Democracy Sessions: Garland

Democracy Sessions opens with the U.S. premiere of Oliver Leith’s Garland. Presented by MOCA and Wild Up, Garland is a large-scale work for orchestra and community chorus featuring 130 performers in a spectacular procession of music, movement, and sound.

Originally commissioned by Bold Tendencies, UK, and created for its multi-story car park, the site-responsive piece will transform The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA into both a stage and an instrument, with scale, architecture, and atmosphere becoming inseparable from the performance itself.

Alongside orchestra and massed voices, Leith constructs a sonic world from handmade instruments and everyday materials—tuned corrugated plastic straws, whirly tubes, button whistles, planks of wood, ceramic shards, carts, bicycles, scaffolding poles, and a horse connected to the chorus by a garland of bells.

Garland imagines democracy as something we do together: a procession, a public gathering, and a shared act of listening. Musicians, community voices, everyday objects, and the architecture of the space unite into a single sounding body.