Dripping with sensuality, The Navigator is a highly charged, emotional work about desire and the journey towards connection and transformation. Director Barrie Kosky brings this provocative opera to life for the stage. Through a complex play of light and costume a world of echoes is created, one that is in juxtaposition with the searing music gloriously performed by The ELISION Ensemble.

Kitten's rollercoaster journey from the depths of despair to soaring hope makes for theatre at its most powerful. Love, grief, transformation and yearning manifest without as well as within. Bewitching and unsettling, Kitten is a three-act tale that is at once psychiatric fable, lyrical puzzle and metaphysical love song performed by an outstanding cast.

On the back of an enormously successful international tour with small metal objects one of Australia's most exciting companies returns to Melbourne Festival with the world premiere of an anticipated new work. Part concert, part theatre show, Food Court features the idiosyncratic vision of Back to Back Theatre and the music of The Necks, who improvise a driving score for each performance.

Two friends come together for a rare and intimate evening of piano and poetry inspired by their passion for the work of seminal beat poet, the late Allen Ginsberg. A friend and mentor to both Patti Smith and Philip Glass, Ginsberg is one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century whose raw, raging verse epitomised the Beat movement in the 1950s. Smith and Glass shepherded Ginsberg through his last rites, and, as this event testifies, he remains a strong presence in their lives.

Both funny and melancholy, Desert Island Dances explores notions of absence and presence in a piece inspired by the popular BBC Radio program, Desert Island Discs. Wendy Houstoun asks 'Can we imagine or create a 'perfect' place?' If we can, what would it look like? What would we throw away? What would we keep?

Some of Melbourne's best-known (and bravest) actors take up an extraordinary challenge!

ENGLAND is about a different kind of empire - one of transmigrations and transplantations. It's the story of one thing placed inside another: a heart inside another person's body, a culture inside another country's culture, theatre inside a gallery, a character inside an actor, a play inside its audience.

Utilising only a piano, a drum-machine, a pair of sunglasses and a hoodie, Kenny Mellman (he of Kiki & Herb fame) explores the connection between a gay Jewish piano-player and a black woman with a bad attitude who ruled the disco floors and the airwaves for many a year. Using Grace Jones' own interviews as text, Mellman presents a requiem for the loss of creativity in the nightlife world and a battle cry for resurrection.

A wonderfully touching and idiosyncratic work that is part theatrical monologue, part PowerPoint presentation, part psychiatrist's couch and part variety show. Revolving around a Baby Boomer's stark epiphany, 7 Important Things is a deeply personal and offbeat autobiographical work from STO Union, the acclaimed Canadian company that presented its Recent Experiences as part of the 2002 Melbourne International Arts Festival.

The mastermind behind KEATING! The Musical shines a dazzling light into the dark nooks and draughty cracks of the Spiegeltent's past.

Combining original live music from acclaimed female vocalist New Buffalo; incisive text from award-winning playwright Ross Mueller; and featuring a fusion of dance, theatre and visual design - Appetite promises to be a literal feast.

The 1919 Mexican silent film El Automovil Gris was the biggest hit of its day. This 21st century Mexican theatre production juxtaposes the classic film with live actors and brilliantly improvised piano music. This critically acclaimed work is complex and highly original, certainly, but it is also tremendous fun. A disarmingly charming production.

Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham team up with long time collaborator Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville in this corporeal evocation of the mind's eye. Stripped back to movement, light and design essentials, Sunstruck exists in a landscape of isolation, absence and the dislocating slippage of memory, reality and the imagination.

UK performance makers Lone Twin team up with Melbourne-based junkyard theatre trio The Suitcase Royale for a series of public performances throughout the city. Lone Twin gather an eclectic sense of local events; part news, part hearsay, part factual narrative, part fictional construct then The Suitcase Royale impart the bulletins, suggesting the familiar cries of Melbourne's newsboys.

In his contemporary reworking of Romeo and Juliet, Lithuanian director Oskaras Koršunovas' sets the infamous conflict between the Capulets and Montagues in rival pizzerias. Koršunovas' deftly handles both the humour and dark tragedy of this famous work, moving artfully from the crude and hilarious to the delicate and sombre. Equally skilful, the performances move seamlessly from the rambunctiousness of a stage that teems with characters to the heartfelt exchanges of the ill-fated lovers. Koršunovas' Romeo and Juliet bursts with movement and colour.

Originally developed in 2006, Exercises in Happiness is a big-hearted performance installation involving audiences in activities designed around the possibility of happiness.

Melbourne theatre company The Eleventh Hour premiered Endgame in 2006. A testament to both Beckett's enduring popularity and the company's reputation for stylish and imaginative adaptations of canonical plays, the season sold out immediately and the production went on to win four Green Room awards including Best Production, Direction, Design and Actor.

Approached by Belgian Theatre Company Victoria to create a work performed entirely by children for an adult audience, acclaimed director Tim Etchells has developed a confronting work that explores the ways in which adults determine the worlds of their children.

Bring the kids to this giant-sized game of life and plunge into a brilliantly fun, oversized adventure. Who will win? The Big Game is a gigantic, fun, interactive performance and play space for families. Kids participate as tokens in a huge board game, rolling enormous dice, stepping on game tiles and meeting larger-than-life characters that take them from start to finish.

Jump aboard The GO Show bus for a fun and inspiring whirlwind tour of the West! Under the artistic direction of choreographer and director Rebecca Hilton, The GO Show teams high calibre artists and hundreds of participants in a whole host of workshops. The results of these collaborations are performed and presented alongside some of Footscray's most intriguing landmarks.

The company behind the groundbreaking 2007 Festival work Glow returns with a bold new dance-theatre work that gives a rare glimpse into the performers' world and takes the audience backstage. Melbourne's leading contemporary dance company Chunky Move has earned an enviable reputation for producing a distinct yet unpredictable brand of genre-defying dance performances and Two Faced Bastard promises to be another truly extraordinary experience.

Raise a glass for a wry toast to the art of drinking! A foaming pint of movement and text reveal the state of bitter England, all from the mouth of a barmaid on a bender. As the night wears on and the drink takes hold, bar stool philosophy turns to bar floor desperation. Both disturbing and funny, Happy Hour is a piece about drinking and what happens in a bar.