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I’m crying in the majestic Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library.
It’s a busy weekday afternoon, and an imposing bearded man is singing “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world” in a booming voice. It bounces off the ornate, gilded ceilings 52 feet above, echoing down the showstopper of a room that stretches for two city blocks. All the faces in the nearly full room are turned to him, yet no one is shushing or frantically calling security. It’s a song that, before this moment, meant exactly nothing to me, latterly a misanthrope, and now I can’t stop crying.
It’s part of Lunch Dances, an extraordinary live performance choreographed by Monica Bill Barnes and written by Robbie Saenz de Viteri that roams throughout the august New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, transforming it into a site of unexpected connection. After an acclaimed sold-out run last year, the free, hourlong lunchtime show—embodying Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s mission, since 2013, to “bring dance where it doesn’t belong”—has returned for just a few weeks this month and next. (The March performances have sold out, but tickets for April will be released in the coming weeks; I recommend signing up for Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s mailing list for updates. Also of note: Two lucky standbys were allowed to join the group.)
Drawing its title from Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, a 1964 collectsion famously written during the poet’s lunch breaks from his job at the Museum of Modern Art, the performance showcases the breadth of the library’s research collectsions by incorporating materials from its vast holdings and building lore into a potently profound hour of stories about fictional library patrons. It’s nothing short of a slice of magic in the heart of Midtown in the middle of the workday.
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Here’s how it works: About 15 of us trail the lithe, smiling, silent Barnes—playing a library page, delivering materials to researchers around the library—wearing wireless headphones that let us hear the narrator and the music. (Think a silent disco, but others do all the dancing.) The narrator, a dapper Saenz de Viteri, tells the story and gives directions between pushing a rolling cart bearing a small console of knobs and buttons. We’re all dodging actual library visitors, including many tourists (who seem understandably more confused than anyone). Signs in each room duly alert patrons to the possibility of a distraction during specific performance times, and staffers make sure foot traffic doesn’t impede the show—but once people see the dancing, they quickly clear aside and begin watching themselves.
The performances meditate on love, joy, sadness, grief, and disappointment and reveal a deep undercurrent of longing within the often very isolating act of research. Because, the show poses, where else in New York can you find so many people quietly searching for something in one building? As the narrator puts it, “People come to the library because they have a question.”
In the map room, we are introduced to Nell, hunched over a 1961 map of Greenwich Village. With her fingers she traces the streets; we’re told how they come alive in her memories. In here, she can still walk by the businesses she grew up with, although they’re long gone and an illness has left her without control of her legs. “Hands up if you know what it’s like to have your life cut in half,” the narrator says.
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Barnes moves with sly, elastic precision—half librarian’s efficiency, half vaudevillian wink—sliding between tables, flicking her wrists, and letting small, buoyant steps bloom suddenly into full-bodied sweeps of motion. Her company’s dancers mirror that playful but exacting style, bursting forth in often quite tight spaces. Together with the wry, poignant narration, seemingly pedestrian gestures become softly devastating moments of theater.
The audience becomes part of the performance too. At one point, we stride quickly down a main artery on the first floor, hands in the air, drawing strange looks from passersby: this small crowd of headphone-wearing people hurtling down a hallway in the New York Public Library, faces full of exhilaration and glee. (Full disclosure: A decade ago, I moonlighted as a marketing copywriter at the library; during the performance, you may brush by the informational signs I created about each collectsion room.)
The reactions of those who happen to intersect with the show end up part of the entertainment as well. On a table down a long hallway, two people deep in animated conversation notice the dancing, then hurry to grab their belongings and rush into a side room. Others who unwittingly find themselves part of the proscenium stand awkwardly and watch us watching. Many also studiously do not watch (seasoned, seen-it-all, busy New Yorkers), or pretend not to, holding out as long as possible before finally taking out a phone. (We the audience, however, are politely asked to keep phones out of sight.)
All the surprises and blurring of the lines of performance and reality begin to reframe what you see. In one room, I suspect an entire table of people—whom I deem a perfectly cast mix of typical New Yorkers—to be part of the act. A woman helping a young child with homework. People looking down at e-readers, watching videos, taking notes, pecking on laptops, earbuds in. I’m sure they’ll all get up at some point and join the performance.
They turn out not to be part of the act. But also: Aren’t we all? And shouldn’t we join?
