Grief Karaoke: A Night of Karaoke in the Cemetery

“I want to do karaoke in the cemetery.” 

This is the phrase that still rings in my ears from our conversations nearly a year ago, when Leigh Davis first approached Historic Congressional Cemetery with a radical proposal for producing a karaoke program. Karaoke in the Cemetery is a new series of karaoke gatherings conceptualized by Davis as ways to connect our collective grief to community support or even celebration. Whether someone is mourning a breakup, a relocation to a new and strange place, a death, we are all carrying some form of it. Everyone experiences grief; like its cousin death, it remains one of life’s few guarantees. Understanding the world from this perspective has incredible power to shift our capacity to bring empathy into our daily interactions, to become a safe harbor for those soft parts of our collective and individual mourning.  

On a Friday night in August nearly one hundred people gathered to pull in a song that spoke to their memory of loss. As there is no one or “right” way to grieve, songs ranged from Disney songs to self-compositions to classics like The Talking Heads or the Beatles. Congressional welcomed a chorus of voices to connect, comfort, and find compassion in the company of others moving through their own process of mourning. It was a joyful gathering, producing as much laughter as it did tears and offered a place to acknowledge the different kinds of losses and many ways we grieve. 

Through video, performance, conceptual light installation, and interactive projects, Davis has cultivated a practice that is centered in the person, the individual experiencing the work and the collective that ultimately forms a kind of community in sharing the experience. She draws from the familiar—like karaoke—to build an environment to gather in that is rooted in identifying, nurturing, celebrating, and releasing the kind of grief we carry around on a daily basis. The kind of grief that changes color or shape, but never really leaves the body. And by engaging the body, in this case through singing (and inevitably, dancing), Davis’ Karaoke in the Cemetery series “provide both a catharsis for individuals and a collective demonstration of our shared humanity.” 

As Historic Congressional Cemetery is designed to support grieving as it manifests—its architecture and natural landscape offer a venue for grief to be acknowledged, carried, and with Davis’ work, shared. In line with other light and sound based-works, Davis bathed the Chapel in a deep magenta light, emanating from a bespoke LED neon installation hosted for a single night. This architectural intervention followed the roof lines of the Chapel’s unique architecture and will be an aesthetic motif for the whole series when it travels to other cemeteries. The bright color is meant to evoke a kind of karaoke club, built in such a way as to transport the singer to an alternative time and place. 

Davis is quite adamant about the language used to describe her work, identifying as a socially-engaged artist, not an artist with a “social practice”. Though it may seem like semantics to most, this passionate definition roots Davis’ intentions when making her work. One of the many astonishing observations I’ve collected over our time working together is her capacity to be so thoroughly open to how her work is received by the audience—this unabashed vulnerability creates a pathway for genuine exchange, whereby the artist releases the control of the experience to the audience. In the end, it’s not the concept on paper nor the light installation alone that is the “art”, it’s the people who show up to lend their voices to this incredible chorus and who share their vulnerable moments to give others a sense of belonging in the isolation of grief.

When Davis asked me to pick the closing song, I fully admit I panicked. What pressure! But recalling our conversations and the gentleness Davis brings to cultivating this work, I almost instantly had my selection. To close out, we needed a true banger of a song. The generosity of others and the spirit of connectedness that the evening brought forth quickly dissipated my nervous energy. What fidgets my anxiety produced quickly transformed into dance moves I only reserve for the company of close friends. But that’s what we had become for the night, a gathering of compatriots in grief, determined to uplift ourselves and one another despite the current climate and conditions of our individual experiences. There was joy in this collective grief. You can hear it here, in the voices that joined me.  

Karaoke in the Cemetery premiered on August 1, 2025 at Historic Congressional Cemetery’s Chapel. Karaoke in the Cemetery continued in Philadelphia in September and will continue to travel to cemeteries on the east and west coasts. To view the archive or for more information, please follow www.karaokeinthecemetery.com.