JJJJJerome Ellis Live

Musical performance
📍 Café Robin des Bois, Montréal
3933 Av. du Parc-La Fontaine, Montréal, QC H2L 0C7
🗓️ November 8, 2025 | 9:00–9:45 p.m.
Free and open to the public

⬅️ Back to Exhibition and Performances: JJJJJerome Ellis x Luke Wyland x Dysfluent art curated by SPACE

Prayer to My Stutter #2
You restore
a living
shoreline
between word
and silence
— from Aster of Ceremonies, by JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Their performances weave instruments, electronics, poetry and stuttered speech into sonic worlds. Through improvisation and silence, and by drawing on prayer, voice, and archival traces, Ellis crafts contemplative soundscape where dysfluency opens into possibility.

At Voice and Media, Ellis will share pieces from The Clearing (2021), Aster of Ceremonies (2023), and the forthcoming Vesper Sparrow. These works ask how stuttering and Blackness can reshape our sense of history, memory, and belonging.

Central to Ellis’s practice is what they call the clearing: a generative space opened by the stutter, where fluent and dysfluent voices can meet. Here, the stutter becomes not a barrier but a passageway: where race, disability, and voice converge into something radically new, a space to pause, to resist, to reconnect. By placing artistic practice in creative tension with medical and therapeutic frameworks, Ellis not only critiques how stuttering has been framed but also generates luminous alternatives, turning interruption into communion and difference into beauty.

Their writing and compositions have been described as “a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of Blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine). The Clearing won the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize and was praised by The Guardian as “an astonishing, must-listen project.” Their second book, Aster of Ceremonies, extends this vision, invoking ancestral voices to reimagine history and freedom through poetry.

⬅️ Back to Exhibition and Performances: JJJJJerome Ellis x Luke Wyland x Dysfluent art curated by SPACE