D​​​​​​​ancing On Air

Clare Barron’s Dance Nation— with a cast ranging age from early 20s to almost 70— edefines American irlhood on the stage.

- Adam Green

NOT LONG AGO, I READ WHAT MAY BE the greatest stage direction in a play since Shakespeare wrote “Exit, pursued by a bear” 400 years ago. Describing a group of twelve- to fourteen-year-old suburban girls rehearsing for a dance competition, the playwright tells us that they have sprouted sharp fangs, which they brandish as they gyrate “like baby sexy robots. Bloodsucking robots who want to destroy the world and then fuck it after it’s dead.” This wholesome vision of American girlhood comes courtesy of the dazzlingly gifted young writer Clare Barron and her astonishing new play Dance Nation, which won both the 2017 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the American Playwriting Foundation’s Relentless Award. Having its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York this month, the play follows a preteen dance team as it gets ready to vie for a spot at the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay, charting the sweat, tears, close ties, and rivalries along the way. But that synopsis doesn’t begin to do justice to this blazingly inventive meditation on ambition, power, friendship, sexuality, self-discovery, and the joys and terrors of growing up in a female body. A cross between Little Miss Sunshine and Dance Moms this is not. Barron takes fraught but ordinary moments and explodes them into something larger—dark, funny, terrifying, tender, surreal, almost mythic—bringing to life the wayward energy and unspoken inner voices of adolescent girls, embodied by a cast ranging in age from early 20s to late 60s.

“This play is kind of an archaeology project to excavate the feralness of being a thirteen-year-old girl,” Barron says. “So much is happening at that age with hormones and energy and sex and identity, and you just have no idea how to express it or get it out. It’s like there’s a volcano going off inside you.”