Wednesday, September 3rd at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room launches the Fall 2025 season in its 22 Boerum Pl. home theater with a program that pushes the boundaries of movement, sound, and perception. The evening features Ash Fure’s ANIMAL—a visceral performance that fuses psychoacoustic impact with spatial choreography—and work by the new artist duo Aavar, Almost Someone Else, a collaborative exploration of presence, privacy, and the poetics of public space. Join as an ISSUE Project Room Member at any level during the 2025 Summer Membership Campaign and receive a free ticket to the event!
Writing in Night After Night, critic Steve Smith has described ANIMAL as a piece that “combines [Fure’s] longstanding architectural approach to sound with a gestural choreography and light-soaked presentation inspired by the Berlin techno club Berghain.” Designed in collaboration with partner and architect Xavi Aguirre, ANIMAL centers on a physical structure: that of the 22 Boerum Pl. cathedral-like theater, and a sheet of polycarbonate suspended over an inverted subwoofer. The work taps into “animal intelligence” through intensely physical sonic material—sub-bass pulses, micro-rhythms, and white noise that engage the listener’s body as much as the ear. Originally staged as a “listening gym,” Fure’s performance encourages active bodily interaction, channeling the visceral tension and release of clubs in Berlin and Detroit. Her manipulation of spatial resonance defies expectation—reducing even the most brutal sounds to a near-whisper, before erupting again in unpredictable jets of rhythm and distortion. The result is both immersive and destabilizing: an ecstatic, embodied experience of sound.
Co-created by Aavar, Almost Someone Else examines the everyday rituals of navigating public space. The duet merges movement and sound to study how individuals mediate visibility and invisibility, conformity and resistance, through subtle shifts in posture, speech, and gesture. Drawn from two concurrent solo projects—one evolving into a book and installation, the other into a full-length premiere next summer—the performance uses the language of proxemics to interrogate how presence is constructed and constrained. Aavar’s Sámi choreographic research investigates how public scrutiny can produce bodily restraint and distinct movement patterns; they explore how overheard public speech—though often meant to be private—forms a kind of ambient poetry, rich with patterns, gaps, and accidental meaning. Together, these elements form a duet that reflects on the silent negotiations we make to fit in, stand out, or simply pass through.
Ash Fure’s full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s live performances and total installations mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening and our animal capacity to sense. Winner of a 2025 Creative Capital Grant, Fure has also received two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, an FCA Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College and served as co-artistic director of The Industry LA from 2021-2024.
The artist duo Aavar (Hayden Dean & Biret Haarla Pieski) works at the intersection of sound, movement and performance, bringing together indigenous knowledge systems, embodied research and contemporary composition. One is a dancer and performance artist from Sápmi with a background in choreography and a practice rooted in land-based connection and collaborative making. The other is a sound artist, performer and researcher whose work explores spatial perception, language, and sonic memory. Aavar's works have been presented internationally, including at Fridman Gallery (New York), Nordic Embassies (Berlin), and Vapaantaiteen Tila (Helsinki). Their individual practices span film, installation, performance, and contemporary dance, with works shown at the Venice Biennale, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Helsinki Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, British Film Institute (BFI), and Gera Museum of Applied Arts, among others. One is a P.A.R.T.S graduate and recipient of Riddu Riđđu’s Young Artist of the Year award. The other is a sonic arts researcher associated with UdK.
