By Steven Maginnis

2007-10-23T18:34:00.000-07:00

Therisa Barber came to New York from England hoping to make it on Broadway, but she has become a hit in Central Park. The classically trained dancer performs there as a living ballet statue on a small plastic box, dancing momentarily when someone drops money in her collection bucket. Although her act might seem short of her original goal, Therisa enjoys her work. “You don’t always get to plan your life,” she explains. “Sometimes you give things a shot, and it sends you in a different direction.”

Talking to Therisa, it’s hard to imagine such a lovely, talented young woman, with her sweet face and her wavy brown hair, not being the theater star she set out to be. But her ballet mime persona may have actually made her more famous than all but a few Broadway headliners.

Growing up in Kent, England, Therisa became interested in dance at five, when her mother took her to the Royal Ballet in London. She instantly fell in love with the art, and she started taking lessons almost immediately. Her mother was her biggest fan. “There was a point,” she admits, “where I almost gave up, but my mum knew me better than I knew myself, and she made me stick at it.” Therisa spent two years studying dance at the esteemed London Studio Centre, followed by an advanced course at Bodyworks Cambridge. After appearing in a royal gala performance at London’s Royalty Theatre, Therisa began auditioning for jobs. She was soon working on cruise ships, eventually entertaining vacationers on the Carnival line. While at Carnival, she helped choreograph a revue of Cher songs for a Christmas cruise. "We performed it on Christmas Day," she declares proudly, and it rocked!"

By the year 2000, Therisa was in New York, but things didn't work out so well. Despite an affiliation with Geoffrey Doig-Marx’s Mantis Project Dance Company and a stint as a teacher’s assistant at the Broadway Dance Center, she was unable to get sponsorship or broaden her professional experience. After four years as a waitress, she sold calendars for a statue mime performing at Columbus Circle, which bored her. The mime suggested that she use her performing skills by working as a living statue herself. “I said, ‘I came here to dance on a big stage, not be a street performer!’” she remembers. “He said, ‘It’s still art, you’d still be performing.’ As much as I fought him, he kept encouraging me. And I saw how much money he was making, and I thought, ‘Maybe I can do this.’”

Having gotten a costume and a routine together, Therisa first performed in Times Square in the fall of 2004, and the experience was a disaster. She struggled to balance herself on her box, her eyes watered from trying not to blink, and the relentless street noise hindered her concentration. Her companion from Columbus Circle, having watched her, complimented her for a pretty good first effort, but Therisa was far from satisfied. Later that day, she found a quieter place to practice her miming skills, next to the Waldo Hutchins memorial bench in Central Park off the corner of East 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue. While quieter than West 42nd Street, the location proved to be a well-traveled footpath, and she attracted attention and money. “From a bank account of zero,” she says, “I had my rent money by the end of the weekend.” She has been performing in Central Park ever since.

A typical workday for Therisa Barber means standing silently en pointe on her box, appearing as if she were about to begin a ballet. Her original costume was a black and gold top with matching pointe shoes and white tights, her wavy hair under a headpiece and her face masked in white makeup and black lipstick. Now she normally appears in a different costume; all in white, with a tutu, making her look like a Degas sculpture. The brief dance she performs when she receives money may be simple or elaborate; children receive a blown kiss for good measure. Standing still on her toes takes much concentration. Once she assumes her pose, she focuses on a spot on the pavement to avoid blinking as she tunes out everything else. “The first twenty minutes are the hardest,” she says, “but after that, I'm off; I'm in my rhythm.” While on her box, her mind may wander from contemplating her choreography to what she’ll have for dinner later. Therisa performs for up to four hours at a time; the pressure on her toes pain and tire her feet as she maintains her balance. To look lifeless, she breathes shallowly by using her lower back and stomach muscles. When she dances repeatedly through a steady stream of tips, though, it can be difficult to resume a shallow breathing pattern. After four straight days, Therisa usually needs a few days off to rest and enjoy some time off. “I don't need to exercise,” she boasts. “This job keeps me in shape.”

She finds her art rewarding, though, in ways that go beyond money. For one thing, she’s developed a unique identity as a statue mime. While most other living statues only move like robots, Therisa’s ballet movements are more elegant and graceful. Her ability to suddenly dance with such beauty after being stationary for so long has a mysterious quality about it. “I think the thing that really gets people about my work is the standing still,” she muses. “It’s nice to have the pointe work as well, to make it like a living doll. It’s unusual for people to see pointe shoes up close. Even after I've moved, some children still don’t comprehend that I’m real. So there’s really a magical element to what I do.”

The people captivated by Therisa Barber’s magic range from locals and suburban daytrippers to tourists from around the world, and she enjoys hearing their generous comments while in character. Many passersby will say that she should be performing in the theater, or how a lucrative dance career is in her future. She draws positive energy from such compliments, and it helps her cope with the stress on her feet - “My feet are a mess,” she laughs – and the discomfort of sustaining an itch while trying to stay still. She even gets spectators who appear regularly. “There’s one woman who always comes by and puts a five in,” she says. “She and her husband are always excited to see me. Then there’s a little old lady with big blue eyes, who always puts a dollar in. . . . It amazes me that people who are seeing me day after day still find it entertaining.”

The children who watch her are even more appreciative; unsurprisingly, they’ll be more into Therisa’s magic. “They are a joy,” she says. “I look up and see a smile on a kid's face, and it's the most rewarding thing.” She recounts how one little girl watched her for several moments before her parents told her they were leaving to get some ice cream. The little girl got upset, preferring to stay and watch Therisa; she began screaming and crying when her mother tried to get her to move on. It flattered Therisa to think that any child would pass up ice cream for the opportunity to continue watching her.

Therisa even says that the spectators give her as much entertainment as she's giving them. In addition to their verbal accolades, she’ll draw humor from those who voice misconceptions about her. They’ll mistakenly guess that she knows yoga to keep her pose, or insist they’ve seen her perform as another character she’s never done in another part of Manhattan she’s never worked in. Other times, with her eyes on the pavement, she'll visualize a person by the sound of the voice, just as someone may visualize her without her makeup. When she moves, she looks up to see a face different from the one she imagined. Another incident involved a boy who had thought she was a real statue and was scared senseless when she moved. He could be heard down Fifth Avenue still screaming, “She’s alive!” Everyone around Therisa laughed heartily; she wanted to laugh too but had to swallow down hard to stay in character.

Her work does have drawbacks. Her schedule is contingent on the weather; she has to be ready to work in the park on a moment’s notice if the day turns out to be sunny, and she can’t make any plans unless she’s certain that rain will prevent her from performing on a given day. The conditions of the seasons also affect her. Autumn provides ideally cool, dry weather to perform in, while winter forces her to work in subway stations where people are generally less appreciative of buskers. Spring produces allergies that cause Therisa’s eyes to run, but the baby powder on her makeup conceals her tearing. Summer humidity causes her pointe shoes to fit imperfectly, and the money comes less easily with more people away at the beach.

The abuse from some people is infinitely worse. One time in the subway a man touched the back of her neck, which felt like an electric shock to her after having stood still for so long immersed in her thoughts. Another time in Central Park, a group of children overturned her tip bucket, forcing her to break character and demand that they go elsewhere. Some people have even tried to steal money from her bucket. No one has ever tried to run off with her bucket, though another group of children harassed her so much that nearby food cart vendors got them to leave by threatening to call the police. “The public are generally my protection,” Therisa says gratefully. “There are so many people watching me, and so many of them have come to my rescue.” The transit police have repeatedly disrupted her act in the subway, though the police in the park have been relatively more supportive. Many people still say rude things to her to get her to break character, but she’s become a natural at ignoring them. “You just have to blank them out,” she says. “The longer you do it, the easier it gets. Usually these people will get bored and leave. I stick it out longer than they do.”

Though it’s her only source of income, Therisa is too ambitious to limit herself to her street act. For two years, she and another Englishwoman, Suzanne Glasper, ran New Dance-Fusion, a collaboration to promote their availability for parties, entertainment productions, and Ms. Glasper's teaching career. A YouTube video displaying their versatility was also promoted. Therisa has her own MySpace page, which draws thousands of views. She has even taken her ballet mime act to Off-Off-Broadway, appearing as a marble sculpture in a play comprised of fifteen poems; Therisa assumed different poses for all but one of them and danced to the remaining one. “It really added something special to the play,” she says proudly.

In addition, she has already performed at Cipriani's as a Grecian statue, requiring her to stand for two hours on a surface half the size of the box she poses on in Central Park. At Landmark in the Park, she worked as a living Statue of Liberty at a Christmas party. After an hour of standing still, she helped get the dancing started while still in her costume, shocking people who had mistaken her for a real statue. Once she got the party going, the guests were delighted with her. “It made the night,” she laughs.

Could this all lead to the big career she hoped for when she arrived in America? Therisa Barber is philosophical about the future. “I live in the moment. Tomorrow hasn't happened, so I'm not going to worry about it. As long as I’m making good money and I'm in good shape, I'll carry on doing my act.”

3.

[The different faces of Therisa Barber: 1.) as the original ballerina mime; 2.) as the white ballerina mime, and; 3) as herself, undisguised.]

Visit Therisa's MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/ballerinamime .

The Magic of Therisa Barber

By Steven Maginnis