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.

21:100:100 features 100 works by 100 sound artists produced in the 21st century. This exhibition is the first significant survey in Melbourne to explore and chronicle the extraordinary developments that have occurred in contemporary sound art.

Sound artist Alex Stahl joins forces with Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, the dynamic duo behind last year's Musicircus, to create an engagement with the soundworld of the common myna. Beyond the steel and stone across the river, listeners are invited to explore other bridges: mapping connections between free speech and free music, human and avian migrations, performer and audience, natural and constructed environments.

Two of Australia's foremost musical forces come together for an historic event that celebrates songs of tradition that are rooted in hope and resistance from the open heart of Australia's contemporary Indigenous music. Hidden Republic reveals the undiminished spirit in the music of Aboriginal Australia and songs which celebrate identity and understanding for all Australians.

An evening featuring phenomenal sound artists from Melbourne and beyond. This live performance at BMW Edge is a companion piece to the exhibition of sound works at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. Curated by internationally acclaimed Australian artists Oren Ambarchi and Marco Fusinato, this concert takes the concept of 21:100:100 beyond the gallery walls, beyond the headphones and enables audiences to listen to the works in a live concert spectacle.

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.

Rather than commemorating a particular hero or an important historical event, these animated monuments turn instead to the people who live in, work in and come to explore Melbourne: the people that bring the city to life.

One of Australia's most innovative dance companies moves through the confines of physical and psychological space in a highly anticipated, intelligent new work.

With that voice that swoops and hollers, sometimes sweet, sometimes stark, Harry James Angus debuts a selection of newly composed pieces for voice and guitar.

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.

Much-loved local artist and singer-songwriter Ileana Posas brings to the Festival a concert of original songs all backed by a handpicked group of some of the most impassioned Latin and jazz musicians in Melbourne, bonding together for the love of music.

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.

Some exceptional Australian musicians come together for a concert event that celebrates the work of composer Nigel Westlake. The repertoire features compositions from Westlake's significant musical partnership with Slava Grigoryan including Shadow Dances, the work premiered during the Olympic Arts Festival in 2000 andconcludes with the much-loved concert suite Westlake has created from his music for the IMAX film Antarctica, including the whimsical Penguin Ballet.

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.

The Meaning of Moorabbin is Open For Inspection is staged as an open inspection. Using photography, film, video and design, this is an extraordinary theatre and installation work that plays with Australian notions of family and suburbia.

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey have collaborated in creating music for fifteen years. In This Map is not to Scale, they amplify, extend and over-emphasise some of the musical ephemera they have created for dance, theatre and film. By adjusting the focus of the eyepiece and ear trumpet they create extended pieces from tiny moments, making works which feature the 'in-betweens, underneaths and rarely-mentioned' of their practice.

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.