Ash Fure's "ANIMAL: A Listening Gym"

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New Haven will be hitting the gym when sonic artist Ash Fure comes to town. Commissioned by Yale Schwarzman Center, curated by YSC Artist-in-Residence Bryce Dessner, and built in collaboration with stock-a-studio, ANIMAL: A Listening Gym is both an interactive sound art installation and a live musical performance. Guests can “work out” in the listening gym, consume themselves in the visceral sounds of Fure’s ANIMAL performance, or both. Gym times and show times are below:

Live Performance (Registration Required)

• Saturday, October 21 @ 7:30pm 
• Sunday, October 22 @ 2:00pm 
• Thursday, October 26 @ 7:30pm
• Friday, October 27 @ 7:30pm
• Saturday, October 28 @ 7:30pm  WAITLIST

Guy Modes: Update (10.25.23)

In order to preserve the integrity of the installation for this weekend’s performances, the Listening Gym will only be open for registered audience members on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 PM. While registration has reached full capacity for these performances, we encourage you to sign up for the waitlists above.

Yale Schwarzman Center Executive Director Rachel Fine said, “This is an unparalleled opportunity during the 2023/2024 season that should not be missed—a pioneering installation by an astonishing artist and educator known for breaking musical boundaries and blurring the lines among aural, visual, and physical art disciplines.”

Bandcamp Daily describes Fure as pushing past the limits of sound. “While it may seem impossible to bring a story to life without words, in [Fure’s] music, it’s the sounds that are alive, and they speak as much as words do, or perhaps even more.” Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied sonic architectures work on the senses in startling ways.

ANIMAL: A Listening Gym offers, in the artist’s words “an underworld of sound.” Fure added, “The project features full-body sonic machines that function like a sensory circuit workout: you press, you lift, you lean, you lie, you exercise your animal capacity to sense.” Fure performs live on a custom gym rig at designated showtimes throughout the run, and a team of listeners works the circuit with the crowd in the wild acoustics of The Dome, the Schwarzman Center’s most intimate performance space.

“In her work, Ash Fure invites audiences to bring their minds and bodies fully into the space. Like a HIIT workout for your senses, ANIMAL triggers the listener’s imagination creating an out-of-the-ordinary sonic and somatic experience,” said Jennifer Harrison Newman, associate artistic director. “By combining sculpture, light and sound, Ash’s listening gym brings sound to a dimension that reshapes our surroundings and has people exercising their ears and minds.”

Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and co-artistic-directs The Industry. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music, two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant-for-Artists, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, a Busoni Prize, a Stuttgart Prize, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.

Fure’s Schwarzman Center engagement is part of Yale alum Bryce Dessner’s multi-year residency as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence in Music at Yale Schwarzman Center, in collaboration with extraordinary musicians, artists, thinkers, and doers at and beyond Yale, and produced in partnership with ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann.

Created by Ash Fure and stock-a-studio.

In collaboration with Charlotte Brathwaite, Sunder Ganglani and Samita Sinha.

Featuring Ash Fure, Charlotte Brathwaite, Sunder Ganglani, Deborah Garcia, Jennifer Newman and Samita Sinha.

With special thanks to Derrick Belcham, Peter Burr, Grace Carney, Daniel Neumann, Zachary Schumacher, and Bryce Dessner.