An Evening with JJJJJerome Ellis

Event time: 
Friday, June 9, 2023 - 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Stephen A. Schwarzman Center (SC) See map
168 Grove Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Don’t miss a special evening with JJJJJerome Ellis as he performs an original musical response to Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty: A View From My Resilient Ordinary Disabled Body.
JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a blk disabled animal, artist, and proud stutterer. He prays, reads, gardens, cycles, surfs, and plays. Through music, literature, performance, video, and photography he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, he lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA.
His diverse body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents.
His debut album, The Clearing (2021), was called “an astonishing, must-listen project” (The Guardian). It was co-produced by NNA Tapes and The Poetry Project, and it was released with an accompanying book published by Wendy’s Subway. Poet/essayist/playwright Claudia Rankine said of the book: “The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the author’s real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter. At its core, Ellis’ metaphor of the clearing becomes a place of possibility and “momentary, transitory, glimpsed liberation.” He invites us to meet him there.” The Clearing won the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize.

Admission: 
Free but register in advance
Registration opening soon.