Dance Nation: A Guide
By: State Theatre Company South Australia
Tags: Theatre, Gender, Dance, Feminism, Adolescence

Everything you need to know about Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, a State Theatre Company South Australia co-production with Belvoir for Adelaide Festival and the first show of State Theatre Company South Australia’s 2020 season.

What is this show about?

In Middle America, a dance team of adolescent girls (and one boy) are preparing for the most important moment of their young lives - a national dance final. Under the guidance of a ferocious dance teacher, we see the teens (all played by adults) collectively fight for glory while dealing with their own talents, inadequacies and experiences. Some are naturally skilled, some just want to have fun, some have overbearing stage mothers, and all are discovering their power in a world that threatens to take it away.

But a straight-laced, coming-of-age tale this is not. Dance Nation is a blur of reality and fantasy; a dream and a nightmare. It flips from the mundane to the surreal in a heartbeat, taking the audience on a turbulent ride through adolescence.

Also — it’s really funny.

Fusing high energy dance numbers, quietly poignant moments and fantastical bursts of surrealism, Dance Nation is one of the most extraordinary pieces of form-bending theatre to emerge in the past five years.

The success of Dance Nation

Dance Nation had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, New York, in May 2018 and its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London.

It won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2017 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — Drama in 2019. It was also a shared recipient of the inaugural Relentless Award, established in honour of Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2015.

The New York Times called Dance Nation one of the best plays of 2018, stating:

“[The play] conjures the passionate ambivalence of early adolescence with such being-there sharpness and poignancy that you’re not sure whether to cringe, cry or roar with happiness. Blazingly original and unsettlingly familiar.”

The writer

Clare Barron is a Washington-born playwright who originally set out to become an actor, but discovered a love for playwriting after penning her own monologues.

Dance Nation playwright Clare Barron.

Her other plays include You Got Older, which received its world premiere with Page 73 and later appeared at Steppenwolf (Obie Award for Playwriting, Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Play, Kilroys List, and Susan Smith Blackburn finalist), I’ll Never Love Again (The Bushwick Starr, NYTimes & Time Out Critics’ Picks), and Baby Screams Miracle (Woolly Mammoth, Clubbed Thumb).

In an interview with The Guardian, the 33-year-old speaks about her passion for telling women’s stories that concentrate on bodies and sex. The article states that “she grew up in a conservative Christian community in Washington state and has tasked herself with undoing the shame she learned there.”

Dance Nation, Barron says, is a play about women, ambition, and desire.

“I wanted to write this play because I wanted to present a different picture of teenage girls onstage. One where trauma wasn’t the central narrative. One where “being the best” was.”

The director

The incredible Imara Savage (who directed Mr Burns: a post-electric play for State Theatre Company South Australia and Belvoir in 2017) takes the helm once again for Dance Nation. Clara Solly-Slade, recipient of the inaugural Emerging Director Fellowship through the support of The James and Diana Ramsay Foundation and the Helpmann Academy, is also on board as Assistant Director.

Dance Nation director Imara Savage

Imara says Dance Nation is “in part a reclamation of narratives, of language and the female body and asks serious questions about what it means to win, to be the best and to burn the brightest.”

Under Imara’s direction, designer Jonathon Oxlade has created a singular, psychological dance studio surrounded by mirrors. As he writes in his Designer’s Note, it becomes the training ground and the battleground — a space that transforms and shifts between the past and the future, a space that is less literal and one that sits inside a feeling and intuitive space.

Jonathon worked with Imara and lighting designer Alexander Berlage to create an aesthetic that drew inspiration from pop culture references, including the high school in the film Carrie, American pop video clips with a cheerleader edge and the television series Dance Moms.

The vision board. Photo by Sia Duff

Composer Luke Smiles and sound designer Andrew Howard then worked with Larissa McGowan’s choreography to create an electric soundtrack that worked with the dance moves, rather than the other way around. Rather incredible.

The cast

Dance Nation has a star cast featuring Elena Carapetis, Emma Harvie, Chika Ikogwe, Yvette Lee, Rebecca Massey, Amber McMahon, Tara Morice, Tim Overton and State Theatre Company South Australia’s very own Artistic Director and Helpmann Award-winning actor, Mitchell Butel. Only Mitchell, as Dance Teacher Pat, and Elena, as an array of dance mothers, play adults. The rest of the cast, ranging in age from 20s to 50s, all play the teenage dancers.

This doesn’t mean the actors become teenage caricatures — the intention here is to ensure the audience views these characters both as teenagers and the adults they’ll become.

It aims to illustrate that what happens to us at 13 is carried throughout our lives.

In turn, it becomes a ‘memory play’.

As Imara Savage quotes in her Director’s Note:

“Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn’t a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.”

― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

Actors Emma Harvie and Yvette Lee in rehearsal. Photo by Sia Duff

The characters of Dance Nation. Top row from L to R: Zuzu (Chika Ikogwe), Tim Overton (Luke), Rebecca Massey (Maeve). Second row: Elena Carapetis (Dance Moms), Tara Morice (Sofia), Mitchell Butel (Dance Teacher Pat). Bottom row: Amina (Yvette Lee), Ashlee (Amber McMahon), Connie (Emma Harvie).

OK. Let’s go deeper

Beneath the pomp and pageantry of Dance Nation is an intense examination of ambition, adolescence, womanhood, sexuality and gender roles.

As Dance Nation literary assistant Lizzie Stern writes, the play “asks the scariest questions about who we are, how we became that person, and who we will become next” and insists we think about these questions in terms of gender.

“And there’s really no other way to do it — because, before we even start preschool, we’re assigned and participating in gender roles.”

“As Judith Butler puts it, in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, ‘Does being female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance?’ The rules and borders of this performance are constraining for all, and unbearably excruciating for some. And what’s so spectacular about Dance Nation is that its characters can’t be boxed in-at least not entirely, not yet. None of them is a ‘type.’ They’re all the smart one, the funny one, the competitive one, the supportive one, they’re all driven in part by an animalistic id, they’re all self-possessed and vulnerable and messy and shifting and opening. Or, in a word, human.” — Lizzie Stern

In short?

Dance Nation will make you laugh, maybe even make you cry, and bring some of the best dance moves to ever grace the Scott Theatre stage. It’s poignant, shocking, funny, tender, empowering, beautiful and just a little bit daggy.

Get out your leotards.

Dance Nation’s Adelaide season plays at Scott Theatre, 21 Feb — 7 Mar, for Adelaide Festival. Tickets at statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/dance-nation Dance Nation’s Sydney season plays at Upstairs Theatre from 14 Mar — 12 Apr, tickets at https://belvoir.com.au/productions/dance-nation/