The mission behind Monica Bill Barnes and Company is to bring dance where it doesn’t belong. That’s true but only part of the story.
The experiential art the company produces creates an intimacy that has the potential to pulverize your insides. Along with dance, it also unleashes emotions or feelings where they don’t seem to belong. A shopping mall. An exclusive Madison Avenue boutique. A museum just after sunrise, before it opens. Now the company, led by Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri, has infiltrated the library.
The excellent “Lunch Dances” — the name is a homage to Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” — invites viewers to the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue for a free hour of storytelling, song and dance. (The program is sold out but may be brought back at a later date.) “Lunch Dances” gives a carefully cultivated assortment of objects from the past a beating heart.
Audience members wear headphones that allow Saenz de Viteri’s voice to enter their minds — not unlike falling under the spell of a book — as Barnes, in the guise of a library page, guides viewers from one location to another. She is joined by a Greek chorus of dancers in different parts of the library, where her task, dropping off requested materials to patrons, develops into stories and dances performed to music that only viewers can hear. A library, after all, is a place of silence.
The characters that come to life — regular people, researching personal topics — are fictional. “Lunch Dances,” a humane offering, is a dance about people finding connection in an unlikely place. It’s a reminder to be civilized in an increasingly uncivilized world.
The invitation to create the work came from Brent Reidy, the director of the research libraries at the New York Public Library, who hoped to share the institution in a new light. “There’s so many different stories of the kinds of people who use our libraries,” he said. “It’s not just people like me who got a doctorate in historyand are plundering boxes looking for the thing they’re going to cite in their papers.”
As for the show? “It’s poignant,” he said, “just a really touching version of revealing all the things a research library is and can be.”
Barnes and Saenz de Viteri were excited about the prospect of making a dance at the library, but it was bumpy initially. As they were making plans — a schedule, a budget — Reidy mentioned a caveat that they hadn’t considered. “He just said, ‘And, of course, it has to be about the collections in some way,’” Saenz de Viteri recounted.
“They have 54 million objects,” he added. “It just felt like, ‘Make something about the world.’”
They started exploring different topics. Saenz de Viteri went down a rabbit hole in the Berg Collection researching Frank O’Hara — his poet hero — while Barnes tried to get into different areas in the building to see what they would be dealing with physically. “I wanted to understand the culture of the space and what would it feel like to move in this space,” she said. “And honestly, for so long, I just felt like it would feel awful.”
People don’t visit a library to watch dance and that thought stuck with Barnes: “I really just felt like nobody wants this,” she said.
To get an appointment to see those spaces, she needed to request materials. At one point, she found herself with a folder titled “ephemera” from the papers of the poet Donald Hall, containing random things, like a canceled check and Christmas cards. “It all feels very contained and ceremonious and special, but then you open up the folder and you find he wrote this note on a Post-it, and then put it on, like, a bill,” she said. It’s just sort of griping, worrying, just doing all those things that we do over email and text.”
These private moments might seem mundane, but Barnes, regarding them, found herself bursting with emotion. That led her to discover a way to be physical in the library. At the heart of every story in “Lunch Dances,” she said, “is some sense of big emotion but also some effort to contain it from thinking nobody wants us to dance or talk here.”
They didn’t want to ruin the library experience for visitors. Nor did they want to make a show about ephemera. So what about making something, not about a map or drawings of birds, but about the person who requests it?
In a vignette, we learn that Nell, a regular in the map room, has lost control of her legs because of a virus. But as her fingers flutter along a map of the city — Greenwich Village 1961 — Saenz de Viteri’s voice magnifies this character’s thoughts. She can walk anywhere. She can move. “Maybe not perfectly but presently. By myself, with everyone in the city.”
As “Rhinestone Cowboy” plays, the dancers surround her, stomping and hopping as their arms wave and punch at the air or open and close with florid breadth. There is a reference to a line: “Hands up if you know what it’s like to have your life cut in half.”
It’s joyful and sad, just like the situation in another vignette: Patsy, who is grieving the death of her wife, looks through pictures, trying to find an image that she can get tattooed in her memory. She discovers Vladimir Nabokov’s drawings of butterflies. Finally, her grief has a place to live; the accompanying dance, aptly, is set to the Bee Gees’ “If I Can’t Have You.”
Circling Patsy, who sits at a table, dancers clasp their hands behind their backs, spontaneously unleashing them as they break free for a skip and a turn or pausing to kick a leg forward and back. Eventually Patsy joins in, too, and a staid scene of research is transformed into a line dance, galvanizing and cathartic.
O’Hara is in the work too, although indirectly. Researching O’Hara and the New York School of Poets, Saenz de Viteri began to consider the people in the poet’s life. What would the painter Nell Blaine have done at the library? What about the poet Kenneth Koch?
Saenz de Viteri said he started to imagine people from O’Hara’s circle “and what their lives in the library would have been, which is such a huge fictional leap.”
“It’s why all the objects are from the 1960s,” he added.
As in the final scene of “Lunch Dances,” when a song from 1964 — “People” from the musical “Funny Girl” — comes to life in the main reading room. Here, John, a peripheral character, takes center stage as library users go about their business. They are not us; they are not there to watch a dance. But they do. We take off our headphones, as instructed, as John sings “People” while dancers spread out behind him, crossing their hands over chests, spinning and raising a single arm. For this singular moment, the performance opens up to everyone.
The point of the piece, Saenz de Viteri said, “is hopefully building this empathy for strangers.” In the best version of that moment, he said, people stop what they’re doing and just watch. “It’s this weird moment of, like, we’re all alone,” he said. “You were just doing this whole experience alone. And then you take off the headphones, and you’re still sort of alone, but you’re together in being alone.”
And the empathy was only natural. Barnes said, “It feels hard to imagine making it about anything else.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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