David Byrne sat alone on the second floor of the Park Avenue Armory, wearing a blue jumpsuit and his trademark shock of white hair. The room he was in, like most rooms in the armory, was ornately appointed—trompe-l’oeil ceilings, mahogany woodwork—but he didn’t seem to notice. “I got much better at cooking,” he said, of his pandemic year. “I learned how to bake fish in paper.” He also spent time with his daughter, upstate, and explored the city by bicycle. “Forty years in New York, and you never run out of stuff to see,” he said. Still, even for the professionally curious there’s a point at which solitude starts to yield diminishing returns. “Rhythm, live music, getting people together and getting them moving—that’s always been a part of me,” he said. Cooking with paper is fine, but what is life, really, if you can’t throw a dance party?
Byrne descended a vast staircase and walked into the Drill Hall, an enormous room that was once used for mustering Union soldiers and is now used for performances and art installations. Spaced across the floor were ninety-six circular rugs, spotlighted in a variety of colors—mini-stages for solo dancing. A syncopated track—“I Just Want to Dance,” by Sault—was playing over a powerful P.A. system. “Oh, that’s a funky groove now,” a voice said. It was Byrne’s, prerecorded, reverberating through the rafters. The corporeal Byrne stopped, cocked his head, and turned to a woman with a blond-streaked ponytail. “Do we need that last part?” he asked. “Might give it more room to breathe.”
The woman, Christine Jones, was also wearing a jumpsuit, which she said was not premeditated: “David and I are both really into jumpsuits.” The show they were working on was in previews, and they were still tweaking it. Jones is an artist-in-residence at the armory, although for the past year the “residence” part has been notional. She spent most of the pandemic at home, in what she calls the Lower Lower East East Side, where her two teen-age kids killed time by teaching her dances from TikTok. “It was liberating, and surprisingly collaborative,” she said. “You’re across the room from each other, but you’re also having this collective release.”
Jones won a Tony as the set designer for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Last summer, while that show’s choreographer, Steven Hoggett, was stuck in London, he and Jones dreamed up, over Zoom, the not-quite-oxymoronic idea of a socially distanced dance party. If square footage, rapid testing, and air filtration were no object, they realized, it just might work. “I asked, ‘What if someone taught dance steps to a room full of strangers?’ ” Jones said. “Steven immediately went, ‘It should be David.’ ”
The three started collaborating on a playlist, ranging from Afrobeat to Benny Goodman. When it was locked, Byrne, at home, recorded a commentary. Some parts were instructions for line dances; others were more abstract (“Let me see you move like you’re in a new world”) or historical (“This song is by the first interracial band to play Carnegie Hall”); some were idiosyncratic Byrnisms (“C’mon, baby, let’s think about your tendons”). While Byrne and Jones stood in the Drill Hall, half shouting above the thumping bass line of “I Just Want to Dance,” Jones noted the lyrics (“I get kind of mad / Mad, mad, mad / We lost another life”). “They’re talking about the police murdering Black men, and yet it also connects to anyone who’s lost someone in the past year,” she said. Then Byrne’s prerecorded voice said, “All of us have had loss . . . this loss needs to be acknowledged.” The previous night, several dancers burst into tears.
The co-creators had spent months hashing out the details: d.j. or no d.j.? They settled on a compromise; the soundscape would be premixed, but a performer would pantomime on a platform in the center of the room, fist-pumping and laptop-fiddling. (For the two-week run at the armory, last month, the performer Karine Plantadit played the role of DJ Mad Love.) Next: how could a hundred strangers, self-conscious and rusty from lockdown, be made comfortable enough to let loose? A combination of low light and a disorienting disco ball helped, as did a team of “dance ambassadors”—nine ringers who would be sprinkled through the crowd, so that, wherever you looked, someone within your line of sight would be a mysteriously capable and enthusiastic dancer.
Half an hour before the house opened, the ambassadors found their circles. “Let’s try the Bus Stop one more time,” Yasmine Lee, the choreographer, said. She cued up the song. A third of the ambassadors missed the downbeat. They tried it again. Success.
“Walk me through it one more time?” Byrne said. He was still missing the downbeat, and most of the beats after that. Lee, Jones, and the ambassadors formed a semicircle around him. “You got it,” one of them said.
“No, but I will,” Byrne said. “I swear I’m gonna get it.” ♦
