Host: Kelly Lovelady (@KellyLovelady)

How do we perpetuate our projects in austerity conditions? Should we dull our originality and politics to attract commercial branding and government grants? Fossil fuel companies are buying into our performance venues to bury their social and environmental crimes. Can the uprising towards an oil-free cultural sector start with us: the artists?

I’ve called a session on refuelling- ideas of powering, nourishing, sustaining ourselves, our projects, audiences and comrades #Musochat
— Kelly Lovelady (@KellyLovelady) March 20, 2017

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As part of our endeavor to support International Women’s Day we begged some of our most inspiring female clients to contribute a blog: here Kelly Lovelady from the inimitable Ruthless Jabiru explores change and power.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that ye olde worlde of conducting is overwhelmingly male. The pride and prejudice of the orchestral podium is, to collate the many confounded observations I’ve collected over the years, a beaming anomaly even to those with little or no concert-going experience.

Gender biases in so-called “classical” music are ultimately borne of a performance ritual which reveres and respects its own history so deeply that it continues to perpetuate the quirks of concert culture as it stood in its infancy almost 200 years ago.
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London chamber orchestra Ruthless Jabiru will deliver the closing performance of Joy & Dissent: a festival of cultural Activism at Hackney Showroom from 27 March to 09 April 2017.

Ruthless Jabiru will join forces with Art Not Oil in a major performance event on 09 April calling for London’s artists and cultural organisations to aspire to an oil-free cultural sector by signing the fossil funds free commitment.

Devised and conducted by Kelly Lovelady, Ruthless Jabiru will perform an industrial meditation around fuel dependency and its ramifications for artistic authenticity and accountability in a programme for string orchestra by Julia Wolfe, Gloria Coates, Cat Hope, Continue reading →