Leigh Davis
Karaoke in the Cemetery / A Night of Grief Karaoke
Project Overview
This project brings karaoke to cemeteries across the country, creating a platform for participants to express and share in grief responses through singing together. Conceived as a transient experience, the work invites everyone to gather in the cemetery to sing, listen, dance, or make a raucous or emotional mess together, shattering cultural expectations that grief should be kept silent. Karaoke is more than just the singing of a song; it’s an outlet for emotions to break from everyday life. By allowing grief to spill out through vibrations that echo into the here and now, we celebrate our simultaneous existence.
Leigh Davis
As an artist, my work often takes the form of a collaboration with the public and I’m interested in how this project provides both a catharsis for individuals and a collective demonstration of our shared humanity. By giving the voice (and audience) agency, this project allows us to share how we perceive of grief experiences differently As a form of gathering, Karaoke doesn’t just provide a container to process these emotions together, or center what is potentially being lost, but grapples with it in a productive way This project welcomes all grief responses.
Taking place in the evening, the singing takes place over a period of 3-4 hours. I begin with a dedication, a moment of silence, and then guide participants into the experience (regarding logistics, song requests and dedications). Attendees can request songs with the karaoke MC on site, but people who don’t wish to sing are still a part of this project. Many will sing a long, support others, or simply listen. People can come and go as they please. But by showing up, even without singing, the people create this experience. I have learned in being together, we feel less alone in our grief. In a way the participants are the collaborators, as they determine the content of each event and help to co-create the song archive to memorialize the experience once it has passed. At the end of the project, this song collection will become a living repository, an archive of grief songs that is made accessible for public use.
This project represents a pivot in my exploration of grief but stems from my previous work about consciousness and end of life, as both are interested in concepts of relic and afterlives what remains after a person or moment has passed, and how we can capture and celebrate the departed in tangible, collaborative ways. I’ve explored these themes through collaborations with Threshold Choir, which feature scores recorded with the choir interspersed with silence, offering holding spaces for participants to listen, sit with others in grief, or meditate on experiences of loss. By creating spaces of communal vulnerability, with all my work I seek to foster individual and collective engagement that will last well beyond the scope of one project.
Installation Description
Visitors enter the cemetery as the sun is setting. By dark, the installation of neon lighting illuminates and accents the architecture already present at each cemetery site. This project can be indoors or outside, depending on the cemetery’s landscape and specificity. The lighting provides a physical framework, a container for participants to activate and fill with songs I’ve included images from the first two sites, Congressional Cemetery, D.C. (indoors, chapel) and The Woodlands, Philadelphia (outdoors, stable) The installation for each site is different, and I discuss and plan this with cemetery staff to center the attention to care within these historic places. What makes this project so compelling, for me as an artist, is how different each experience is. The architecture/landscape is unique to every site, the participants and the songs of grief they share are never the same, and each city and night has a dynamic crowd. All while there is a need to create spaces to express grief is ongoing.
Leigh Davis
Leigh Davis
Leigh Davis
Leigh Davis
Dedication, A Night of Grief Karaoke, The Woodlands, Philadelphia, PA, September 26, 2025
Web Site: https://www.karaokeinthecemetery.com/
Previous Sites + Partners: The Woodlands + Congressional Cemetery, 2025
Heather Moqtaderi, Founder and Artistic Director, Past Present Projects, Philadelphia, Emma Max, Programs and Operations Manager, The Woodlands, Philadelphia, Hann Daly, Events and Communications Manager, The Woodlands, Philadelphia, Ashley Molese, Inaugural Curator-inResidence, Congressional Cemetery, D.C.
Projected Sites: Green-Wood, NYC, Hollywood Forever, Los Angeles, Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh, 2026 - 2027
Leigh Davis
Partner Reflection
It was a true pleasure to collaborate with Leigh Davis, Heather Moqtaderi of Past Present Projects on A Night of Grief Karaoke at The Woodlands. Since we first started talking about Karaoke in the Cemetery in February of 2025, our grief mounted individually and collectively, with personal, community, and global losses. It’s been a gift as an organizer and project partner to have this container to dream, to feel deeply, and to know, one day, we’d get to sing in the cemetery together. Karaoke in the Cemetery brought new and familiar folks to The Woodlands. We witnessed and shared and dedicated a full spectrum of recent sharp losses and lingering, life-long grief. I was moved by a participant who shared a song they used to sing in the car with their dad, who passed, The Woodlands' own Board President, Becca Flemer, belting out a ballad, and strangers and friends finding each other in their shared vulnerability. I'm eager to hear the different iterations of Leigh's project as it finds its home at other cemeteries and in the grief archives.