The New York Public Library’s new series, Lunch Dances, features choreography based on objects in the stacks. Can a pirouette tell the story of a mid-century lesbian magazine? Naaman Zhou writes.
Robbie Saenz de Viteri, the project’s co-creator, came into the visitor center, wheeling a library cart laden with a blinking soundboard. Next to him was Monica Bill Barnes, the co-creator, choreographer, and lead dancer.
Saenz de Viteri looked like a podcaster: tousled hair, black-rimmed glasses, a plaid button-down, and a microphone. Barnes stood with dancerly poise in a crisp white shirt, a black tie, and cushy black sneakers. Each performance lasts an hour. Audience members, who sign up online, wear headphones, through which they hear music and a live narration by Saenz de Viteri. During the run-through, he said softly into the mike, “There’s no way to rehearse this in the studio.” It was after hours, but the dances are designed to be performed when the library is packed. In the dance, Barnes plays a library page on her lunch hour who has to deliver five research requests to patrons. It’s a quasi-Shakespearean structure, comprising love and heartbreak. At the great doors of the lobby, she meets five more pages, who shimmy and snap like a gang of Jets. Inside the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, with its elaborate murals, Barnes meets two researchers. Anna, in a cardigan and a messy bun, has ordered a box of editions of The Ladder, a magazine launched in the fifties, published by the first lesbian-rights organization in the United States. Hannah, opposite, in a checkered shirt and Vans, has ordered Us Weekly. Around them, the dancers spin and slide. The researchers’ eyes meet. Watching the rehearsal were two librarians in headphones: Meredith Mann, a curator of manuscripts, who had on a tartan skirt, and Kate Cordes, a director of reference and outreach, who was dressed all in black. Both had helped Saenz de Viteri and Barnes find ideas for the plot. Saenz de Viteri had taken Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book, “Lunch Poems,” as loose inspiration, but making a dance about a library was a challenge. “We just really panicked,” Saenz de Viteri said, of the commission. “Everyone has that, the first time they visit,” Mann told him. She had shown Saenz de Viteri The Ladder, when he and Barnes were rummaging in the collection. A lot of the dances turned out to be slightly melancholy. Cordes teared up at a scene about an older visitor, sitting alone in the gold-ceilinged map room. “I’ve had people cry at the desk,” she said. “Especially in Genealogies.” “Doing research is a really personal thing, but you’re also surrounded by people,” Mann said. “You’re reading someone’s diary, their love letters.” In the Periodical room, Anna discovers an edition of The Ladder, from November, 1964, that published the first cover photo of an openly gay woman in the U.S. The cover girl is Ger van Braam, an Indonesian woman who subscribed to The Ladder and sent her picture to the editor in search of kinship. “In this city of millions, surely there are hundreds of my own sort,” she wrote. After the rehearsal, Saenz de Viteri ran through some notes. “Do you feel like you get the story of that object?” he asked the librarians, of Anna’s historic copy of The Ladder. “There’s a part of me that is, like, You’re not allowed to pick it up!” he said. “It’s like how police officers don’t watch ‘Law and Order,’ ” Cordes said. ♦
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