Interview: The Dance Cartel’s Ani Taj on bringing OnTheFloor to Velocity Dance Center this weekend

I first heard about the Dance Cartel by reading about them in the New York Times about a year ago. A profile highlighted their production OnTheFloor, which started out in 2012 in the Ace Hotel and makes its way to Velocity Dance Center this weekend. I remembered being drawn to the dance company’s commitment to making dance accessible, while enjoying their unique video tutorials on YouTube for dances like “Fluff the Haters Away.” It sounded like a fun time and the entry point into contemporary dance that I was looking for.

I became even more intrigued when I read in the Huffington Post that a theater director wrote:

I’ve gone to The Dance Cartel’s OnTheFloor four times and still have no idea what to call it.

That’s not a complaint, mind you. Part dance, part video installation, part DJ set and part concert, describing the evening as a “performance” or a “show” doesn’t do it justice, because OnTheFloor is more than that. It’s a crazy, communal, underground, energetic, messy, drunken, carnivalesque, silly, social, artistic, glittery, participatory, emotional, vibrant, bass pumping, choreographic EVENT. (If you come up with something better, I’m all ears.)

When I learned the Dance Cartel was looking to bring OnTheFloor to Seattle, I gave their Kickstarter campaign $50 and waited.

It’s finally here and the Dance Cartel is taking over Velocity Dance Center this weekend for a series of performances. It’s part of Velocity’s Guest Artist Series. On Friday and Saturday night, they will be joined by Seattle choreographer/dancer Amy O’Neal and all-around funnyman Reggie Watts, plus DJ WD4D. Sunday’s show includes dance troupe Hypernova, drag performer Georgia Sanford, and also DJ WD4D.

To learn more about the Dance Cartel, founder and choreographer Ani Taj found some time between rehearsals and seeing MacArthur fellow Kyle Abraham at the Moore to answer some of my questions. We met at a Belltown bar to talk about dance, cartels, and what to expect from their shows this weekend.

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First, I’ll ask how the Dance Cartel came to be.

I was invited to choreograph this performance party, or an art party. I knew the crowd was going to be standing up and moving around the whole time. That planted the seed for what the Dance Cartel would later become. I didn’t know that at the time, but we created this piece where, when we needed the crowd to move, we just moved them and the stage space changed throughout the night. It was super lo-fi, very DIY, DIY everything. We found this model of putting moments of performance in the crowd and let it break a part and letting the crowd participate in the dance as well.

Somebody saw that and asked if we could design a space inside the Ace Hotel. It was actually Ken Friedman, who runs the Breslin there. He brought us into the space. I took a look and thought it would be neat to craft something specific inside this club-like room. We did that and started running it as a monthly event. That was the jumping off point for the Dance Cartel.

It came out of this excitement to make something that felt social but had a high level of technical and, I hope, artistic value, something of a vision and a bit of storytelling. I wanted to tie the evening together so that it’s not just ambient dancing at a party. That was the beginning.

I also spent a lot of time in Brazil so something else that was informing me was Carnival and watching the way all the laypeople in Brazil all participate in the movement of dance in a way that doesn’t happen in the same way here, I’ve noticed. It was exciting to see that people who weren’t dancers knew how to Samba or had a sense of Brazilian rhythm and could share that very socially. There was a desire to bring some of that energy.

I think I read that you only planned on doing OnTheFloor for a couple of weekends, but it took off and you’re still doing it years later.

Yeah, that’s true. It was initially for a couple of weeks in June of 2012. We thought it was pretty fun and that we’d try it again in August. We kept getting encouragement to keep doing it because audiences responded to it well. It took a while to get it off the ground, as underground, DIY things do, but it started building this funny little underground community.

We always looked to have guest artists so that there is something new at every show. It keeps us on our toes and we would develop new material each month. It kept working really well as a monthly show, so we just kept doing it. I’m happy with that as long as we keep reinventing it for ourselves. It developed into a nice structure. From there, we started doing other popup performances that went further with this model of designing stuff for a space and for an audience rather than for a clean, neutral stage.

You mentioned how the show reinvents itself. How has it evolved from the first shows into what you’re going to do at Velocity this weekend?

I would say that the dancers have a way of interacting with the crowd over time. We didn’t know how it was going to be at first. But with time, the chemistry within the company has solidified and crystalized. We learned to adapt to whatever room we’re in, sometimes very much on the fly. The material has hardened a little bit, but everything around it has gotten more flexibility.

It’s kind of a vague way of talking about this, but something I’ve seen is that the dynamic energy of the dancers change and evolves over time. We’ve also reinvented the show a few times since that first weekend. We swapped in about 80% new material last spring and then another 50% new material this fall. What you’re seeing now is the newest show that we developed in the fall.

It’s been really cool seeing how the show has come to fit different spaces and different crowds as we take it from space to space. That was something new, starting this fall.

You’re also going to get some special guest artists this weekend. Some of them have a long-time Seattle following. That’s cool for us because we don’t know what we’re going to get with that, either. There will be improvisational elements for what Reggie and Amy do. Hypernova is bringing something we’ve never seen before. Georgia Sanford is going to do a mini-Vogue workshop in the show. There are all these new elements for us that make it fun to keep doing it.

I remember seeing Reggie Watts often when he was living in Seattle several years ago, sometimes with his band Maktub, sometimes solo, but he each show was so unique and different from the one I saw before. How did you meet him and get him involved with your projects?

We’ve worked with him a few times. Reggie hired me to dance at one of his shows at Under the Radar, probably about five years ago. He was working on a play with Tommy Smith called Transition. I danced for them in that show years ago and we’ve kept in touch.

When we were starting to do these shows, I reached out to ask if he would be interested in guesting in our shows, saying it would take very little of his time. I knew he was heading to a different place in his career. He’s very generous with his time and he said, “Of course, any time I can do it.” Dates didn’t line up right away, but when they did, he came through.

We tried to keep it really simple. Actually, we try to do that with all of our guests. We say, “It’s five to seven minutes, whatever you want to do or whatever you have fantasized about doing that would be fun to do with a dance company in a dance club, think of what that would be and we’ll sound check it on the day of.” Maybe we’ll throw some dancers into it or maybe we’ll let you do your thing. Whatever feels right. There’s this kind of on-the-fly, dynamic, surprise energy to it.

Reggie did it a couple times with us and then he hired us to do his music video “If You’re F*cking.” That was really fun. But whenever it works out to collaborate, we do.

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Do you know what he’s going to do yet?

Not really. You can’t really ask Reggie what he’s going to do. People do and he says “I’ll do something” and they say “okay.” I’ve learned to just let him do what he’s going to do. We might set the tempo right before him so the dancers know how to play to him but sometimes maybe not. It’s fun to keep it really open because if you’re calling on the energy of spontaneity and of a party, you don’t want to nail it down too much. Surprises are good for everybody in that format.

I know that Amy is going to collaborate with him. Amy O’Neal is a really gifted improviser so we’ll see what they fuse together. If it ignites with the Cartel, cool. If not, it’s great to watch them do what they do.

While doing research for this interview, I read that you once did a show at an Ikea in New York. How do you customize each show to the space?

For me, it’s a very intuitive thing. It’s important for me to see a space before we perform in it. We’ve definitely done the version where we don’t, but it’s nice to go in, clock it, and see what kind of energy the room already provides. A concert venue is going to provide a different energy than a gallery or a museum space. We’ve done all of those and we’ve done similar material in each of them. What’s key is listening to the frequency of the space. I think of each space having a musicality to them. I’m sure architects could speak more to more gracefully than I will.

I always say to start a piece, I need to see the room, or hear the music, or both. Those are the two things that will guide how we’re going to work it. The room can tell you a lot. If you’re working a club environment, you know you’re going to be working a different kind of material than in a quiet, gallery room. What we like to try to do is hack either one of them and give them the opposite type of energy. If we’re in a pop music or dance music type of environment, we’ll throw in something, I don’t want to say heady, but with bits of storytelling or virtuosic performances. Something that space hasn’t seen before. Meanwhile, if we’re in a gallery, we’ll try to break it up a bit and throw in some vibrant, dance club energy into that. It’s so that you’re stretching the audience a little bit. It’s definitely listening to what’s in the room, but also trying to subvert what’s already been in there before.

For the outdoor spaces… You mentioned Dance on the Greenway, which was at this open, Ikea park. You’re dealing without any tech. You don’t have a fancy lighting rig or hazer or anything that makes a dance party sexy. You have to work off the energy of the people around you, the sunlight, or the interesting steps that are in that corner or the lawn over here. It’s all treating that as interesting scenic design and trying to bring something interesting and festive and joyful. We can work off the Carnival format more in the outdoor settings because that’s where Carnival happens anyway. You have to ask how you can give something a big boost of energy without all of the luxuries of an indoor club.

How are you going to customize Velocity to fit your show?

With Velocity, we’re working to make an environment that feels more “nightlife” than how a dance studio usually feels. It’s to our advantage to give it a more intimate, nighttime feeling.

There are those interesting risers, the platforms at the back of the space. Their room is more neutral as a default because it’s a dance studio, so we’re going to try to break it apart and put some levels in the room so that people can climb up on stuff or the audience can go up if they want to watch things, or dancers can go up if we want to pop them in and out of the space.

What’s great about Velocity is that it’s outfitted for dance in a way that a lot of the spaces we’ve ended up in have not been. We’ve had to adapt to concrete floors or sweaty, outdoor situations. We’ve had a lot of challenges in the past, but Velocity is more comfortable in a way. Like with the Ace Hotel, we’re working to make the space come alive for movement in a way that it doesn’t always do.

We’re just trying to break that room up a little bit and make it feel like anything could happen.

Let me ask, please, about your background and how you got into this.

Sure. Weirdly, my early years were in musical theater. I really revered old-school musical theater because of its ability to be quirky and have a great sense of humor but also tell sweet love stories. Above all, there was great music. The days of Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein came later. I loved that vocabulary. Then I got to musical theater school and realized that isn’t what is being trained anymore. You go to musical theater school to do a very cookie-cutter thing. No dis, but it was not for me. It felt too boxed in.

I left in a huff and started to do more experimental work at NYU. I went to the Experimental Theatre Wing there. I kept choreographing the whole way through. I was always making dances from high school onward. After college, it occurred to me that it’s possible to bring together elements out of that musical theater vocabulary, meaning having that silly sense of humor and having elements of music and dance and drama altogether, but not have it in this boxed-in, act one, act two, act three format. I just hated that.

I guess I brought some of that sensibility to working with the Dance Cartel. It’s like finger-painting. I didn’t realize that until we made a bunch of material, but you can tell that there are bits of musical theater in my background. It’s coming together with my love of hard dance music and punk rock and Brazilian folk music. There are all these other elements that I musically and stylistically wanted to draw on so that I could stay fresh and current. Though my background came from this really traditional place, I was always listening to eclectic music and wanted to find a way to bring all of that in.

I have to say, my dancers have also taught me a ton of what the Dance Cartel is and what it wants to be. It was always important for me to have dancers that are diverse stylistically and aesthetically and physically. I got bored going to dance companies that had eight white ladies in gray unitards doing the same movement. That’s not to say that there’s no place for that, but it’s not what I wanted to do. It felt too uniform. I was excited to work with dancers that had different bodies, different backgrounds, in terms of what dance they have done. They tell me more about what’s out there and how broad the palette can be. That provides access points for all of these different types of audience members. It’s like “that move I’ve seen is this environment or that style I’ve seen more on TV. This is more music video or that is more hip hop or more club or house styles.” All of those things can reinforce an interplay of many different influences.

That’s what drew me in to being interested in what the Dance Cartel is doing. I’m interested in how to make art more accessible. I wanted something to be an entry point because I don’t know a lot about dance.

That’s what almost everyone says. Someone will say “I don’t know anything about dance” and I’ll say, “Great, me neither, to be honest. I’m just going from the gut.” I love that. I love hearing “I don’t know anything about dance but I’m willing to find out.” How can we make that connection? I think often not knowing something about an art form can put people off and I want to erase that.

That’s what I find so interesting about what you’re doing. I want to learn more about dance, but don’t think seeing Swan Lake is necessarily the best place to start. My background is with pop music and I probably know the Azealia Banks song you dance to inside and out.

That’s a good one!

Is one of your goals to try to expand the audience for dance?

Yes, everywhere, always, all the time.

It’s an ambitious goal and not to sound too highfalutin, but we’re definitely interested in creating a new and bigger dance public. There’s a desire for it. I can hear people all the time say “I wish I could move more” or “I want to start dancing but I’m too scared.” I hear it constantly.

I don’t watch them, but shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing with the Stars” point to a latent desire to connect to that art form. A lot of what happens on those shows is rather specific stylistically, and very commercial, but it’s answering a demand for something. I think that’s really exciting, even if it’s not necessarily your bag. It’s cool that people really want to watch dance and that they’re doing it across the country.

I think about how we can take this interest and connect the highbrow and the lowbrow a little bit more so that you’re not only getting the commercial music video side, or the sexy backup dancer side that is on tour with Beyoncé. Or you’re not getting only the ballet people who are in their own little corner. How do you get those things to talk to each other?

We want to appeal to danceheads but it’s equally important to me that we broaden that audience and get everyone playing more together and to represent that dance can have so many different incarnations. Every body is so unique and it’s a cool thing to discover.

Everyone can be a part of it. Even if you think you’re the most left-footed, awkward person in the world…

And I do.

I didn’t mean you specifically, but…

Oh I did.

I hear that all the time and it’s awesome. I think it’s great. Everybody moves differently but everyone has a sense of rhythm because you have a pulse and you have a heart and a breath and all of these internal, organic rhythms. I think everyone can hear and connect to music, even if it’s stylistically specific. There’s always a way in, so it’s about finding that moment for a person where they want to let go and the music takes over or what’s happening takes over. Liquor helps for some people but it’s awesome when it happens in a field without that too.

We try to create conditions for that so it’s not just that it’s a cool dance to watch but that I can do that in some form and that my form is as valid as a prima ballerina.

I’ve read in other interviews with you that while the audience is involved, you don’t force it on someone.

Yeah, I think that’s really important. I hate when people say it’s “audience interactive.” I panic. Is someone going to put a spotlight on me and hand me a mic and make me say something? I’m not interesting in putting someone in that position. We want to create a situation where if you want to move, you can move but you are under no means obligated to do that or to be featured. You can totally watch and hang out. If you were at a rock concert, you would bounce in your body and not feel self-conscious about it because nobody is necessarily staring at you.

I try to set it up so that the doorway is open and your body and space matters so you’re not just a receiver of information but you’re not obligated to do anything that you don’t feel like doing. That’s not fun either. I know some people like audience abuse but it’s not my thing.

I go to a lot of comedy shows and I’m terrified of sitting up front and being the subject of someone’s punchline on stage.

Yeah, that’s not my thing. I know that has its place, but I’m not interested in something that’s not inviting or welcoming.

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Photo by Stephen Elledge; Ani Taj second from left.[/caption]

I know we only have a few more minutes so you can meet your other dancers. Can I ask who came with you from New York?

Absolutely. We have a team of five coming with us this time. Alex Albrecht, nicHi douglas, Thomas Gibbons, and Sunny Hitt. We have a team of ten dancers back in New York. If I could have brought every single one of them, I would have. We’re working on a modified scale with traveling.

They all bring an amazing set of skills to the table. Alex is a contemporary dancer who works with a number of choreographers. She has a really strong modern and contemporary dance background. Thomas is a model and we see his pictures of fancy, fashion shows in Milan when he’s not working with us. Sunny Hitt has a really diverse background. She’s a skinny, Minnie fireball of energy and is trained in ballet and contemporary dance. nicHi douglas is a badass comedian. She also has a hip hop background and her own, unique style of movement and this incredible comedic sensibility.

Like I said, they all bring different skills to the table. That’s the team for this round. We’ll have another batch next time we’re traveling. Everyone has learned how to have a fluid structure and can step in for one another if the cast changes.

I hope people walk out of the show and know a little bit about whom each person is and each person is an individual character you connect to on some level. It’s not just uniform bodies moving.