“Dance Nation”: Female adolescent ambition unleashed

When Clare Barron was at a press event for her play You Got Older, which won an Obie Award, a journalist asked her if she was an actor. She replied that she had written the play.

“His eyes kind of bulged, and he said, ‘All by yourself?’” Barron said. “But what’s important is what I did next. I said, ‘Well, I had lots and lots of help.’ Later, I was thinking why didn’t I say, ‘Yes, by myself!’ I had this need to make him feel comfortable.”

This impulse to apologize for herself as well as her love of a reality TV show, Dance Moms, led to Barron’s latest play, Dance Nation, a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist about competitive pre-teen dancers, opening at the San Francisco Playhouse on September 28, and playing through November 9. 

In the play, Barron wanted to explore ambition and success — and how girls and women sometimes feel they can’t openly go after what they want.

“I was 27 and pursuing life as a playwright, and any time something went well, if someone gave me a compliment, I felt the need to dismiss it,” Barron said. “I wanted to understand why women downplay success and feel bad about taking up space.”

The first thing that Barron wrote was a monologue for one of the characters in the play, Ashlee, where she imagined what it would be like if a girl stopped denying her power and saying no to compliments. Ashlee says she’s going to get a perfect score on the SAT and be a surgeon and a genius poet, and she goes on, “I am your god. I am your second coming. I am your mother and I’m smarter than you and more attractive than you and better than you at everything that you love and you’re going to get down on your knees and worship my mind, my mind and my body, and I’m gonna be the motherfucking KING of your motherfucking WORLD.”

This is not something Barron can imagine herself doing. At all.

“If I had to get up and say my strengths with no bashfulness or no hesitation, I feel like I just couldn’t,” she said. “I would just fucking die.”

Along with monologues like this one, the play contains some unexpected moments — the dancers are played by women of all ages, the girls grow fangs, chant, and hiss, and their teacher, always referred to as Dance Teacher Pat, is having them perform a dance about Gandhi, which he calls a “really beautiful number about resistance. 

Barron said she was able to keep the play on track even with these startling touches by sticking with a simple story — that of Amina, the best dancer, and Zuzu, always second best. 

“In some ways I wanted to subvert the story of the underdog — the person who shouldn’t succeed, and against all odds, they win. That’s not what happens usually,” Barron said. “I wanted there to be a star and an underdog, and I had a simple story about going to a competition. Because I had that skeleton of a simple story, I could hang these weird diversions off of it.”

Julia Brothers, named Bay Area Theatre MVP by The San Francisco Chronicle, has appeared on Broadway as well as regional theaters all over the country. She heard about Dance Nation from the director, Becca Wolff. They read the whole play out loud together, and Brothers, the oldest member of the cast, was cast as Maeve.

“I felt a real kinship with her,” Brothers said. “She’s a little weirdo, but she’s just sort of really in touch with her animal self and some sort of wisdom.”

Maeve wants to be an astrophysicist, so she’s the least driven to be a dancer. She also thinks she can fly. Things like this recall what it’s like to be 11 or 12 or 13, Brother thinks.

“When we were kids, we all had these things like, ‘I dreamt that and then it happened!’ and ‘My dolls come to life at night,’” Brothers said. “We always did Ouija boards, and I remember the magical nature and mysticism about that age and having something that is secret.”

Brothers also finds it somewhat mystical that women are playing little girls in the play.

“Their futures are always present,” she said. “That’s kind of my visceral feeling. Their future is there and their response to it is in the play.”

Like Brothers, Indiia Wilmott, who plays Amina, the star dancer, has been remembering what it was like to be in middle school. 

“There’s a lot of me in Amina and this difficulty of owning that you’re good at something,” she said. “It’s like if I say those things, it will hurt someone else’s feelings. I could get good grades or play music without too much difficulty, and I felt like I had to downplay that I was good at things.”

Dance Nation offers a portrait of corralling female ambition, says Wolff, the director.

“I think the play is about the things we do to talented, smart, extraordinary young women,” she said. “Dance Teacher Pat, who is the stand-in for the patriarchy, wants [Amina] to be in her ambition, but he also wants a piece of it. Amina has a line like, ‘Everything I do, I feel I hurt people by existing.’  People who are socialized as men feel like if they beat someone it’s collateral damage, sad times, but move on. Young woman are socialized to be very aware of the feelings of people they beat.”

In Dance Nation, the stage directions calls for ferocity and feralness. They also say that the actors don’t need to be good dancers. 

Choreographer Kimberly Richards says it’s not her first time working with actors who aren’t dancers. She calls some of the dancing in the play metaphorical, like the first number.

“It’s a face ballet,” she said. “They stand completely still and use their face and it goes between sad surprise and fierce over exaggerated facial expression, and that’s the dance.”

Along with being a choreographer, Richards has also been an aerialist, director, illusionist, and dancer. She says many of her closest friends are from her early life dancing and that camaraderie in the dressing room as well as other aspects in the play feel familiar.

“There’s the self-doubt about our abilities that rings true to all of us,” she said. “And the pushing of yourself to the very edge of your capabilities.”

Brothers has been acting for decades, but she’s never been in something like Dance Nation.

“It’s not a play where everyone is sitting around the dining room table chatting about things, and it’s not a weird experimental thing,” she said.  “It’s a deeply moving experience and a real privilege to be part of, and I don’t think I’ve ever said that about a play before.”