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.
From left, the dancers Indah Mariana, Monica Bill Barnes and Hsiao-Jou Tang. The audience is guided from one location to another in the library.Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times
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.
