2019d have got tracks like WAP<\/a> without her. She really is a trailblazer.\u201d<\/p>\n Kae Tempest performs at the Village Underground in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Andy Hall\/The Observer<\/p>\n Kae Tempest, a poet whose latest album, Self Titled, is an \u201cirrepressibly joyous\u201d <\/a>celebration of the trans community, will perform at Rising and Vivid as well, as part of a national tour. Joining him at both festivals is the rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) and the musician Brian Jackson, who will celebrate the life and career of Gil Scott-Heron, the influential spoken word artist and Jackson\u2019s longtime collaborator.<\/p>\n Other acts appearing in the two cities include the singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon; the Palestinian rapper Saint Levant; French Senegalese neosoul singer Anaiis; and Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat musician and son of Fela Kuti, who will perform with his father\u2019s band Egypt 80.<\/p>\n Music acts so far only announced for Melbourne\u2019s Rising festival<\/a> include the septuagenarian multi-instrumentalist Kahil El\u2019Zabar, who has played with Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder; the electronic artist TR\/ST; and the US band Wednesday.<\/p>\n Raven Chacon, a First Nations composer from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, will stage his Pulitzer-winning work Voiceless Mass in St Paul\u2019s Cathedral in Melbourne on opening weekend. \u201cIt might not be such an obvious one in the program, but I think it\u2019s going to be a really fantastic [night],\u201d Fox said.<\/p>\n A Year Without Summer by Florentina Holzinger. Photograph: Mayra WallraffDance and performance spotlighted at Rising<\/p>\n Rising is also headlined by Florentina Holzinger, the gleefully gross-out Austrian performer who memorably staged her \u201cbloody ballet\u201d Tanz at Rising two years ago<\/a>. Set in the year 1816, the famous \u201cyear without summer\u201d after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the show about biohacking and ageing has been a huge hit in Europe with tickets for the Berlin dates selling out in minutes<\/a>. In Stuttgart, her opera Sancta left 18 audience members needing treatment for severe nausea<\/a>, and caused the concertmaster to faint<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cFlorentina would probably hate me saying this, but there is a tenderness in this work, in amongst all the iconoclastic feminist body horror spectacle, which is really beautiful,\u201d Fox said. \u201cIt is about our quest for endless youth and immortality, alongside this unhinged belief that we can invent our way through climate disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n Rising will also stage the inaugural Australian Dance<\/a> Biennale, to celebrate contemporary dance from all over the country and internationally. This will include a pop-up dance academy called Land of a 1,000 Dances in the Flinders Street Ballroom, where the public will be able to attend classes on ballet, bootscooting, jive, TikTok choreography and even the Melbourne Shuffle, a rave dance that began in the city in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n Royal Family Dance Crew, the New Zealand\/Aotearoa dance group that has provided choreography for the Super Bowl. Photograph: Rising<\/p>\n The Aotearoa hip-hop group Royal Family Dance Crew, who have won the World Hip Hop Championships three times in a row and choreographed the Super Bowl, Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, will lead the public in a free dance event at Federation Square in addition to their already sold-out show at Hamer Hall.<\/p>\n Other dance groups in the biennale include Lucy Guerin Inc, Northern Irish dancer Oona Doherty and Chunky Move, who will also present a show at Sydney\u2019s Carriageworks for Vivid.<\/p>\n Music, talks and food come to Vivid Sydney<\/p>\n Sydney\u2019s Vivid festival program is split into four categories: lights, music, minds and food.<\/p>\n Alongside the light walk, which involves 43 installations and projections along a 6.5km walk through the city, Vivid Lights will feature the 23m-tall Molecule of Light, a laser and sound installation by Chris Levine; and Obstacle, a pulsing corridor of light that traverses 45m along the harbour.<\/p>\n The music program features a series of already announced shows from the US, including alternative pop musician Mitski, as well as performances from Mogwai, Matt Berninger of the National, and Earl Sweatshirt & MIKE. The \u201cminds\u201d program \u2013 formerly \u201cideas\u201d \u2013 will include talks from two Oscar-winning film-makers: Anora\u2019s Sean Baker and Nomadland\u2019s Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, whose Shakespeare biopic Hamnet is up for seven Academy Awards this year. Music interviewer Zane Lowe, Pulitzer-winning art critic Jerry Saltz and commentator Roxane Gay will also be appearing.<\/p>\n The Vivid food program will include dinners designed by several celebrity chefs \u2013 among them Yotam Ottolenghi. \u201cIt\u2019s a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the outstanding produce and beverages of New South Wales,\u201d Ottolenghi said in a statement.<\/p>\n Vivid festival<\/a> will run 22 May to 13 June and Rising festival <\/a>will run 27 May to 8 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The pioneering female rapper Lil\u2019 Kim will headline both Vivid Sydney and Melbourne\u2019s Rising this year, as each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-528546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}