On the night of Tuesday, March 11, Danish art school students living in Crown Heights sat shoulder-to-shoulder with trendy eight-year-olds playing with their parents’ BlackBerries on the dusty drill hall floor of the Park Avenue Armory. They, along with 40 to 50 others—barely filling the enormous room—were all waiting for the beginning of “Make a Baby,” the interactive musical performance of L.A.-based music collective Lucky Dragons. The show was one of many events that walked the line between concert and performance art at this year’s Whitney Museum Biennial.
Lucky Dragons is the brainchild of Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck, two individuals whose work blithely defies categorization. Having performed in such varied locations as a clearing in Oakland’s Las Trampas Mountains and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the artists put on shows that range from reggaeton-inspired bodily convulsions on art gallery floors to serene flute and drum circles. For “Make a Baby,” Rara and Fischbeck incorporated both aspects of their previous artistic endeavors into a single, seamless performance.
In the center of the 55,000 square-foot drill hall, four projector screens displaying images of arid landscapes sat in a tight square, in front of which lay a scattered arrangement of rocks, flutes, sticks, MacBook laptops, kalimbas, two-dozen miniature amplifiers, and a mess of cords. Rara and five others, dressed in white, began the performance by moving quietly amongst the objects, arranging them in clusters. Eventually Fischbeck—a tall, unimposing man with a neatly-cropped blonde mullet—emerged from the crowd and bent over a computer. The projectors displayed, in rapid succession, images of hands caressing plants while the amplifiers emitted low soothing tones. The figures in white began making soft, unorchestrated sounds with the various objects surrounding them, falling into and out of an atonal harmony. To my right, a mother quieted her puzzled child who asked her repeatedly, “what are we supposed to watch?” They left soon after.
The tight circle of the crowd surrounding the performers and their instruments lost its shape, and as the audience pushed inwards, the performer-spectator division dissolved.
Over the course of an hour, the drill hall echoed with loud percussive stomps and wafting digital blips, beeps and squabbles set in a mildly abrasive major key. Audience members wandered through clusters of people circled around drums, kalimbas and, perhaps the most interesting component of the show, a number of amplified chords tipped with braided strips of tin, which produced varying sound pitches through skin to skin contact. Fischbeck looked on in contemplation as total strangers holding the chords stood in large circles and experimented with grabbing and releasing each others hands, creating electrical circuits that caused the sound to jump spastically. The projector displayed a video of Rara and Fischbeck letting Technicolor liquids ooze from their mouths, and then drinking the liquid out of the other’s cupped hands.
Despite the intricate set-up and preparation involved in “Make a Baby,” there was little evidence of a score or program directing the event.
“There’s never really an intention of each show,” explained Jasmine, one of the performers, while watching a group play with a pitch modulator. “We just sort of see where it goes.”
Jasmine added that neither Fischbeck nor Rara, neighborhood friends of Jasmine, gave her any instructions or parameters beforehand: “They said ’just play.’”
I caught up to Fischbeck as he wandered from corner to corner of the hall, listening to the varying qualities of sound at each. He described “Make a Baby” as “a way of mapping out touch relationships between people.”
According to Fischbeck, the sensory wires that brought the audience members into physical contact with one another allowed creative agency to spread to numerous individuals across social, cultural, and traditional performance barriers. Fischbeck said that “Make a Baby” was an attempt to “make something that extended multiple peoples power.”
As audience members slowly wandered out of the drill hall, the thumping beats of the 96 hour dance party in the next room became increasingly difficult to ignore, yet the projectors still displayed videos of Fischbeck and Rara drinking out of each other’s hands. In light of Fischbeck’s comments, the video’s connoted themes of creation and distribution took on a far greater significance. The at-once chaotic and serene spectacle of “Make a Baby” exhibited a deft amalgamation of primitive and ultra-modern sound making techniques. Yet its most notable success lay in the artists’ ability to establish a unique space, which both inspired and encouraged social connection through physical touch and the creation of sound.
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