JJJJJerome Ellis

Monday, November 30, 2020

6:30pm (EST)

Join online at >> yaleart.org/JJJJJeromeEllis

Inaugurated during the summer of 2020 in an effort to address the NOW, the Yale School of Art’s Speak to Me series continues into the fall semester with a special presentation by composer, poet, and performer JJJJJerome Ellis. The public virtual event, organized during the Yale School of Art’s 150th anniversary year as a co-educational professional school of art, emerges from Diving Into the Wreck: Rethinking Critical Practices, the first-year MFA course taught by Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean and Professor of Art, Marta Kuzma.

The School of Art is honored to welcome JJJJJerome Ellis as a Speak to Me guest, to deliver a performative address which centers around the poetics and politics of Black dysfluency. The artist’s ongoing practice of spelling his name “JJJJJerome” is a reflection of the Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer’s personal relationship with the subject matter: “…the word I stutter on most frequently is my name.” The event will be introduced by Dean Marta Kuzma, followed by JJJJJerome Ellis’ presentation of “On Fugitive Speech,” and concluded by a Q&A.

Focusing on a body of poems and songs Ellis has been composing based on eighteenth and nineteenth century runaway slave advertisements concerning slaves who stutter, stammer, or have speech impediments, “On Fugitive Speech” will follow the radical linguistic methods employed by M. NourbeSe Philip in her book length poem Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), in which Philip mines the historical texts surrounding the meager legal fallout of the November 1781 massacre of 150 Africans— ordered to be murdered by drowning by the captain of the slave ship Zong so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money.

Ellis’ “On Fugitive Speech” will reflect the artist’s daily practice of writing poems and songs restriced to the words used in the advertisements for fugitive slaves throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—rearranging and remixing the masters’ words to create a site for thinking about Blackness, dysfluency, disability, fugitivity, opacity, and time. The special presentation will ask: What can Black dysfluency teach us about the power of refusal and illegibility? How does the Black stutter open time and what can we find in that opening? Is the Black stutter a form of music? What forms of resistance and protest does the Black stutter enshrine and protect? In “On Fugitive Speech,” Ellis asks, “What does the moment of the block—when I hold my mouth open, waiting for the word—hold?”

JJJJJerome Ellis is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer. His works are invitations to healing, transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Through an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on oral storytelling, improvisation, and the interrelations between speech, silence, disability, and religion, he’s collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers. Mr. Ellis’ work has been presented or developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, and WKCR. He is a writer in residence at Lincoln Center Theater. Born in Connecticut to a Jamaican mother and a Grenadian father, he was raised in Virginia Beach, VA.

As a composer Ellis was awarded a 2015 Fulbright Fellowship to research traditional samba performance and write new music in Salvador, Brazil. There he performed with local musicians at Teatro Gamboa Nova and Feminaria Musical at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. Recent sound design/composing credits include Help (The Shed), Passage (Soho Repertory Theatre), the Radical Craft Design Salon (TED Conferences), and LAB RAT by A$AP Rocky (Sotheby’s/YouTube). From 2008 to 2011, Ellis was resident composer and saxophonist with pianist Trudy Silver at 5C Cafe and Cultural Center in New York City. As a jazz saxophonist, he has performed with Joseph Daley, Aaron Scott, and Shayna Dulberger. Ellis earned his B.A. in music theory and ethnomusicology from Columbia University, studying ear training and counterpoint with pianist and composer Ramin Arjomand. He is also a piano tuner and teacher, as well as a translator from Portuguese.

Now in its fifth year, Diving Into the Wreck borrows its title from Adrienne Rich’s poem written in 1973 at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, in the wake of the civil rights movement, amid the student protests against the Vietnam War, and in reflection of the author’s own process of self-discovery and personal emancipation. As a work that focuses as much on the isolation of life as it does on a sense of shared community, Rich’s poem brings forth a perspective that there can be no understanding of the “wreck” without becoming one with the ruin. It is possible to see how this self-motivated, even self-legislated impulse toward autonomy is mirrored within the very constitution of a work of art that is bound by the dialectic between autonomy and dependence, individuality and collectivity, randomness and resoluteness (Jacqueline Rose), and expression and rationality (Adorno). Taking “Diving into the Wreck” as a point of departure, the course provides space for a cultivation of consciousness that extends self-knowledge outwards into a sense of community, through the act of critical reflection. Guests to the course this semester have included Autumn 2020 Hayden Distinguished Speakers Angela Y. Davis, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, and Stefano Harney alongside artists Cameron Rowland, Naeem Mohaiemen and others.

In this special event, Diving into the Wreck converges with Speak to Me, an online forum with invited speakers, activists, writers, and artists first hosted throughout June 2020 and originally organized with poet, playwright, author, and Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale Claudia Rankine, Leah Mirakhor, Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, alongside Dean and Professor Marta Kuzma.

Envisioned as a series of virtual events through which the work of activists and organizers engaging in the continued fight for justice can be lifted up, the program continues to feature a series of individuals from across the United States, in order to facilitate a nationwide conversation on what is going on across the country geographically at the moment. With the aim of spreading awareness as to how ongoing conditions of state violence, racial capitalism, and COVID-19 concerns manifest in the protests and calls for justice we ask: What is to be done?

The summer conversations welcomed New Yorker critic Hilton Als, historian Sarah Schulman, musician and writer Greg Tate, and Muneer Ahmad, Yale Law School Professor, in conversation with activist and movement builder Lorella Praeli.

Speak to Me is made possible by the Yale School of Art’s Art and Social Justice Initiative, which aims to foster an awareness as to how a practicing artist in today’s landscape is both challenged and influenced by the current climate of political and social dissonance, turmoil of public opinion, and structural problems of inequity.