Kelly Lovelady

Kelly Lovelady might have been living in Montreal and might never have visited Adelaide before, but rallying Adelaide talent was simple. She used the internet.

Thus did the Perth-born conductor conduct her business, connecting with arts contacts in Australia and seeking references to new ones in Adelaide, communicating her needs to them and liaising their participation in her Pazzia Contemporary Performing Collective's show.

Now Lovelady may boast Leigh Warren dancers, a Jam Factory sculptor, Kurruru dancers, Krinkl Theatre puppeteers and a string quartet co-ordinated by Adelaide viola player Heather Lloyd.

The show is called Soft Sculpt, an experimental art theatre form in which the participants mould their performances around set music pieces by Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Martin Wesley-Smith, Ross Edwards and Carl Vine.

To these are added the periodic sounds of Australian nature in a setting of found objects reflecting the browns and the oranges of the Australian landscape.

In Adelaide, Lovelady found her objects at industrial offcuts company That's Not Garbage – a resource not available in Montreal where she has previously produced this work.

"In Montreal, people don't throw out their garbage. They leave it on the sidewalk," she says.

"I have been able to pick up some beautiful stuff.

"My last show was based around bamboo blinds someone had left out. Here, I have wallpapers and different textures to make patchwork motifs."

Lovelady gained her musical qualifications at the University of Western Australia and her master's degree in Canada. But she does not adhere to the conventions of music conducting. She is also a conceptualist. "It is unusual for a string quartet to have a conductor, but I face the audience, creating an additional entity for the audience to see and my gestures show what the music looks like," she says.

"It is all very fluid, partly improvisational. I like to talk it out thoroughly with my team, and brainstorm, ensuring that the music is deeply integral."

Each hour-long performance presents different elements of the team Lovelady has created – one night the dancers, another the puppeteers.

Static and focal pieces will be by the Jam Factory's Megan Jones whose work on waxes, clays and other malleable substances will be projected.

Soft Sculpt runs at the Fringe Factory Theatre, Mellor St, city, from today until Saturday at 10.30pm.
- The Advertiser

While many 'music and art' festivals are long on the music and short on the art, Pop Montreal puts itself out to offer a full menu of tasty visual treats. True to its musical roots, however, Art Pop focuses on multi-disciplinary works that combine the audio with the visual and that cut through the ever-looming high/low artistic binary. Billing itself as "an intersemiotic fuck dance," Art Pop features artists such as singer/songwriter Joseph Arthur, who won a Grammy in 1999 for his inspired album packaging and Wil Murray, whose "canvases illustrate the metamorphosis of a tirelessly functional machine." Other works include Songs of the Apolcalypse, a group show inspired by esoteric poet William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Search for the Simorgh, an exhibition based on Farid Ud-Din Attar's medieval Persian Sufi epic The Conference of the Birds.

A particular highlight of this year's Art Pop is Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, a contemporary opera directed by orchestral conductor Kelly Lovelady. Telling the story of an Australian bride jilted at the alter and subsequently holing herself up indefinitely in a Gothic Sydney mansion, the opera features costumed musicians in lacy, Victorian outfits and a full cast of contortionists to provide a mind-bending visual complement to the classical score.

"I really believe in the full package when it comes to performance," Said Lovelady. "It's not just music and it's not just visual art and it's not just performance art."

The opera is the latest installment of Lovelady's Pazzia Contemporary Performing Collective, a loose international collection of musicians recruited locally by Lovelady in each city where she launches a production.

"All the elements come together and I think that's where contemporary performance is heading in a lot of ways," Lovelady said. "That's my style of work-bright and colourful and overwhelming. You come out of it and you've definitely had an experience."

Miss Donnithorne's Maggot runs from Oct. 5-7 at Cafe L'Utopik (552, Ste-Catherine E.). Visit www.popmontreal/art for
more information. - The McGill Tribune