When bad dancing is good theatre: Show reveals the messy truth of adolescent dance comps
By Nick Dent
DANCE NATION
Metro Arts New Benner Theatre, until August 30
★★★½
Queensland schools once competed in ‘Rock Eisteddfods’: high-camp dance competitions that dared many a kid to dream big of that business we call show.
So it’s plain what appealed to Ipswich theatremaker Timothy Wynn (THAT Production Company) about Dance Nation, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play from US playwright Clare Barron in which a small-town troupe of 13-year-olds makes a bid for the finals of a national competition.
It’s like Strictly Ballroom blended with Netflix’s Sex Education – as much about the angsty, pubescent awakenings of its cast as their drive to perform and compete.
Dance Nation is Metro Arts’ production of a US play in which adults play the roles of adolescents.Credit: Kenn Santos
As if to emphasise their awkwardness, the young dancers – six girls and one boy – are played by adult actors of varying ages, shapes and sizes (all of them very capable dancers, I might add). It hardly helps that their teacher, Pat (Cameron Hurry on opening night), is a bully with a bad case of the Mr Gs.
Amina (Jeanda St James) is the outstanding dancer, but embarrassed by her talent. Her friend Zuzu (Carla Haynes) struggles with feelings of envy, and her self-doubt is starting to manifest as self-harm.
Connie (Janaki Gerard) feels overlooked by her tyrannical teacher, while Ashlee (Thea Raveanu) believes she’s underestimated due to her good looks.
Dance seems secondary to sex-focused Sophia (Johanna Lyon), and to the ever-daydreaming Maeve (Jessica Veurman), while the group’s sole male member, Luke (Morgan Francis), happily ignores Pat’s habit of referring to them all as “girls”, as he’s nursing a crush on one of them.
Stage mums and their various moods – from extreme pressure to extreme indifference – are all played by the versatile Aurelie Roque.
The play never sits still: naturalistic scenes of dirty adolescent banter give way to uproarious dance routines, choreographed by co-director Jennifer B. Ashley to be “real” rather than “right”. The “robot” is freely deployed.
Then, just as suddenly, there are monologues where the characters speak as adults remembering their younger selves, putting a sobering perspective on the frequently funny clashes of childhood wills.
Carla Haynes (centre) plays Zuzu, an aspiring dancer, in the play.Credit: Kenn Santos
Adding lyricism to these soliloquies is the use of actual child dancers. The kids, who also perform a scene-setting tapdance, are from a local talent school, and chaperoned while offstage, I’m assured.
The show is about pubescent kids, but not aimed at them. A scene where one desperately tries to clean period-stained tights while her mother sympathises from the other side of the bathroom door has the raw impact of a painful memory. Another character’s lengthy description about what she thinks losing her virginity will be like is heartbreakingly innocent.
Not every scene lands with the punch it should, but Wynn and Ashley pull it all together with a Gandhi-inspired routine to the tune of Madonna’s Like a Prayer that’s as jaw-droppingly absurd as it sounds.
Just when you’re laughing at the ropey choreography, the show turns around and floors you with its uncensored insights into the adolescent psyche. Ambitious things are happening on the small stage of the New Benner Theatre.