It’s been a long time coming, but patience never goes unrewarded. Asia TOPA is back in 2025 from February 20 to March 10.
While five years between triennials may seem a little unorthodox, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA) has its reasons. A world-halting pandemic, a change of leadership and a complete reimagination of the triennial saw the team behind Asia TOPA take the time to recoup, research and reinvent itself for 2025’s edition of the arts and culture event. Melbourne has never seen an Asia TOPA like this before. Nay, the city has never seen any event like this before.
From February 20 to March 10, Asia TOPA is taking over the city, streets, art centres and underground of Naarm. Featuring 33 performances and enveloping the entirety of the city – including the Arts Centre Melbourne and 15 other partner venues – Asia TOPA’s Creative Director Jeff Khan says he wanted the festival to “feel like an adventure.”
Asia TOPA 2025
- February 20 to March 10
- Melbourne CBD and beyond
- 33 performances, over 15 venues
- Full program here
Stay up to date with what’s happening within the region’s art scene here.
Beginning the role of Creative Director at the end of 2022, Jeff was invited to reimagine the festival, to “come up with a new sort of structure, a new vision.” Moving back down to Naarm after a stint in Sydney/Gadigal, Jeff began the mammoth task of researching for a triennial during a period of time when, just after the pandemic, “this city that’s always had such a vibrant pumping arts and cultural scene was having to sort of rethink everything.”
“It was the same everywhere in the world,” Jeff says. “Festivals were just starting to open up again after a period of being shut down for a few years. People were just starting to come back out of the woodwork and think about what it means to stage a festival in this post-pandemic world: What’s changed? What kind of work are artists making now? What are people thinking about?”
The decimation of cultural industries that the pandemic left in its wake could have been a barrier. For Jeff, it was an opportunity to reconnect with arts communities the world over. Artists coming to Naarm for the three-week period of Asia TOPA will be visiting from places like India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, and all over the Pacific.
“I really hope that there’s a whole bunch of new connections between local communities here in Melbourne and this kind of incredible international cohort that we’re able to bring for the festival,” Jeff says.
Go on a citywide adventure at Asia TOPA
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“I hope that [Asia TOPA’s] legacy is about more collaboration,” he continues. “About people here being more connected to what’s happening in the Asia Pacific. [About] new collaborations springing up, and also those international artists getting to know and forging a relationship with Melbourne. We are also creating opportunities for Melbourne to feel more connected to the region that we’re in.”
For this and many other reasons, an event in Australia’s arts calendar as unique as Asia TOPA seems only fitting – if not perfect – to be happening in Melbourne.
“I think Melbourne just has such a rich and diverse cultural scene across all kinds of artistic genres,” Jeff says. “Across music, across visual art, theatre, dance, nightlife. And it’s so interconnected. You can go out any night of the week and experience something amazing.”
“You can go on that citywide adventure in Melbourne to all of the spaces, whether they’re the most gritty artist-run initiatives or the big cultural institutions – they’re all welcoming to all audiences as well.”
A collaboration across cities, countries and cultures
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With Asia TOPA hosting events at over 15 venues across Melbourne, collaboration in getting this city-engulfing event up and running has been key in securing accessible, creative and exciting venues to make the most of their spaces.
“The depth of collaboration across the whole city is something that’s really unique to Melbourne, and something that we really emphasise with Asia TOPA,” Jeff says. “Melbourne is also incredibly multicultural. It really embraces people from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life who make work here.”
With Naarm as the backdrop to the festival’s events, it only makes sense then that – for a city that rarely sleeps – a brand-new programming stream will be introduced at this edition of Asia TOPA. Creatures of the night, unite: Nightlife is coming to Naarm.
“On a personal level, I am a creature of the night,” Jeff says when I ask him about where the idea came from. “I grew up working in art institutions, curating, working in art admin, but also going to raves, going to clubs, going to parties. And that is just part of what I consider to be my kind of cultural heritage.”
“Through that experience, [I noticed] that there’s a lot of crossover between the kind of club and nightlife and party scene, and the kind of more traditional contemporary art scene,” he continues.
“So many artists and arts communities, or just creative people in general, find nightlife spaces as their sort of natural homes. And so all through my curatorial career, I’ve been exploring that kind of crossover between the clubbing world and nightlife communities and the kind of contemporary art and performance that you’re more inclined to see in theatres and galleries.”
“A club is a space of creative risk”
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The Nightlife stream in Asia TOPA’s programming is an ode to all the moments spent out after dark, to all the events that can only take place once the sun sinks, to the people who thrive off the night like they’ve finally awakened from their slumbers. Nightlife will be host to a plethora of events across a range of Naarm venues. Most enticing – and most radical – of all will be Arts Centre Melbourne’s very own nightclub: Club 8.
A hub that blurs the lines between contemporary performance art and club culture, Club 8 will feature nine events over the three weekends of the triennial. The astonishing feat of opening a nightclub inside Arts Centre Melbourne – on level 8 of the building, I might add – speaks to the immense creativity and determination that has been propelling Jeff forward throughout the curation, compilation and creation of this event.
“I think one of the purposes of a club is that it is a space of creative risk,” Jeff says. “Work that you experience in those settings is often a bit more raw. Creating a space that is a club, it sets up a different kind of expectation with the audience that allows us maybe to push the boundaries a little bit more with the programming.”
While far from an easy task to accomplish – with Jeff admitting that “it’s just not the way an institution like Arts Centre Melbourne usually works” – the Creative Director’s plan of attack from the early stages of developing the Nightlife stream was fake it ‘til you make it. “I just started talking about it as if it was going to happen,” Jeff says, laughing.
Surrender to boundary-pushing brilliance
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An idea that has been front of mind for Jeff and the team behind Asia TOPA when designing the festival is the significance of accessibility. “We were really conscious when we were building this club program that we want it to be a welcoming space for everybody,” Jeff says. It’s just as important for the communities that are leading the events in these spaces – like that of the Vogue and Ballroom communities – to feel welcomed as it is for the audiences attending.
“It’s about creating an incredible space and an incredible platform for these kind of nightlife artists and communities to really thrive in, at the same time welcoming new audiences in to have an experience they might not otherwise have access to.”
Jeff adds that this idea of accessibility through inclusion also extends to those coming into the space from different cultural backgrounds. “For me, [creating Club 8] was about creating a container where all of those ideas from across a different spectrum of perspectives could live and thrive.”
After-hours adventures and chaotic club nights
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Out of the nine events hitting up Club 8 over the course of the festival, Jeff highlights a few to keep an eye out for. “We’ve invited Betty Grumble (Gadigal/Sydney) and Betty Apple (Taipei) to come and perform and headline one of the club nights, which is called The B_B,” he says. “For these supreme performance chaos agents to come together and combine energies in a club night, I think is going to be really unmissable.”
Other Club 8 events to make sure you check out are BLAX: ACT ONE – “a First Nations-led club and performance evening, bringing local First Nations artists together with some really exciting international First Nations musicians and DJs” – and Shapeshifters – a performance by Phasmahammer (Justin Talpacido Shoulder), who Jeff says is “a real leading light of the queer performance scene in Sydney. All of his work originates in club settings.”
It’s clear that no one loves – and believes in – the Asia TOPA program more than Jeff. He offers up a plethora of other must-see events spread across the course of the festival, including DJ Zequenx (India) at NGV Friday Nights on Friday February 21, the free and all-accessible opening weekend concert at Fed Square also on the Friday (“that has a really exciting international headliner that we’re going to drop closer to the time”), the Welcome Gathering on Saturday February 22 at Bunjil Place, and also the free all-day festival of food and performance on Sunday February 23 at Fed Square as part of Nongkrong Festival.
Discover the unexpected, morning to midnight
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And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Asia TOPA will be taking over every corner, nook and cranny of Naarm from February 20 to March 10, almost all day and all night.
It will electrify the city with the creative energy and artistic fervour that it’s been missing for the last five years, bringing together cultures, communities and countries across the Asia Pacific through the connecting forces of art.
Whether you’re eyeing the Club 8 program or planning on popping into Fed Square for the opening night, the delights to be discovered across Asia TOPA’s calendar are the ones you wouldn’t normally take a swing at. A program as diverse, creative and talent-filled as this, you know you’re in safe hands no matter the corner of the city you find yourself dancing in over the course of the festival.
Asia TOPA runs from February 20 to March 10. You can check out the full program here.
