collage of ancient early democratic sites and smashing the berlin wall
Democracy Sessions 2026

Order and Its Others

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Program

  • Sofia Gubaidulina Dancer on a Tightrope

  • Gabriella Smith Carrot Revolution

  • Luigi Nono La fabbrica illuminata

  • Intermission
  • Louis Andriessen De Staat

About

Every order decides what belongs and what is left outside. This program listens at the margins through works that organize sound, power, freedom, and collectivity in radically different ways.

The program opens with a triptych of works that place the individual body, voice, and imagination under pressure. Gubaidulina’s physically charged Dancer on a Tightrope, Gabriella Smith’s vivid and propulsive Carrot Revolution, and Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata move between precarity, transformation, and resistance, asking how a person might assert freedom within structures that seek to contain or overwhelm them.

The second half is devoted to Louis Andriessen’s De Staat, a forceful meditation on music, politics, and the ensemble as a social body. Written in response to Plato’s Republic, De Staat takes up the ancient claim that music can threaten the state by turning the score into a political argument that doubts its own power even as it makes it: can music ever be free from the institutions and ideologies that decide what gets played, who gets to play it, and how we listen?

Across the evening, the ensemble turns sound into a living system, negotiating hierarchy, interdependence, and the tension between the individual and the whole. The players form an order, test where it holds and where it breaks, and ask what—or who—remains at its edges. To play together, the program suggests, is to practice democracy and perhaps even imagine another order.

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 Season

About 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.

All Democracy Sessions 2026 events

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.