Who: Ani Taj
What: Debut dance film
Where: Youtube
When: Streaming now
Why: I first saw Ani Taj at the Ace Hotel in 2013 in OntheFloor, an exhilarating evening of movement, music, and mingling from her company, the Dance Cartel. Later that year, I encountered Taj at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, where she was playing an opera dancer who gallivanted around the unique, immersive set and got right up close and personal to the audience. Now, amid a global pandemic that shuttered theaters and demanded social distancing, Taj, an artist and activist reliant on in-person interaction with others, has turned to some of her friends and made her first dance film, the thrilling two-and-a-half-minute Sunday, which premiered on YouTube last week in conjunction with Pride Month. Taj directed, choreographed, and stars in the film, which takes place at an empty East River Park Amphitheater; the space was going to be torn down as part of a public works project to prevent future hurricane-related flooding, but it was just announced that it will be preserved after the neighborhood came together and fought for its survival. Among other pandemic works made at the amphitheater was Sara Mearns and Andrea Miller’s five-minute Another Dance Film.

“The amphitheater definitely has a draw for many different artists and communities,” Taj said in an email interview. “It’s a versatile public space that gets shared and repurposed in meaningful ways. I’ve loved seeing how many different ways people have used that space through the pandemic, especially since outdoor spaces have become so treasured during this time — on the day we were shooting alone, we saw folx doing workouts, having meetings, performing outdoor comedy shows, impromptu dance parties. . . . The architecture of the amphitheater definitely drew us, since it has a certain geometric framing that seems to invite movement and a camera — and of course being by water and open air, in a time of such confinement, was appealing. But I think the main draw was that energetically, it’s a space that can hold many different expressive and social dynamics, gatherings — and that’s what we wanted to make contact with and honor in this project. An open-air theater, as a container for everything that we were missing, felt right.”

The film opens with Taj, a native New Yorker, just waking up, stretched out across the wooden seats, upside down and out of focus, evoking both performer and audience rising after a long period of isolation, in addition to a nod to homelessness. In sneakers, light jeans, and a midriff-revealing shirt with abstract designs, she twists and turns, shakes her blond-green hair, stands, and lifts her arms in a defiant gesture. Later she wears an orange hoodie as she sits on the stage, looking back at the empty seats. Composer and musician Daniel Kluger’s searing electronic score echoes with staccato vocalizations and brash percussion that melds with Taj’s choreographic language and inherent sense of humor. No mere day of rest, the electrifying Sunday was shot and edited by Maddy Talias; Kluger is the only male in an otherwise queer- and female-led project. Knowing how central collaboration is to Taj’s process. I asked her what she has missed most over the past fifteen months.

Ani Taj directed, choreographed, and stars in Sunday, photographed by Maddy Talias and with music by Daniel Kluger

“Mostly, it was the being-with-people part,” she said. “I suspect that was true for many people across disciplines and fields — but the social aspects of dance have been really important both in my work and also for . . . my . . . soul — so this time definitely tested that. The video is largely an homage to that, to the longing for contact and communion. We got a decent surrogate for it through @socialdisdanceparty, an online party that has kept us in community and moving together, but being in the shared gathering spaces of theaters, dance clubs, music venues — there’s no replacement for that, the immediacy of responding to the same beat, the charge between people on a dance floor, the sense of play it brings out in us.”

The film marks Taj’s debut as a dance-film director; Sunday is also the first release for Archie & Fox Records, an NYC-based label founded by multiple Tony nominee Kluger (The Sound Inside, Oklahoma!) and playwright and musician Ken Urban (Nibbler, Sense of an Ending). Taj directed, choreographed, and appears in the November 2020 music video for “Privacy Invaders” by Occurrence, an Archie & Fox trio consisting of Urban, Cat Hollyer and John Hager, with contributions from Kluger.

“The most exciting part was collaborating with Maddy on how the choreography and cinematography would hold hands. The architecture of the space presented certain opportunities, both for body movement and for the camera, that we wanted to explore, and braiding those together was a lot of fun,” Taj, who has choreographed such shows as Runaways, The Convent of Pleasure, and Good Men Wanted, noted. “Working solo is a weird thing, too, especially as someone who typically works with larger groups of dancers — so getting precise about one character’s trajectory — and then using the magic of film + editing to split that trajectory up a bit — was a fun challenge.”