The site-specific performance leads small audiences through the Schwarzman Building, guided by music and live storytelling via headphones. NYPL/ Jonathan Blanc

Lunchtime at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building has gotten a little wild. Dance troupe Monica Bill Barnes & Company, whose motto is “bringing dance where it doesn’t belong,” is presenting a new site-specific dance-theater work, Lunch Dances, that travels throughout the library and was inspired by its vast collection.

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The company’s acclaimed artistic directors, choreographer and performer Monica Bill Barnes and writer and performer Robbie Saenz de Viteri, have presented site-specific work in many unusual places—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shopping malls, conference rooms and interactive websites, but creating a work for the Schwarzman Building has been their most interesting challenge yet. “The library is not built for us to do something like this,” Saenz de Viteri told Observer. “We’re rubbing up against the library culture in every way possible. You’re not supposed to play music, you’re not supposed to dance, you’re not supposed to do all the things that doing a show requires.”

Barnes and Saenz de Viteri were invited to create the new work by

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