Ash Fure Wins 2025 Creative Capital Award

On January 21, New York-based arts funder Creative Capital announced that it will award one of its highly competitive 2025 grants to Associate Professor Ash Fure. Fure, who is the director of Dartmouth's sonic practice M.F.A. program, is among 55 artists selected from a pool of 5,653 applicants to receive the award this year. Per the nonprofit, the grant "champions artistic freedom by uplifting risk-taking, underinvested artists with a transformative award that provides up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, plus access to multiyear wraparound professional development services and community-building opportunities." Proposals were evaluated through a rigorous 120-member external review process that culminated in final panels specific to each artistic discipline, and the grantmaker awarded $2.45 million in total for this year's projects.

Fure's award will support the newest incarnation of her techno-opera/performance installation ANIMAL. First staged in 2023 at Yale's Schwartzman Center (as Animal: A Listening Gym), the 2025 version, titled ANIMAL [the underground] is a site-specific staging for a cavernous subterranean space in Los Angeles. It will be produced by experimental opera company The Industry, for which Fure is an artistic advisor (and former co-artistic director). The opera will run in June 2025, with official dates and tickets available this spring.

Creative Capital's webpage for the project describes ANIMAL [the underground] in more detail:

Elephants stop in lockstep silence when they sense danger. Whole herds will go still on a matriarch's cue and wait like statues until she moves. Scientists understand this startling behavior as integrated threat response: they halt so they can hear the horizon. In the face of risk they listen, fiercely, together.

Steeped in this image of herds on alert, adrenaline-soaked and aligned in focus, ANIMAL reimagines opera as sonic training ground: a visceral field of full-bodied sound that activates our animal capacity to sense.

Created by sonic artist Ash Fure and produced by The Industry, the project debuts in 2025 in a site-specific staging in LA, taking over a cavernous concrete basement with a massive empty pool inside. 32-channels of speakers and subwoofers activate this architecture as a resonant force, while custom full-bodied sound machines, developed with architect Xavi Aguirre, spread throughout the space like stations at a gym. This circuit workout functions not to force participation but to up the ante of body investment, to blur the lines between doing and watching, agent and witness, alone and together. Moved through en masse by a migratory crowd, it aims to amp the focus, exercise the senses, and activate a heightened social sphere that operates entirely outside language. ANIMAL interrogates the social force of sound and the primacy of listening to our power as a herd.