Cara Wilder EBS CONTRIBUTOR
If you’re looking to welcome 2024 with a memorable flash of exhilarating creativity and fun, the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center offers Many Happy Returns, an inventive, interactive dance piece. Co-created by Monica Bill Barnes, whose choreography has been seen on stage at Carnegie Hall, throughout the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Greta Gerwig’s film Little Women, and Obie Award winning writer and performer Robbie Saenz de Viteri, Many Happy Returns will run six, one-hour performances, starting Jan. 17 through 20.
“I love their new show so much I’ve seen it twice. Super-fun. Truly unlike anyone else’s work. You should see it,” Ira Glass, host of the smash podcast This American Life, who performed with Barnes at WMPAC in 2019, said.
Following its debut performance in Brooklyn, the New York Times extolled, “It should make your head spin in the best of ways!”
Many Happy Returns is a performance that combines movement and language, and gives audiences a chance to reflect on the last few years: where we’ve been and where we’d like to be. New York-based choreographer Barnes describes the impulse for the piece as a post- pandemic exploration of our social habits and how they’ve evolved. She said the show is “exploring the awkwardness of what it means to be back together again, and how we actually are all changed but we don’t know what that means and that we can’t just pick up where we left off.”
Barnes’s creative partner and co-creator, Saenz de Viteri, said the show wants to understand what it means to gather again.
“Being in the same room and being together somehow feels like a muscle we don’t have anymore,” he said. “To just sort of experience something together.”
When asked if this is an event audiences will want to share with friends and family, or co-workers as a team-building experience, their answer is a resounding “Yes!”
The piece is partially scripted and partially improvised, meaning no two performances will be exactly alike. Utilizing audience input, the company creates each show as it happens, maximizing uniqueness and spontaneity. According to Barnes, audiences have returned bringing new people with whom they want to share the experience.
“Someone will come with a friend, then that person comes again and brings their dad and their brothers,” Barnes said.
Saenz de Viteri raves about his part as a performer creating the show with an audience in real time. “There’s an experience that it’s giving people that you always hope for when you make something,” he said. “And you never know if you’re gonna get. And it feels like it’s really serving people in this moment where I wanna self-reflect, I wanna have a good time, I wanna also be a little sad, and I think it’s sort of hitting all of those kind of buttons for people.”
Describing the distribution of labor and talent in the show between himself and Barnes, he recounts a binary, yin-yang process: “Monica and I play the same character, she’s the body and I’m the voice.”
Audience reviews have touched on all of these elements, and are a testimony to what is ultimately a celebratory event: “It was just so special to be laughing together, sharing people’s stories together.” “A poignant and joyful experience about the passage of time.” “That sense of somebody else expressing a feeling that you didn’t even know you had.” “Spectacularly alive and unusual and a celebration of the human condition.” “I feel like I’ve been happy crying for an hour.”
Many Happy Returns runs for one hour and performances at WMPAC are on Wednesday, Jan. 17 at 8 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 18 at 8 p.m., Friday, Jan. 19 at 6 and 8 p.m., and on Saturday, Jan. 20 at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets and more information at warrenmillerpac.org.
Cara Wilder is the director of operations and marketing at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center.
