JJJJJerome Ellis (Nights 1+2)

Over two nights, artists JJJJJerome Ellis, Christof Migone + Marla Hlady, and Alex Raja Ven explore sound’s liberatory potential—moving through, across, and against time.

This two-part performance program explores embodied sound—its resonance, pronunciation, utterance, and silence.

Night 1: 

Night one begins with Alex Raja Ven’s embodied approach to ambient music and sound as a liberatory portal. The evening continues with JJJJJerome Ellis performing The Clearing (2021).

The Clearing challenges us to reimagine dysfluency in speech and its impact on how we exist in the social realm. Ellis, who speaks with a block stutter—manifesting as intervals of silence—calls these pauses “clearings.” They argue that stuttering, like music, opens time and suggests that disabled speakers, particularly Black individuals, face temporal regulation and oppression that seek to pathologize and criminalize. Of the project, they share: “I hope this album offers the listener some of what my stutter offers me: an opportunity to imagine new ways of being in time.”

Night 2: 

Night two continues with two interventions on time. Christof Migone + Marla Hlady present Temper (Span Time) (2025), a performance imagining a time-travelling, resonant chorus of metronomes. Then, JJJJJerome Ellis performs Aster of Ceremonies (2023), summoning a “chorus of voices past and present.”

Temper (Span Time) features twelve vintage electronic metronomes, all set to the slowest speed.

Some don’t keep time steadily, while others emit a noticeably loud electrical hum. None can be depended on for accuracy; each functions idiosyncratically. Manipulated and mixed, they no longer demarcate time but instead jumble, disorder, and confuse it. Each metronome spans time in its own singular way, yet together, they produce a chaotic chorale.

Expanding on The Clearing, Aster of Ceremonies weaves together spoken word, live music, and projected text. Combining piano, saxophone, dulcimer, and voice, Ellis explores connections between blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Through a devotional song cycle, Ellis honours 18th- and 19th-century Black runaway slaves who stuttered, offering a profound counter-narrative to the “masters of all vessels” by invoking the imagery of a family of flowers. This lecture-performance is an ongoing attempt to, in the words of critic Hortense Spillers, “hear [slavery’s] stutter more clearly.”

JJJJJerome Ellis’ performance of The Clearing will have ASL and CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) interpretation. Alex Raja Ven’s performance will have subwoofer-adjacent seating options.

Co-curated by Sara Constant and Karie Liao, this program is co-presented with the Blackwood Gallery as part of In a Manner of Speaking, in collaboration with the Music Gallery’s 2024-2025 season.

All prices inclusive of HST.

As always, if funds are low you’re welcome to reach out to sanjeet@musicgallery.org to join. No questions asked.