THE RUNNING SHOW (excerpt) by Monica Bill Barnes & Company

The Running Show continues modern dance company Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s investigations into dance as a sporting event that they began at WP Theater with One Night Only in 2017. The Running Show is remade every time the company does it, working with local dancers in every city that they travel to, ranging in age from about 12 – 84 years old. The show becomes a kind of live documentary that sends audiences through the timeline of a dancer’s life – what it means to fall in love with dance at an early age, to shift that passion into a profession, and to keep moving, for as long as you can.

Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri created this show and perform together.

Monica choreographs for and dances alongside each local community, bringing them into her rigorous, athletic, and always funny movement vocabulary in an intensive week of rehearsals. Robbie interviews each cast member, putting their recorded voices and stories into the show every time they do it.

At this point in the show the audience has seen a manic snapping race between Monica and 15 – 20 college students, a 12 year old ballet dancer’s first (or maybe second) ever solo, an 80-something year old dancer balance for longer than most of us can, and Monica fail to beat her own record for the most number of turns she can complete in one song.

There’s a line of mostly empty chairs upstage. The community cast has all left the stage and Monica sits, changing her shoes. Robbie speaks directly to the audience, from a table and chair DSL. There are two audio clips right below this excerpt, you should be able to play them as you read.

-(Robbie at table, in chair, DSL to audience) We performed an excerpt of this show at a dance festival in NYC in October 2019. The festival is called Fall For Dance. It’s like a sampler platter of four different companies or choreographers all sharing the stage on one night. As is obvious by this point in our show, I am not a dancer. No. I’m a chair person. I’m like you. We sit in chairs. And as a chair person, I didn’t know anything about what this dance festival meant.

The festival gave us a 20-minute slot that we crammed as much humor and sentiment into as possible. Before we went on stage there was this beautiful contemporary ballet pas de deux. If you don’t know what a pas de deux is, it’s worth having one of dance students from earlier in the show explain it to you. Here’s a clip from an interview with Casey from the Third Street Music School explaining why their dress rehearsal for the Nutcracker was the worst one of their shows this year.

PLAY AUDIO FILE 1 – “PAS DE DEUX EXPLANATION”

I was literally imagining a line of ducks that was supposed to walk across the stage, but I’ve never seen the Nutcracker and I don’t speak French.

So there was this pass de ducks before we went on stage. And then, after us, The Martha Graham Company came on. If you don’t know the Martha Graham Company you should probably act like you do or you might be followed to your car by a quartet of modern dancers. And if you know anything at all you know you don’t always even have to call The Martha Graham Company by their full name you can say I’m studying Graham Technique or taking Graham Class in the same way that we only call George Herman Ruth by his nickname and we all know who we’re talking about.

If dance were the NBA, The Graham Company is like The Golden State Warriors in 2015 which basically makes us The Phoenix Suns. And the only reason I can get away with saying that is Monica feels genuinely happy that we are at least in the same league. So we are sandwiched between the beautiful pas de deux featuring two of the most celebrated living ballet dancers and one of the most important dance companies in modern dance history.

We’re about eighteen minutes into our piece, which means I’ve somehow made it without throwing up in one of the garbage cans they provide in the wings. And I notice this line of women gathering off stage. We bow, we head into the wings, and the women all have their hands out, waiting to high five us all. I’m behind about 20 students from Hunter College and we all start this good game high five line with these women. They’re all smiling at us and I’m sort of fake smiling and murmuring Yay We Did It because I’m at my most dishonest when I have to show enthusiasm (hence, chair person). But I’m pushing through, high-fiving the nice ladies and walking along the line until we get backstage and one of our Hunter College dancers comes up to me with these wide eyes and says “The Graham Dancers just high fived us.”

She’s stunned. She can’t move. She’s looking at her hand and she doesn’t actually say “I’m never going to wash my hand again!” but it feels like that’s the moment she’s having. Someone in the group yells “let’s go watch them on the monitors!” And before anyone replies verbally, they’re all running (dancers) and I start running too because that’s what everyone else is doing. In spite of the 20:1 female to male, dancer to chair person ratio I do actually want to fit in. We all go huddle around this closed-circuit TV monitor. It’s not like an HD broadcast. It looks more like the lobby security channel that my Nana and I watched on her TV while we wondered where Mrs. Gunther was going in such a hurry.

But the quality of the image doesn’t matter. Our Hunter College dancers are transfixed, their eyes are not leaving the TV monitor. The Graham Dancers are doing these moves that I can’t even make out really, but our students are jumping on the sofa, grabbing each

other’s arms, and yelling “Did You See That?!? Did You see that contraction?! That release is insane.” Sometimes the students, one in particular, Katherine, start doing the moves along with the dancers on the TV. They’re mirroring the Graham Company, making their arms and legs jut out in these jagged angles that look more like Picasso paintings than real people.

And for a moment, I can imagine what it’s like to be in Chicago, standing outside of Wrigley Field on November 2 2016 while the Cubs play the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the World Series. The game isn’t even happening in Chicago, it’s in Cleveland. But the fans all pressed themselves together outside of Wrigley Field, Cubs stadium. There’s not even a Jumbotron, Wrigley was built in 1914, so they’re watching the game on their phones and listening to it on the radio and staring at the numbers changing on the scoreboard.

(PLAY AUDIO FILE 2 – “AVE MARIA”. Monica gets up from her chair and begins a dance.)

And just like in the world series that night, the actions themselves, the moves the dancers are doing on the TV monitor mean so little in isolation. Swinging a bat is just a bunch of moves—knees bent, shoulder width apart, forearms over hips, weight springs forward over your front leg. When Ben Zobrist doubled in the 10th inning to put the Cubs up 7-6 everyone erupted. The movement and the context collided, thundering through the crowd. It wasn’t only about the way Zobrist moved the bat over the plate. The fans threw their arms in the air because they had been waiting, collectively, generation to generation, for the last 108 years. Ben Zobrist wasn’t even swinging for himself, he was swinging for Ron Santo and he was swinging for Billy Williams and he was swinging especially, especially, for Ernie Banks and every other Chicago Cub that never won a ring. Zobrist was the force but it was the Cubs history that made people scream those pre-verbal sports fan growls, climb sign poles, and kiss in the streets. But if you don’t know that history, if you don’t have that context, what does it mean?

Watching the Graham Company through the students, as a chair person, I’m missing all of the context. My body does not channel the annals of modern dance. My arms don’t have a history of hours and hours of perfecting an arc over my head and then an equivalent number of years spent breaking an ideal that I once strove for. And I’m a guy.

I can only imagine how empowering it is for an eighteen-year-old girl to finally see women on stage moving with force and grit, not just grace.

I’m an outsider. I’m listening to a language that has been passed down and learned and studied and revered and obsessed over and codified and interrogated and annulled and established anew, over and over again for generations. There’s an entire conversation, happening in a body. I’m a chair person. If I want to start a conversation, I start typing.

I have no idea where movement comes from.