JJJJJerome Ellis: Aster of Ceremonies
Access notes: Aster of Ceremonies features ASL interpretation, audio description via headphones, and Computer Aided Real-Time Transcription (CART) on a separate screen. The performance will also be recorded and shared via YouTube at a later date. Audience members are encouraged to arrive at the performance scent-free and will have the option to check in without speaking by showing their digital ticket/reservation receipt. Masking and social distancing are strongly recommended. PICA is an ADA accessible venue.
In this performance, artist JJJJJerome Ellis presents portions of their latest project, Aster of Ceremonies. Using piano, saxophone, electronics, and voice, they perform excerpts from Benediction, a devotional song cycle attending to eighteenth and nineteenth century Black runaway slaves who stuttered. This performance is an ongoing attempt to, in the words of critic Hortense Spillers, “hear [slavery’s] stutter more clearly.”
JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice.
Born in 1989 in Groton, Connecticut, the artist lives in Norfolk, Virginia with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. Ellis dreams of building a sonic bathhouse!
Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include unknowing, improvisation, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among Blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time.