Bringing their uniquely disciplined (and extremely high-energy) dance style to Rising – Melbourne’s arts, music, and live performance showcase taking place across June 4-15 2025 – Oli Mathiesen is promising to condense the exertion and ecstasy of a three-day rave into a single 90-minute show.
With its charmingly evocative title, The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave has been a year-long project that finds its origins in the post-pandemic euphoria of being able to connect with friends and strangers alike in clubs and warehouses.
Dialling in from New Zealand, where Oli and his fellow performers Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer are based, he tells me the new work gives audiences an opportunity to fully let loose, even when seated at the edge of the stage.
“I felt that the history and aesthetics of rave culture, as a cathartic space especially for queer people, was the perfect mode to explore this through,” he says. “I really wanted to make a work that reflected the endurance that we have been through, as a society, and make an art that was a gift to audiences.
“You get to sit there,” Oli says of the show’s prospective attendees, “and witness the equivalent kind of enduring that we’ve been through.”
Due to its relentless degree of physical and mental focus, providing rave-level amounts of energy while remaining totally sober, the intention behind Butterfly is to incubate the kind of spiritual sensation which can be felt at such intense events.
The highs enjoyed in full-fat, hardcore raves are not always manufactured under the influence of narcotics, Oli suggests, but come from the profound exertions of motion and emotion across your typical Friday-to-Sunday bender.
“I think the feeling of catharsis is really apparent in the work,” he says, “the commentary on the human rat-race that we’re in. The desire to always achieve more, to consume more, and push ourselves beyond our human design… Obviously, we perform the work in a very sober, controlled state as performers, but it’s interesting how we reach the same pinnacle of euphoria as you may when taking a chemically-enhanced experience at an actual rave.”
Given his own active ties to the rave community, Oli reflects on the slightly odd experience of seating true-blue ravers among his audiences, and preventing them from being able to partake in the familiar rituals taking place onstage.
The absence of that catharsis, which they themselves would enjoy on the dancefloor, offers a unique and somewhat challenging view of rave culture for those deep within its ranks, as well as audience members far on the peripheries.
“It’s had lots of different responses,” Oli says of the show’s current run of performances. “People will often get up and dance, or lots of people go out after the show and party, because they’re so riled up by it!”
Whether your view of a perfect Friday night is throwing your hands skyward at 5am or snuggling under a blanket on the couch, The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave promises the bright highs of rave culture for every shade of partygoer.
Oli Mathieson will be performing The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave at Melbourne’s Rising festival from 12-14 June 2025. Get your tickets at https://2025.rising.melbourne/program/the-butterfly-who-flew-into-the-rave
By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
