By day, Brisbane Festival fills the city with spectacle. After dark, Metro Arts invites audiences to experience Night Moves – a season of performance, exhibition and celebration that embraces the intimate, the curious, and even the disturbing.
Across four works spanning contemporary dance, visual art and queer nightlife, audiences are invited to step into spaces where familiar boundaries begin to dissolve and new ways of seeing, feeling and connecting emerge.
“Night doesn’t just change the city; it changes us,” says Metro Arts CEO Kieran Swann. “Metro Arts offers something a little darker, a little stranger, and a little riskier. It’s an invitation to step beyond the familiar and discover artists that aren’t interested in easy answers. They’re creating experiences that ask us to lean into uncertainty and discover what new ideas might be waiting there.”
At the heart of Night Moves is The Scramble, Shaun Johnston’s award-winning work that combines contemporary dance and wrestling. In a rough-and-tumble athletic match, two performers wrestle with masculinity and the boundaries, physicality, and connection that exist within male friendships. Slipping from friend to foe to friend again, they gradually reveal something tender and complex about the ways men connect through touch.
Shandy sees Metro Arts transform into an immersive, queer fantasia. DJ Sweaty Baby’s much-loved Brisbane club night invites you to stay out later than you planned. When the lights drop and the pulse kicks in, Shandy brings Metro Arts alive with the kind of sweaty, euphoric chaos that only a proper queer dancefloor can deliver. Through live performance and DJs, Shandy offers you a night that’s darker, sweatier, and just a little bit risky.
Night Moves’ exhibitions invite audiences to question the boundaries of perception and self. Choral Cthonics, gathers local and international artists to explore the voice as instrument, threshold, collective technology and self-annihilation. In Choral Cthonics, the mouth and body act as conduits for forces that are communal, elemental and unstable: drawing audiences toward new connections with each other and with the more-than-human world.
Meanwhile, (In)Sight by Kuweni Dias Mendis and Grant x Wilkes explores image making across digital and handmade forms, inviting audiences to see and be seen. Building on their award-winning collaboration (Metro Arts Experimental Portraiture Prize, 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize), this exhibition extends this collaboration into a third dimension of experimentation with ritual, darkness and the unstable nature of images.
Together, these works form Night Moves: bringing a different beat to Brisbane Festival. Whether on the dancefloor, in the gallery, or at the edge of a wrestling mat, Metro Arts invites audiences to embrace the unfamiliar – and discover something new about themselves along the way.
The Brisbane Festival runs 4 – 26 September 2026. For more information about Metro Arts: Night Moves, visit: www.metroarts.com.au for details.
Images: Shandy (supplied) | Mikhail Karikis, No ordinary protest (production photo)