leiken wields medieval fragments as living tools, compressing grief, ephemerality, and queerness until history buckles, bleeding into the present. They fuse early music, contemporary theatre, and ritual performance to summon a past that never came to be.
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. A MacDowell Fellow and member of the internationally renowned medieval ensemble Sequentia, leiken has developed work for the Hirshhorn Museum, Lincoln Center, and the Getty Villa.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Dead Songs, which filled the medieval sculpture hall with ten excavated songs of lust and longing, featuring wardrobe by Vivienne Westwood.
Their new work, Ars Moriendi, builds on their experience as a funeral singer to reclaim death from hospitals and mourning from therapists. Drawing on late-medieval "art of dying" manuals, Ars Moriendi asks audiences to bring their grief and face it.
leiken also loves fermentation, textiles, and swimming.
Photo by Oriana Camara courtesy of MacDowell.