Musical chairs: UMD professor elicits ethereal tunes from plastic seats

Dan Ortiz Leizman’s hands flashed over the strings, each one summoning separate yet interwoven melodies.

The sound was evocative and poignant. The instrument was unexpected: two plastic chairs.

“It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re from, everyone knows these chairs,” said Ortiz Leizman, 27, of the utilitarian objects they transform into musical instruments.

For nearly a year, the University of Maryland, College Park, arts instructor has been outfitting these ubiquitous plastic chairs known as Monoblocs with harp strings, tuning pegs, mics and pedals.

The results have captivated audiences online. Ortiz Leizman’s most popular video has drawn more than 800,000 viewers on Instagram.

“This sounds like waking up in a house full of your family the day after a tragic event,” one commenter wrote of Ortiz Leizman’s music.

“Plastic chairs like this are such a staple of human connection, especially in lower- or middle-class groups,” another wrote. “Hearing something so beautiful played from them makes me emotional.”

Ortiz Leizman, who uses the pronouns they/them and has a master’s in visual arts from College Park, hatched the idea for the chairs in August at an artists’ residency in coastal Maine.

The armorlike, earth-colored exoskeletons of dead horseshoe crabs littered nearby beaches. Ortiz Leizman outfitted a few with speakers and played recordings of beach sounds. The vibrations caused the exoskeletons to move, as if dancing.

Then Ortiz Leizman’s eyes were drawn to the dingy plastic chairs in the studio. Perhaps these homely furnishings also longed to dance.

“I just started nerding out,” said Ortiz Leizman, who grew up in Mount Airy and received dual degrees in philosophy and art from Goucher College. “I started making stop-motion videos of them dancing with each other. It immediately opened all the possibilities of the chairs.”

They were intrigued by the history of the Monobloc, which is produced by injecting liquid plastic into a mold to create a sturdy-ish, stackable chair composed of only one piece. The chair, which was introduced in the 1970s, is so ubiquitous — appearing in backyards, garages, churches and schools around the world — that it is functionally invisible, Ortiz Leizman said.

“It’s bringing us all together in this weird way,” said Ortiz Leizman, explaining that the chair could be seen as the human version of an exoskeleton.

“If humans are gone, these plastic chairs are still going to be around,” they said.

Soon Ortiz Leizman was drilling holes in the chairs and attaching tuning pegs and strings, experimenting with string placements and tones. They called the instrument the Monobloc harp.

“It felt like I was falling in love,” they said. “I don’t say that a lot about the things that I make.”

Today, five Monobloc harps sit in the living room of Ortiz Leizman’s Hyattsville apartment, including one fashioned from a weathered peach chair given away on NextDoor. There’s also a hunter green chair Ortiz Leizman turned into an electric guitar.

Ortiz Leizman took the peach Monobloc harp to Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum in April to perform at the Sound Scene avant-garde music festival with collaborators Ian McDermott and Wednesday Kim.

“Dan has this powerful punch hidden inside,” McDermott said. “They are very mellow, very chill, but whenever they start playing the chairs or whatever instrument, it’s like this flood comes out.”

Ortiz Leizman has published six issues of a Monobloc zine titled Exoskeletons. In one issue, a writer reminisces about the plastic chair she turned into a swing in the yard of her grandmother’s El Salvador home. Another includes moody Polaroid portraits of white plastic chairs.

“The chair just took over my life,” Ortiz Leizman said. “I go outside and see them everywhere.”

They plan to continue to experiment with Monobloc creations, including threading one with cello strings. The beauty that can emerge from a humble object fills Ortiz Leizman with wonder.

“Each chair, once I string it, it has the melody in it, ready to go,” they said. “The chairs have already told me what they want to sound like.”