Exercise, for art’s sake
Met Museum offers aerobics amid the works
World-class art, meet sweaty aerobics.
New York City ’s cavernous Metropolitan Museum of Art has been holding lively morning workout sessions this winter amid its prized masterpieces.
The 45-minute Museum Workout sends people in exercise attire chugging through 35 galleries, past paintings, sculptures, armour and other treasures, before the venerable Fifth Avenue institution opens to the public.
On a recent morning, an overnight snowstorm didn’t deter any of the 15 people who’d signed up for the session.
It started with a warm-up: calf stretches in the museum’s grand limestone entrance and an easy jog out to the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive. Then came the speedy trek through the galleries and up the preserved ornate staircase of the 19th century Chicago stock exchange.
There were squats in front of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, balancing on one leg before Henry VIII’s rigid armour, a yoga pose before a bronze nude of the Roman hunting goddess Diana, and jumping jacks in-between, all to a soundtrack of disco and Motown hits.
“This ofers you amazing moments,” said participant Oliver Ryan, who runs a corporate wellness company.
The Met commissioned the innovative Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company for the project. It was choreographed by the two women leading the workout — Monica Bill Barnes herself and her dance partner, Anna Bass — along with Robert Saenz de Viteri, the company’s creative producing director.
Bass said the team worked “obsessively” calculating how to keep a safe distance from the artworks. That means no wild swinging of arms or legs, and exercising a minimum of three feet or so from any treasure.
Leading pumped-up bodies around the artworks “really runs against the culture of being in a museum, being quiet and being still and walking slowly,” said Barnes.
De Viteri helped guide the workout session in a vintage tuxedo and sneakers, holding a laptop attached to a speaker that channelled music and recorded narration by artist and author Maira Kalman, who selected the art and gallery route.
“Something very physical happens to me when I’m in a museum. I get this rush of excitement, this kind of tingle of mad, passionate arousal,” Kalman’s recorded voice said as the group did side-stretches in front of a bust of American founding father Benjamin Franklin.
The workout ends with everyone lying on their back, eyes closed, on the floor of the Met’s luminous American wing. Rising over the human stillness is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ goddess — the resplendent, gilded Diana, about to release her arrow.