The Brooklyn Rail

“Ron?” Ron waved. “Hi Ron… Luiz? Or is it Louis?”

Correct pronunciation is important for librarians, and this one, a bespectacled man in a hunter green sweater, knows it’s about more than just accuracy—he was opening a performance that was all about welcome.

After checking bags and checking in with their bespectacled guide, audiences of just a dozen or two toured various rooms of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Visitors can do that whenever they please (“You don’t need a dollar to walk through it,” the guide later narrated), but this special visit toured at lunch—and danced. Welcome to Lunch Dances.

At the top of this site-specific performance that ran throughout March and April, the guide passed around headphones for his voiceover narration and introduced Carolyn Hall, a page. Dressed in grey slacks, a white tunic, and black tie, Hall was one of the tour’s half dozen dancing pages. Yes, this is a library, and there were dancing pages.

Besides filing through security scanners upon entry—and then filing through bag check upon exit—synchronized movement is not expected at the New York Public Library. Nonetheless, Lunch Dances creators Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri understand that libraries’ kinetics are based on movement, through searching, and stillness, through discovery. Magnified and set to decades-spanning bops, Lunch Dances’s choreography highlighted the awesome in the quotidian hunt for history, for comfort, for tattoo inspiration—all private gifts this public institution bestows.

Moving from the Map Division on the first floor to the McGraw Rotunda on the third, audiences met new characters in every room. The librarian guide, trailing audiences with a pushable cart, script, and speaker, shared each character’s need. With an avuncular voice, he detailed one room’s magazine collection—TV Guide, Sesame Street Magazine, Referee Magazine—while two young femme-presenting visitors sat at opposite sides of a wooden table. One, Anna, read The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States, and the other, Hannah, a historic issue of Us Weekly, whose cover depicted an out queer person.

Music underscored the guide’s headphone narration: it was Yazoo’s “Only You,” and soon the pages were not the only ones dancing. Anna and Hannah rose and, perhaps less deftly than the pages but no less spiritedly, grooved at a distance as Moyet’s crooning drew them closer.

You do not need a reason to come to the library, the man narrated. “The only request is that you’re looking for something.”

Audiences met more characters on their journey, and they too all danced. A Sleeping Car Porter’s son looked for that union’s memorabilia; an elderly woman examined a map of her old home’s streets before levitating to “Rhinestone Cowboy,” leaning on a page to support her dance. Audiences had to check bags at the start, but wise ones would have pocketed tissues.

It is possible these room-by-room protagonists were neither formal actors nor formal dancers. They didn’t have any lines, and their steps were fairly simple. But in their infectious shoulder bops and hip shimmies, Barnes and Saenz de Viteri telegraphed the simple ecstasy that follows unlocking new information that was actually never hidden: at the library, knowledge is accessible to all—if you care to seek it. And, in foregrounding the protagonists’ movement against the gloriously dancing pages, the creators further accomplished two goals: they exalted the everyday searchers and personified the exceptional building they come to. In this varied choreography, all skill levels were celebrated.

Lunch Dances was so immersive that any surrounding spectacle seemed intentional: the young woman on the bench reading Lolita, the couple in the window in April’s best light taking engagement photos—were they all staged?

Beautifully, no: Lunch Dances could be viewed as a form of gimmicky marketing, harkening the late aughts’ flash mob craze. This performance’s goal, after all, was to enliven library participation. But the library, like the show, is free, and in inviting visitors to experience it in a fresh way, Lunch Dances not only employed artists but also highlighted the creative rigor that blooms out of activating spaces not normally considered for dance or theater.

People took note. Visitors not on the tour, peering on other sides of a room’s window, pressed against panes, took out their phones, and documented the scene. Headphone narration or none, mesmerization took hold.

In the show’s finely planned audience tracking, there were still gentle missteps. In another room, a woman sought an image she couldn’t quite describe, and then one of the pages, as a librarian, handed her exactly what she didn’t know she needed: Nabokov’s Butterflies. In this instance, the librarian became omniscient, less human—helpful, yes, but a mind reader who answered more than guided. There’s a subtle difference, and the woman’s ability to discover felt squashed.

And then, at the show’s conclusion in an open hall full of readers, the guide invited audiences to remove their headphones and listen. A scanner beeped. A chair scraped. A laptop unfurled. It was an ordinary moment heard anew, and interrupted.

A security guard, who had accompanied the performers and audience, began singing “People” from Funny Girl. Though delivered in a rich baritone that even Brian Stokes Mitchell would applaud, the number—and the pages’ final ballet—was one flourish too many after a show that made you want to rummage around for a book, an artifact, or just speak with a librarian. That impulse is stronger than any ovation.

Across the East River, another performance used bookshelves as a backdrop. Archestratus, the former cookbook store and gathering hub in Greenpoint, hosted its final hello, at last on April 23. Curator Jess Tsang’s concert series brings together two instrumentalists who have never played together to improvise their maiden voyage together.

A staffer for Archestratus (Archie, in neighborhood slang) took out folding chairs, and then took out more as audiences kept entering. People with earrings, noserings, no rings—some fifty crammed into the storefront; standing room only became inevitable. One man, in town from Georgia, said he had an offer to see the New York Philharmonic but wanted to check out this show instead. No offense to Gustavo Dudamel, but hello, at last was just as lively.

But, it may not be a surprise that the performance began tepidly. After Tsang’s introductions, Jonathan Kaiser and Eleonore Oppenheim took their positions, shook hands, and readied their bows, Kaiser on cello and Oppenheim on upright bass. The first few notes were toes dipping into the pool—hushed and expectant. Right, that’s what water feels like.

In black pants and loose button-downs, the pair dressed casually—no need to over-impress. While playing, Oppenheim more often kept her eyes on Kaiser, who largely looked down; an audience witnessing your musical blind date can’t be easy. But perhaps a focused gaze also perked the ears, which were deeply attuned.

After a bed of low drones, Kaiser found a firmer rhythm, offering steady quarter notes; on his deep cello, you’d be forgiven if you thought Jaws was on the way. But the music that followed was anything but predictable, and the store—with fifty-percent-off stickers while a hundred percent full—allowed a space where experimentation was not weird but safe. Wooden bookshelves, bare from closing sales, conjoined and formed the performers’ bandshell.

Perhaps Kaiser and Oppenheim sensed that welcome, and the audience’s warmth in the form of holy attention; they loosened.

The music got rangier as the playing went on. Kaiser jumped to a higher pitch; Oppenheim hammered out downbeats that became fervid strikes—snap! snap! snap! snap! Kaiser responded with irritated scratches, his bow a wobbling tightrope walker on the strings, and Oppenheim’s fearsome playing became increasingly aggressive, like her strings might break. Forte! Fortissimo! Fortississimo!

And then it stopped.

Things find their ending, strange and natural as it is. A few days later, on April 26, visitors gathered once more to say goodbye to Archestratus, which closed after over a decade in Brooklyn. Neighbors clustered in groups; they rattled off names of other closed haunts—Achilles Heel, the Noble, Ramona—and then rattled on walls. Tsang was again present to help musicalize the event, handing out drum sticks to anyone who wanted to participate in a thirty-minute percussive drone. The shop’s owner, Paige Lipari, banged on a snare. A child took mallets, the size of his arm, to a timpani. Others hit the walls or stomped their feet. By the shop’s closing, Lipari had too many leftover onions, so some people banged those, inventing new instruments.

Alliums, shelves, floors. New musicians witnessed just how much space they were able to transform.