Sold Out
Registration Full
VNM Festival 2025
Whispered Folds: Day 3
Curated by
Moderated by
Mentored by
Collaboration with
Choreographed by
No items found.
Notices:
We’re happy to provide ASL interpretation for this event. If you’d like to request it, please indicate it at the checkout, or reach out to info@newmusic.org. We need at least 14 days' notice to secure an interpreter.
QUIET PLEASE! As these performances are sound sensitive, please refrain from making noise. No children under 10 years permitted.
Whispered Folds is a metaphor for the overlapping layers of identity, experience, and resonances that are explored in this year’s VNM festival. Using sound as a powerful medium to reimagine relationships between individuals, cultures and spaces, the artists invite us to consider how sound reflects and disrupts physical, psychological, and cultural borders.
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.
Ellis will share improvisations and atmospheres from his new record Vesper Sparrow, released by Shelter Press.
Anaïs Maviel is a composer, artist, vocalist & multi-instrumentalist dedicated to translating spiritual concepts to sensory experiences, using sound as medicine & alchemy. With traditional and experimental approaches, her works investigate the power of sound to shape reality, and emphasize the relevance of cultural hybridity. She navigates song, choral, instrumental, orchestral music, and staging with a strong connection to cosmologies of sound and speech rooted in oral traditions such as mantra and ring shout. She strives to bridge the gaps between genres and to create a diverse, inclusive, yet sacred musical experience.
Maviel will perform a series of originals excerpted from her various works, including Time is Due, and arrangements of folkloric songs. Maviel’s compositional language focuses on harmony and, in a solo performance context, the piano allows her to share her latest explorations, applied to song forms, and as they support storytelling, lyricism and improvisation.
JJJJJerome 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.
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 historical archives.
Highlights in Anaïs Maviel’s music collaborations include Alarm Will Sound, The Rhythm Method, Chiquita Magic, Meshell Ndegeocello, M.Takara, and William Parker. Equally impactful have been several collaborations with dance, including Contra-Tiempo, Urban Bush Women, Merce Cunningham Trust, Okwui Okpokwasili, Melanie Maar, and the Commons Choir. Visual arts collaborators include Nene Humphrey, Sean Webley, and Steffani Jemison. Anaïs facilitates vocal liberation with a focus on the body, its environmental, archetypal, and cosmic resonances.
Both her solo albums received international acclaim, and among the generous press shout outs, Jazz Right Now has called her a "unique aesthetic visionary". She is an awardee of the 2019 Van Lier Fellowship, 2020 American Composers Forum Create, 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, 2022 NYFA Artists Fellowship, 2023 New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy, and a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Music nominee. She holds a Masters degree from Paris Diderot University in modern literature, aesthetics, and contemporary thought, which led her to write about the stakes of music and utopia in the creolized world. One can read her essays & poetry in the form of intimate newsletters.
