State Theatre to reopen with First Nations concert

Arts Centre Melbourne’s newly refurbished Ian Potter State Theatre will reopen on October 3 with a world-premiere First Nations-led concert performed entirely in Aboriginal languages from across Victoria.

Gugu Dindi Gunyah (Many Rivers. One Home) will be the first public performance staged in the theatre following its extensive refurbishment, which has been under way since 2024 as part of the wider Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation project.

Created by Mutti Mutti, Nari Nari and Yorta Yorta songman Kutcha Edwards, the concert will bring together Song Keepers and cultural custodians from across Victoria in a multi-disciplinary celebration of culture, resilience and belonging.

Curated and led by Edwards, the work is framed as a journey of reconnection to culture, community and self, shaped by rivers, songlines, ancestral stories and shared memory.

He will be joined by artists including Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, Wayne Thorpe, Alice Skye, Stacie Nicholson-Piper, Neil Morris and Boorook – Brett Clarke.

Directed by Kylie Belling, the production will evoke Country as a living and changing presence beneath the performers, with music direction by Aaron Choulai. Every song will be sung in the language of the Song Keeper who holds it.

Artist Tegan Murdock will guide the performance through a lens of cultural practice, ceremony and weaving, with the stage designed to ripple and shift with light and texture like river systems guiding the work’s journey.

For Edwards, whose own story is deeply connected to water, song and ancestral knowledge, the project follows an extensive series of on-Country creative developments with Song Keepers and cultural custodians across Victoria.

Born on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River and removed from Country as a child, Edwards said the work had emerged through a cultural framework.

“When you’re asked to conceptualise something for Arts Centre Melbourne, you first need to ask yourself why me? Then you need to figure out what story do you want and need to tell,” he said.

“You take a deep breath and realise that this concept needs to be seen as ceremony, Waripa. You enter into a cultural framework. Gugu Dindi Gunyah starts to take form. The rivers have their own Dreaming stories. The country has its own story. We have our own story.”

Minister for Creative Industries Vicki Ward said the concert would be “an unmissable and unforgettable performance” and a powerful way to mark the theatre’s reopening.

Arts Centre Melbourne CEO Karen Quinlan AM said the work was an important celebration of the languages and songlines of Victoria’s First Peoples.

“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 refurbishment has included new aisles, upgraded seating, improved heating and cooling, accessible seating supported by two new lifts, and new lighting and sound systems, while preserving the theatre’s distinctive interior vision by designer John Truscott.

Arts Centre Melbourne will announce its broader reopening program in August. Gugu Dindi Gunyah will be performed at 7pm on October 3.