Arts Centre Melbourne’s Ian Potter State Theatre will reopen on October 3 with a First Nations-led concert performed entirely in Aboriginal languages from across Victoria.
Created by Mutti Mutti, Nari Nari and Yorta Yorta Songman Kutcha Edwards, Gugu Dindi Gunyah (Many Rivers. One Home) will be the first public performance staged in the theatre following its extensive refurbishment.
The multidisciplinary concert brings together Song Keepers and cultural custodians from across Victoria, with each work performed in the language of the artist who holds it. Rivers, songlines, ancestral stories and shared memory will shape a journey of reconnection to culture, community and self.
Edwards serves as the production’s Senior Songman, creative producer and curator. The participating artists include Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, Wayne Thorpe, Alice Skye, Stacie Nicholson-Piper, Neil Morris and Boorook, also known as Brett Clarke.
Directed by Kylie Belling, the production will transform the stage into an evocation of Country, shifting through light, texture and ceremonial imagery beneath the performers. Aaron Choulai is Music Director, while artist Tegan Murdock will guide the performance through cultural practice, ceremony and weaving.
Born beside the Murrumbidgee River and removed from Country as a child, Edwards has drawn upon his own story of displacement and return. In developing the concert, he travelled across Victoria for a series of on-Country creative developments with participating Song Keepers and cultural custodians.
“You take a deep breath and realise that this concept needs to be seen as ceremony,” Edwards said. “The rivers have their own Dreaming stories. The Country has its own story. We have our own story.”
The performance’s journey will culminate beside the Birrarung at Arts Centre Melbourne in Naarm, on the ancestral lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. The site has been a place of gathering, ceremony and storytelling for thousands of years.
Arts Centre Melbourne CEO Karen Quinlan said the work was chosen to acknowledge that history and to celebrate the diversity of Victoria’s First Peoples languages and songlines.
“We knew it needed to be the first concert to reopen our beloved theatre, celebrating and honouring the stories of our First Peoples on Victoria’s most treasured stage,” she said.
The Ian Potter State Theatre has been closed since 2024 while undergoing its first major refurbishment in four decades. The works include improved accessibility, new seating and aisles, upgraded heating and cooling, and new lighting and sound systems, while preserving John Truscott’s distinctive auditorium design.