Since premiering his performance The Revival: It Is Our Duty on Juneteenth 2021 as part of The Shed’s Open Call program, Troy Anthony has taken his music around the country and the world. He has also founded The Fire Ensemble, a group he describes as a “choir community.” In its first three years, The Fire Ensemble has been incubating at The Shed since 2022, assembling an intergenerational group of singers for rehearsals and performances at The Shed and elsewhere. Under Anthony’s direction, the ensemble has explored new ways of collaborating at the intersection of artistic practice and community-building.

As a ritual performance rooted in what Anthony describes as a “church service without religious ideology,” The Revival has become foundational to The Fire Ensemble. In 2022, the choir presented a second production at The Shed. This summer, on June 15, Anthony gathered the choir in the recording studio to make an album. Within the vaulted, cathedral-like space of Power Station at BerkleeNYC, the group spent the day capturing the joyful connection they’ve created in rehearsal and their past performances.

In the studio, Anthony can’t coach the choir as he would in rehearsal, so he has to find other ways to communicate, embodying the sound and its direction for the singers.

Over the past three years of developing The Fire Ensemble, Anthony has come to know the choir’s members, their stories, and why they have come to this community.

In moments in the studio, he saw their stories reflected by their embodied performances.

Two worlds exist side by side in the process of recording an album. While the choir brought joy and song to the studio, the engineer and co-producer, Tom Gardner and Will Stone (who co-produced with Anthony and Sam Appiah), contributed their own rigorous dedication to their work in the booth. They were instrumental in translating what happened in the studio so that the album recording will best capture The Fire Ensemble’s own story.

Since the recording session, Anthony has reflected on what that day means to the choir community he founded. The Fire Ensemble is proving that community-engaged artmaking leads to creative excellence, and that democratizing artistic space and process is, in fact, necessary to excellence. “The cohesion of sound,” in the words of Darren Biggart, The Shed’s director of civic programs, who is currently guiding the end of the ensemble’s incubation, “comes from the existing cohesion of spirits.”

The Fire Ensemble’s final season of rehearsals at The Shed runs through the end of the year. To join, fill out this RSVP form.

To support The Fire Ensemble in making The Revival album, learn more about donating to the group.

Photos: Tori Mumtaz.