The Room Begins to Rise
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Program
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Shelley Washington How We Hold Together World Premiere
About
Wild Up presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Shelley Washington for Wild Up musicians, CalArts students, and The Collective Orchestra, an open-invitation community ensemble. Inspired by Émile Durkheim’s concept of “collective effervescence” — the energy that arises when people gather in shared emotion, attention, and action — the piece asks how music can become a practice of collective life.
Through a flexible score that combines notation, images, text, and prompts, the piece invites musicians of all backgrounds to a collaborative performance shaped by listening, responsiveness, and shared decision-making. Wild Up musicians serve as both performers and facilitators, teaching and learning the work alongside community participants. REDCAT will be reconfigured into a more communal space, allowing performers and audience to occupy a shared field of resonance, proximity, and exchange — a space where music becomes a way to rehearse collective creativity, cooperation, and democratic action in real time.
About Endless Season
Art in LA has long been about freedom and a rich rejection of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, it is humble yet aspirational, creating a city that appeals to the aesthete and mystic in all its citizens. Here, famous artists also double as street-side sign painters, our finest restaurants are located in strip malls, and our landmarks are more geographical than architectural or fleetingly experiential rather than permanent monuments to their lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.
Endless Season revolves around these distinct West Coast traits. These programs mark a new chapter, focusing on sustainability and place, and investing in the artists and audiences who make our city vibrant. Together, we encourage, question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space for intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work.
More about Endless SeasonAbout Democracy Sessions 2026
Democracy Sessions returns in October 2026 for an expanded festival of music and performance taking place across Los Angeles.
Building on the inaugural festival, organized by Wild Up and MOCA, presented in the days immediately following the 2024 US Presidential Election, this new iteration takes place in a moment shaped by censorship, polarization, and shifting public trust and asks how art can function as a democratic practice — a means of gathering, listening, speaking, and acting together. Developed by Wild Up in partnership with MOCA, REDCAT, and CalArts, and expanded through related programming independently conceived and presented by Clockshop, 2220 Arts + Archives, Human Resources, and Living Earth as part of the broader festival.
Democracy Sessions 2026 is timed to align with the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, and seeks to position music and art as a living civic practice and a space where free expression, cooperation, and collective action can be rehearsed in real time.
Endless Season 2026–2027
Wild Up continues to explore music as a social practice: a way of listening, learning, and rehearsing our collective life together. Across Los Angeles and beyond, Endless Season 2026–2027 brings audiences into concerts, festivals, workshops, participatory performances, and large-scale collaborations that ask what an orchestra can be now: a space for civic engagement and imaginative practice shaped by the people who make it together.
The season begins with Democracy Sessions, returning as an expanded, multi-venue festival at MOCA Geffen, REDCAT, and additional partners to be announced. Timed to lead up to the 2026 US midterm elections, the festival brings together artists, audiences, and communities for concerts, performances, participatory actions, and public dialogue on democratic practices.
Throughout the year, Wild Up moves through projects that trace connection in many forms: continuing our work at the intersections of jazz, improvisation, and contemporary classical music at The Nimoy; bringing Meredith Monk’s immersive Indra’s Net, a vast meditation on interdependence, to Walt Disney Concert Hall; developing two new operas — Shelley Washington’s The Passion of Nell with Long Beach Opera and Ted Hearne and Chana Porter’s The Dispossessed, set to premiere in 2028; and carrying Julius Eastman’s music onto the international stage with performances at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
This season, The Collective Orchestra deepens its role as a gathering place for community music-making, bringing together participants for multiple projects within the Democracy Sessions festival and for our annual performance of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
Together, these projects imagine music as a living practice: a way to rehearse cooperation, make room for many voices, and build new ways of being together.