leiken performs medieval fragments as living tools to unsettle the present, compressing grief, ephemerality, and queerness until history fractures and bleeds. They collapse early music, contemporary theatre, and ritual performance to summon a past that never came to be.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Dead Songs, in which leiken, dressed by Vivienne Westwood, flooded the medieval galleries with lust and longing. By connecting audiences to ancestors who left only a soft resonance, leiken unlocks history as vulnerable and volatile when housed in the body.
The New York Times has written that leiken "intones jokes and prophecies in a mournful descant, their voice as eerie as a singing wineglass." Their sound has also been praised for its "earthbound...gravitas" by New York Classical Review. leiken has developed work for the Hirshhorn Museum, Lincoln Center, and the Getty Villa, and is a member of Sequentia, the internationally renowned medieval ensemble.
At MacDowell this spring, they will research Ars Moriendi, building on their work as a funeral singer and death doula. This large-scale performance reclaims death from institutions and grief from therapists,. Drawing on late-medieval manuals for death, Ars Moriendi asks audiences to bring their grief and face it.
They also love fermentation, textiles, and swimming.
