Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Smarten up, world. That way you have of underestimating, sidelining, denying even, the sheer visceral power of pre-teen girls means you’re missing out, world.

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There’s a play now running at the SkirtsAfire Festival that’s all about that: power and rage, under pressure and ready to explode. Dance Nation, by the American writer Clare Barron, will startle you mid-plié, so to speak, and knock you back in your seat. It’s insightful, it’s disturbing, it’s frightening.

There are plenty of plays set on the threshold between childhood idylls and the problematic complexities of grown-up world. And just as many about those infamously vexatious high school years: how does anyone survive that peer group meanness, the bullying, the competition?. Dance Nation really isn’t like those.

As the production directed by SkirtsAfire’s new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg reveals, the 2018 play, nominated for a Pulitzer, ranges freely between the dancers now and the women they become looking back in time to their younger selves. Goldberg’s nine-actor ensemble, who vary in age between 20-something and 50-something, takes us into the locker room, onto the stage, and sometimes into the future, with a competitive dance team of dance-crazy 13-year-old girls (plus one boy), and their relentless trainer/coach/director Dance Teacher Pat (Troy O’Donnell).

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Their specific aspiration is a trip to the national finals. And there’s a lot of perfect high kicks and extensions to be executed, and angst and anxiety to be overcome, en route to this monumental goal. In this drive, Dance Nation has been compared to the soccer team girls of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, produced here by The Maggie Tree several seasons ago. But Dance Nation is a stranger swirl of theatrical experiences, and like the characters  struggling to make dance fit life and vice versa, it never lets you quite settle.

The opening scene leads you to expect a musical comedy: a perky synchronized number with beaming girls in matching sailor suits. The number comes crashing down when one of the dancers has a devastating fall and fracture, never to be seen again, which seems to perturb Dance Teacher Pat not at all.

His vision for upping the competitive ante, rather hilariously, is an interpretive dance exploration of Gandhi. None of the girls has heard of him. And then Dance Teacher Pat (“I am making the future,” he declares) has the further inspiration of double starring roles: Gandhi and The Spirit of Gandhi.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

There’s ensemble camaraderie, to be sure. The dancers, with varying skill, throw themselves into performance. And the girls verbally support, encourage, and console each other (“your turns were amazing!”). But there’s an undercurrent of competition, both for the leading roles and individual honours, and there’s doubt.

The anxious and uncertain Zuzu (the appealing Kristen Padayas), who’s dreamed of being a dancer forever, gets the lead role — even though, as she knows, she isn’t as good a dancer as Amina (Sydney Williams). “I hope I’m not losing my spark,” Zuzu says to her best friend, hoping for reassurance. The knotted relationship between the two is the centre from which ripples spread outward. And the scenes between the two are beautifully played by the two actors.

Backstage, the young dancers kibbutz, reveal insights, crises, fears, tensions…. In very sharply written scenes, subjects like menstruation and masturbation (“what do you think about when you masturbate?”), the cost of dedication, naturally seem to come and go, ignite and flicker out, among them. Thirteen is a dangerous, confusing age to be, on the brink of something big, but not just between worlds. At age 13, one girl plays with toy horses, while another tries to get the hang of masturbation. And there are glinting reveals of mother-kid relationships in scenes between the dancers and their moms (all smartly played by Kristi Hansen).

The excellent sound score by Kena León captures that sense of volatile confusion, with its cross-hatching of motifs. Stephanie Bahniuk’s design, a dance studio with panels of distorting mirrors, speaks to the age, too.

Kristen Padayas in Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Sometimes there are monologues. Amino, as Williams vividly conveys, is afraid to admit her own special talent, and her own ambition. She’s straining under the opposing pressures to deliver and to not be better than the others. Padayas’s Zuzu can’t reconcile her big dreams and her moderate talent, always struggling to live up to the proxy ambitions of her mother, a former dancer. Ashlee (Kijo Gatama) starts her monologue with confidence in her smartness and sexuality — “I think I might be frickin’ gorgeous” — and it escalates into a rage-filled manifesto. “I am your god, I am your second coming.” Gatama knocks it out of the park. One of the most wistful touch-downs comes from Kristin Johnston in a moment as a woman remembering her younger dancer self who had an unexpected magic power, and then somehow lost it.

Unnerving are the chants that erupt — furious, violent, aggressive. Fangs erupt; blood is drawn. As Ashlee says, stepping back to consider her declaration of domination, “what am I going to do with all this power?” That’s the question. And Dance Nation shakes you up and leaves you to think about it.

Check out the 12thnight preview to learn more, from Amanda Goldberg, about her debut SkirtsAfire production.

REVIEW

Dance Nation

SkirtsAfire Festival 2025

Written by: Clare Barron

Directed by: Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Sydney Williams, Kristen Padayas, Kijo Gatama, Veenu Sandhu, Kristin Johnston, Linda Grass, Tristan Hafso, Troy O’Donnell, Kristi Hansen

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through March 16

Tickets: skirtsafire.com