There are many fine reasons to love the Hirshhorn, but composer and multimedia artist Eric Haeker has hit on one of the less obvious ones: “In the middle of a recession, they’re throwing the biggest, craziest art party ever.”
And so they are, albeit with a lot of help from him.
Haeker is the 31-year-old founder of Pieris Music, a Philadelphia-based performance, education and advocacy group that puts on radically inventive multimedia chamber music concerts in unconventional venues. The Hirshhorn, for example, where tonight, Haeker and his Pieris co-conspirators will provide the entertainment — or if you insist, (some of) the art. Haeker isn’t precious about these kinds of labels.
Two years ago, the Hirshhorn began a campaign of community outreach to young and -ish hipsters with the first of their “After Hours” parties. Basically, for four hours on a Friday night, D.C.’s coolest museum is transformed into its coolest nightclub, complete with drinks, dancing and a cover charge. Success! With capacities in the 1,600 to 2,600 range, After Hours now routinely sells out. Tickets for tonight’s event, which cost $18 and were available only in advance to avoid last year’s club-like long lines for entry, are gone.
Three more are scheduled for 2009, but they’re going to have to work hard to top tonight’s main attraction: “Fountain,” an original suite of electronic chamber music composed by Haeker and performed by the Lumia Ensemble, which includes pianist Hugh Sung, violinist Hannah Cole, and maestro Haeker, triggering prerecorded backing tracks from his laptop. DJs Someone Else (nee Sean O’Neal, a German) and Tielaxu (aka Christopher Frank, from the Illadelph) will keep the party pumping before, between and after the two movements of “Fountain.”
Accompanying the music will be live-mixed immersion video by Ricardo Rivera and the Klip Collective. Nearly every surface within the “ring” of the Hirshhorn’s courtyard is ripe for appropriation as a makeshift movie screen; the better to display Rivera’s video montage, which he mixes in real time the way a club DJ combines and sequences songs. Thus, each performance of “Fountain” — Haeker has designs on more — will be necessarily unique, unrepeatable, and adapted to each venue. Almost any large place with more than one flat surface could be a candidate, says Haeker, with the possible exception of — yawn — a traditional concert hall.
“You want people up and walking around, going to the bar, getting a drink,” Haeker says. “You want them to [pay attention to] your art because they’re grooving on it — not because that’s the etiquette, and it they don’t, you’ll shush them.”
Haeker has dreamt of playing the Hirsh since he attended its “Visual Music” exhibit in 2005. When he hit upon the concept for “Fountain,” the Hirshhorn, with its massive, er, fountain, seemed a natural fit. He drove down from Philly to pitch the museum last May, and finally signed a contract in early February. “We wanted to go big or go home,” Haeker says, and “pitch it only as a high-end, major-venue big deal.” And thus “Fountain” arrives more or less as he imagined it, a program of chamber music with the production values of a U2 stadium spectacle.
There’s a plot of sorts, derived from the Greek myth of Peirene, the woman whose tears of grief for her slain son eventually turned her into a fountain from which poets and philosphers would drink to find inspiration. But the narrative is “more a way for us to organize our own thoughts,” Haeker says. In other words, you don’t stand in one spot and watch the whole four-hour opus (though a few diehards will, he predicts). Instead, you mingle. You drink. You duck inside to check out the awesome Louise Bourgeois exhibition on the second floor, or the “Strange Bodies” show in the basement.
It’s a party. Like Haeker says, “It doesn’t have to be” — you’ll pardon the term — “a museum experience.”
If you go
“Fountain” at the Hirshhorn After Hours
Where: Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Seventh Street and Independence Avenue SW
When: 8 p.m. to midnight tonight
Info: 202-633-4674; hmsg.si.edu
