How the Dance Scenes in ‘Once Again (for the Very First Time)’ Came to Life

A man is falling from the sky. Even as he plummets, you can tell he’s a dancer: There is grace in the twisting of his wind-buffeted limbs. He lands not with a thud but a whisper, on the tips of his toes.

That’s how the hip-hop fantasy “Once Again (for the Very First Time)” begins. (The movie opens in theaters on Oct. 18.) The film’s dream logic follows an unresolved love affair between a dancer, DeRay, played by Jeroboam Bozeman — the falling man of the opening sequence — and a spoken-word artist, Naima (Mecca Verdell).

Neither Bozeman, a former member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, nor the film’s choreographer, the street dance poet Rennie Harris, had made a movie before. Plunged into the world of film, both landed softly, feet first. The dance scenes in “Once Again” — blistering battles, a solo of muffled rage, a duet that weaves through a club — reveal Bozeman and Harris discovering their natural affinity for the camera.

Boaz Yakin, the film’s writer and director, is a dance devotee. His parents are pantomimes who have taught movement for actors at Juilliard; his 2020 movie “Aviva” featured choreography by the gutsy contemporary dancer Bobbi Jene Smith. “Using movement to convey things that other modes can’t, that has always been part of my life,” he said in an interview.

In “Once Again,” Yakin wanted hip-hop battles to be “a metaphor for this idea of both life and art as a struggle,” he said. A colleague recommended Harris, 61, a guiding light in hip-hop, renowned for translating street dance styles to the stage. And Harris suggested Bozeman for DeRay.