‘Lunch Dances’ Turns the New York Public Library Into a Stage

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.

Photo: Paula Lobo. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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 collection room.)