Over two nights, artists JJJJJerome Ellis, Christof Migone + Marla Hlady, and Alex Raj Ven explore sound's liberatory potential–moving though, across, and against time. This two-part performance program explores embodied sound—its resonance, pronunciation, utterance, and silence.

Night One: The Clearing

8:00 PM – Alex Raja Ven

9:00PM – JJJJJerome Ellis

Night one begins with Alex Raja Ven's embodied approach to ambient music and sound as a liberatory portal. JJJJJerome Ellis then performs 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 Two: Aster of Ceremonies

8:00 PM – Christof Migone + Marla Hlady

9:00 PM – JJJJJerome Ellis

Night two continues with two interventions on time. Christof Migone + Marla Hlady open with Temper (Span Time) (2025), a performance imagining a resonant, time-travelling chorus of metronomes.

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 (2023) 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. Expanding on The Clearing, Aster of Ceremonies 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.”

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.

We regret that 918 Bathurst is not fully accessible due to stairs (two steps to the main entrance, a half-flight to enter the performance space, and a half-flight to access the washrooms and the Music Gallery office).

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

Masking and social distancing is strongly recommended for attendees who are able to and audience members are encouraged to arrive scent-free to the performance.

For additional questions or accessibility needs, please contact: [email protected].