Met Museum offers exercise amid art
NEW YORK — 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, armor 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 warmup: calf stretches in the museum’s grand limestone entrance and an easy jog out to the Bee Gees’ hit “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 armor, a yoga pose before a bronze nude of the Roman hunting goddess Diana, and jumping jacks inbetween, all to a soundtrack of disco and Motown hits.
Why bother traveling to a Manhattan museum — some did, from Pennsylvania, Kentucky and even California — just to exercise?
“This offers you amazing moments,” said participant Oliver Ryan, who runs a New York corporate wellness company. “We did our first stretch, and there in the vast gallery was Perseus holding the head of Medusa. What hit me was this was the TV of ancient times, a frozen moment from a story everyone knew.”
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.