It seemed improbable to Taj and Pinkleton that Virgin Voyages, a joint venture of Bain Capital and Branson’s Virgin Group, would want what they had to offer. “I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”
“I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide,” David Foster Wallace wrote in the opening paragraph of his 1996 essay “ Shipping Out,” about the week he spent on a Caribbean cruise. The words “cruise ship entertainment” might bring to mind a Broadway revue, a Vegas-style cabaret, or a sun-drenched deck filled with line-dancing vacationers. “I think we had a very narrow idea of what making a show for a ship would mean.” “We definitely had a moment of: A cruise ship - did they get the right people?” Pinkleton said, recalling his confusion when he and Taj, who are represented by ICM Partners, were invited by their agents to pitch a show to Virgin Voyages, a new adults-only cruise line founded by the British billionaire Richard Branson. It could have been one of the many clubs or theater spaces where the choreographers - Ani Taj, Sam Pinkleton and Sunny Min-Sook Hitt - had performed and presented their work over the past decade, as members of the Dance Cartel, a group founded by Taj in 2012 and known for its exuberant, open-to-all, party-meets-performance live events.īut a few features set this space apart: the screen outside the entrance beckoning “Sail Into Something Spectacular” the fluorescent signs reading “PORT” and “STAR BOARD” to mark stage left and stage right the enormous pink inflatable whale onstage. Neon projections in the theater, a nightclub-like space called the Red Room, exclaimed “Welcome to the Show!!” Cocktail servers wove efficiently through the crowd with trays of drinks, as nimble as the dancers who would soon take the stage. On a late-summer night, three choreographers greeted friends at the New York opening of their latest show, exchanging hugs and chatting through masks over the blare of pop music.