Thursday May 21
STUTTER
Featuring Jordan Scott & the Element Choir
Co-presented with Artist Bloc

Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
$10 regular, $5 member

It is a painting or a piece of music, but a music of words, a painting with words, a silence in words, as if words could now discharge their content: a grandiose vision or a sublime sound.
— Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered”

What is the utterance?
— Blert, by Jordan Scott

Mouth implies choir, choir mimics mouth
The Element Choir and poet Jordan Scott collaborate for an evening of disfluency and sonic gyrations. Performing from Blert (Coach House Books, 2008), which explores the poetics of stuttering, Scott’s own disjunctive speech will collide, inhabit and wind through the rhythmical and extended voice techniques of the Elemental Choir. The resulting noise will stretch language into strange and rare permutations – challenging and exploring how physicality impacts communication.

As a lifelong stutterer, Scott’s poetry attempts to make language itself stutter through the prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning. Gurgling consonants, plosives and gutturals, Scott’s performance is a process of labour, patience and elation: blort, jam, rejoice.

Christine Duncan and the Element Choir also explore the textural and timbral qualities of the mouth. As a group, the Element Choir examines the interplay between voice, sound and the architecture that contains them.

Collaborating to produce original compositions, the pairing of Scott and the Element Choir is certain to delight the ear.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (New Star Books, 2005) and Blert (Coach House Books, 2008). Silt was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In the fall of 2006, Jordan worked on the final sections of Blert while acting as a writer in residence at the International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre in Rhodes, Greece. In 2008, Blert was nominated for an Expozine Award. In the spring of 2009, a short film based on Blert will appear on the Bravo! network. Jordan lives and works in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver BC. He spends the spring and summer slinging canoes at Pitt Lake — the largest freshwater tidal lake in North America.

Element Choir is an improvising choir from Toronto led by vocalist Christine Duncan. This is a group that works with both structured and non-structured elements, based primarily on a system of conduction cues. As an ensemble they explore textural and timbral sound qualities, soundscapes, rhythmic patterns, sound poetry, group and individual composition ideas, musical genre interplay and extended voice techniques. This cinematic approach to group vocalizing presents both tonal and non-tonal material in a constantly evolving and “in the moment” sonic environment.