Lunchtime at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building has gotten a little wild. Dance troupe Monica Bill Barnes & Company, whose motto is “bringing dance where it doesn’t belong,” is presenting a new site-specific dance-theater work, Lunch Dances, that travels throughout the library and was inspired by its vast collection.
The company’s acclaimed artistic directors, choreographer and performer Monica Bill Barnes and writer and performer Robbie Saenz de Viteri, have presented site-specific work in many unusual places—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shopping malls, conference rooms and interactive websites, but creating a work for the Schwarzman Building has been their most interesting challenge yet. “The library is not built for us to do something like this,” Saenz de Viteri told Observer. “We’re rubbing up against the library culture in every way possible. You’re not supposed to play music, you’re not supposed to dance, you’re not supposed to do all the things that doing a show requires.”
Barnes and Saenz de Viteri were invited to create the new work by Brent Reidy, the New York Public Library’s director of research libraries and a longtime fan of their work. He envisioned the performance as an unexpected way to tell the story of the library and encouraged them to use the collection as a source of inspiration. “Which is a daunting task,” Barnes said, pointing out that there are over fifty-four million items in NYPL’s research and circulating collections. “That’s sort of like saying ‘let everything in the world be your inspiration.’ But Robbie found an incredible way in.”
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Saenz de Viteri’s way in came via the poet Frank O’Hara. “He’s been an accidental, not intentional, influence on me all the time, in all the things that I write for our performances,” he explained. He decided to start his research there, by looking at the items the library had of O’Hara’s, which included personal letters, postcards and playbills from dance performances the poet had seen. Saenz de Viteri found a lot of communication between O’Hara and his circle of friends and fellow experimental writers and artists, known as the New York School of poets and painters. Soon, the group’s location (downtown Manhattan) and period (1950s and ‘60s) became the seeds for the show’s written narrative. The title, Lunch Dances, is an homage to O’Hara’s famous book, Lunch Poems. “But you don’t need to know Frank O’Hara or anything about that time period to understand what’s happening in the show,” Saenz de Viteri assured us.
Barnes’s way in was very different. “My ‘research’ was to find my way into every room at the library,” she said. “I really needed and wanted to understand how every room physically felt.” She described the process as akin to going on a fishing expedition, finding things that interested and surprised her in all the available spaces.
After internalizing the library’s physical form, Barnes turned to the collections. Also a fan of poetry, she requested the poet Donald Hall’s “ephemera” folder, which contained artifacts like canceled checks, personal letters and Christmas cards. She was inspired by the juxtaposition of being in a quiet space and looking through someone’s very personal and occasionally mundane items while having an amazing internal experience of discovery. To mimic this experience, she created “emotionally explosive dances that are also self-contained in a certain way.”
The two creators generated a lot of material “simultaneously, in parallel,” she said. The movement and text all relate to the years-long conversations they’ve had about the library, the New York School and the 1950s and ‘60s in Manhattan, but while Saenz de Viteri’s text is grounded and concrete, Barnes’s choreography is more abstract.
When I asked Barnes how she went about transforming the collection’s items into movement, she said, “I’m definitely not doing that at all.” One dance piece is anchored around a map of New York City from 1961. “It’s incredibly important, but the dance doesn’t reference the map or the time period,” yet the feeling and experience of the map remain. “What is so rewarding, but also slightly confusing even to us about our collaboration, is that there’s a way that dancing is such an abstract form and writing is, by its nature, more anchored in real things.”
Eventually, Barnes and Saenz de Viteri brought their movement and text inspired by these objects and characters in the collection together, and it became clear that the “stories,” whether told physically or verbally, shared a similar emotional sensibility. “The language and the movement are sort of tag-teaming at times,” Barnes said. “The writing gets you to a certain point and then the dancing brings you a little farther, and then the writing picks up and we’re cumulatively—we hope—creating this deeply emotional experience based on the collection and the experience of being in the library.”
As to how the hour-long show is performed in a public space where it doesn’t belong, both the audience and performers wear headphones (connecting them in a separate, intimate world) through which they hear music as well as Saenz de Viteri’s live narration. The audience, which is capped at fifteen people per show, follows the sixteen performers through the building, experiencing the selected items in the collection that relate back to O’Hara and his friends. Sometimes the audience watches, sometimes they listen and sometimes they do both.
“I think we’re trying to educate the audience on how to take in language and movement and have them both be meaningful,” Barnes said. “To understand that they live side by side, and that they’re not representing each other but are building on and relating to each other.”
The shows invite a kind of thrilling disruption, Barnes believes—not only for the patrons of the library but for the performers, too. “This project requires that. And this moment in the arts requires that. A generosity and openness to working differently. A certain grit and heartiness.”
The company will perform at the library twenty-four times in two weeks. “But it’s not going to feel like we’re doing the same show that many times,” Barnes said. “I feel like we’ll be going on twenty-four adventures and things are going to be different every single time.”
Lunch Dances is at the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (476 Fifth Avenue) Monday through Saturday at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. through May 17, 2025.
