Urban portraits by Melbourne artist Adnate will be the face of Ruthless Jabiru’s homage to Oodgeroo Noonuccal at the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts this month in London, an echo of Oodgeroo’s line ‘the past is all around us’. Paying tribute to local indigenous communities has been a theme of his street art for many years and it is with pleasure that we welcome Adnate to the project.

Earlier this year Adnate was commissioned to paint a 23-metre high portrait of an Indigenous boy from the northern suburbs in Melbourne’s city centre. The gaze of the boy is looking directly towards Birrarung Marr, an important Aboriginal site, with the intention to connect the two locations. “Melbourne is a significant site for Indigenous culture and history, particularly the CBD,” he says. “A 23-metre high portrait is a great way to represent and empower.”

Adnate’s solo gallery show Beyond the Lands opened last week at Metro Callery in Melbourne and will run until early June. He is described as having transcended his origins as a graffiti artist, combining close studies of his subjects with skills learned on the street using aerosol and acrylic paints.

Ruthless Jabiru will perform at Kings College London for the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts on 31 May. Booking for the event is now open at the festival website.

Global retail giant Westfield is to join Ruthless Jabiru as an Associate Sponsor of the orchestra’s appearance at the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts. As part of a wide entertainment and leisure offer, Westfield is a keen supporter of arts and culture in London, regularly playing host to cultural and musical events at its London centres and supporting both local and international artists. The recently established Westfield Presents platforms further secure the centres as a high profile destination for events and celebrity performances.

Myf Ryan, Director of Marketing for UK & Europe said: “Westfield, as a long term supporter of music and culture in London, is delighted to support Ruthless Jabiru through their performance at the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts. We are also incredibly proud of our support for aspiring and established artists on our Westfield Presents stages and we look forward to welcoming Ruthless Jabiru to that platform.”

Ruthless Jabiru will perform at Kings College London for the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts on 31 May. Booking for the event is now open at the festival website.

Ruthless Jabiru will be a lead collaborator in the inaugural Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts in London next month, performing a programme honouring Australian poet and political activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal on Saturday 31 May.

The programme will centre around The Past, an orchestral song for countertenor by Australian composer Andrew Ford, combining Oodgeroo’s poem of the same name with James Cook’s diaries of his contact with the First Australians. The programme will include Altjiranga Mitjina by Chris Williams, its title translated from the Arrernte language as “the timeless dimension of dreams”; an idea at the heart of Oodgeroo’s poem. The two Australian works will be offset by British music in Neoclassical style by Michael Tippett and Tansy Davies, alongside the world premiere of Sandhi Prakash by Egidija Medekšaité, commissioned by Ruthless Jabiru through the Sound and Music Portfolio scheme. The orchestra will perform in the Grade I listed Chapel at Kings College London, joined by award-winning Australian countertenor Russell Harcourt. Booking for the event is now open at the festival website.

We’ve had two Portfolio composer workshops with Ruthless Jabiru now and the three pieces are close to being finished. Each composer has taken their own approach to working with Kelly and the orchestra. Eugene Birman’s piece was more or less ready at the first workshop and so for him the process has been one of refinement. Imago Dei is a piece full of contrast – from flickering clouds of notes, to rich harmonies, to the sounds of the players’ breath – and the challenge is in navigating these contrasts.

Michael Cryne, on the other hand, came to the first workshop with the beginnings of his Slipstream, almost as if he was checking that he was on the right track. He was, and for the second workshop he had a finished score which follows those opening ideas through to an exhilarating conclusion. It’s music which, once the notes are securely under the players’ fingers, is really going to fly.

Somewhere in between these two ways of using the workshop process has been Egidija Medekšaitė. Her piece depicts the transition from day to night and back again and she obviously knew how darkness and light should sound; it was the transitions which benefited from rehearsal, reflection and reworking and now the piece flows beautifully from one state to the other.

For me this whole experience has been hugely enjoyable. The three new works inhabit their very different imaginative domains with complete conviction and part of my role has been to confirm this for the composers. Rehearsing is my favourite part of the whole compositional process and sometimes it feels like it’s useful that I’ve spent a lot of my life listening to musicians working towards realisations of new music. Sometimes things don’t work immediately; maybe they’re misconceived or less than ideally communicated, but often it’s just a matter of being patient, waiting for them to come into focus. For composers there’s an art to being useful in rehearsals; knowing when an intervention might be helpful and when it’s just going to be annoying!