The way ‘voice’ plays into Jordan Scott’s performances of Blert, both solo and accompanied, is quite different than in most other spoken performances. Scott, like other poets, use their voice as an instrument through which they make art, that is, without a doubt, what he is doing here, however, there is an obstruction, he has a speech impediment that breaks up his performance, and in an art where timing is so critical, one might assume that a stutter would be detrimental. However, that doesn’t really seem to be the case, in the accompanied performance his stutter along with the music and the sound of the waves work together to manifest his performance into something you are no longer listening to, but into something you are now living with him. Meanwhile, in the unaccompanied performance, the entire thing seems less artistic, and less of a performance, the stutter seems more like a imperfection that one should try to ignore. It’s like how Aristotle placed so much value on human voice, because it was intentional and meaningful, looking at Scott’s performance through that lens takes away a lot from his performance, because a stutter is both unintentional and meaningless, but that is clearly not how Scott uses it, he uses it as a means to perform an art.
