Democracy Sessions: Order and Its Others

PROGRAM

Sofia Gubaidulina Dancer on a Tightrope

Gabriella Smith Carrot Revolution

Luigi Nono La fabbrica illuminata

-Intermission-

Louis Andriessen De Staat

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

The evening opens with a triptych of works that place the individual body, voice, and imagination under pressure. Sofia Gubaidulina’s physically charged Dancer on a Tightrope, Gabriella Smith’s vivid and propulsive Carrot Revolution, and Luigi 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 of the program 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.

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, with related programming presented in collaboration with more organizations to be announced. Democracy Sessions 2026 is timed to align with the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, and seeks to position music as a living civic practice and a space where free expression, cooperation, and collective action can be rehearsed in real time.