Dance Nation or In Flight Towards Sincerity

This show is fucking fantastic.

Dance Nation is broadly about group of teenage dancers in the run-up to a competition. There is a competition for the part of Gandhi and the Spirit of Gandhi in the dance that could take them all the way to the finals in Florida. But the plot is sort of Bring It On meets Big Mouth: the competition narrative really only there to allow an expansive canvas of teenage experience, sometimes through scenes, sometimes through monologues, sometimes through movement.

And it’s so fucking great.

All the teenagers are played by adults of varying ages – all women bar one bearded man. And what I think this allowed was a sort of anti-representational naturalism: we were never supposed to really believe that these weren’t teenage girls, but we also weren’t supposed to believe the opposite. We never laughed at the juvenile characters’ words, they were always embedded within the jokes but in a really sympathetic way, and so we were able to be simultaneously older-than and the-same-age-as these characters who are young, searching, and uncynical.

I found it really confusing to figure out what Quentin Letts hated about it (how does that man not see that he’s the bad guy in the story of modern culture?) because it seems to straddle radical performance and “proper” theatre really successfully. There was a scene where Zuzu, the “second-best dancer” – but the one whose ambition since she was two was to be the best in the world – is confronted by her best friend Amina – and a dancer who is, it seems objectively, a better dancer. Zuzu mentions her idea of applying to a programme in Pittsburgh and Amina mentions a dance programme in Russia. The tiny unintentional one-upmanship perfectly modelled that vicious, destructive self-denial that we all experience when faced by someone who is just better than us at the thing we love most: it was so deft, subtle, dramatic. It is a beautifully constructed scene with all the meat of what I imagine Quentin Letts would think of as a really great play, so I guess what he didn’t like was really that it was just two young women? was that it? I really honestly can make neither head nor tail.

And outside of the brilliant drama of the scenes there are these sparkling, strange, shaky dance sequences, where no-one is pretending they are magnificent trained dancers, they are sort of gesturing at the idea of being a dancer, a past dancer that might have been, it’s magnetic to watch and feels like such a fervent choice on the part of the director, where others might have tried to trick an audience into imagining these people were really wonderfully composed dancers.

I loved Dance Nation. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in London in ages. It made me think such warm, big thoughts about growing-up, about the costs and pains of that experience, the particularity of that experience [which I guess is quite something as I’ve never been to a dance class and I’m not even nearly an American teenage girl]. But Dance Nation managed to be angry, ebullient, while occasionally veering close to the nostalgic, the sincere – a mode against which I think British theatre is constantly in flight. It made me think sincerely about my own adolescence: about what I missed, what I’ve forgotten, what I misread and misunderstood, that now seems so important to how I got to the present.

There is a wonderful monologue towards the end about a girl who can remember being able to fly, who really could, quite unapologetically and not at all figuratively, fly – but who forgets this ability as an adult. It was heartbreaking to hear: “the coolest thing I ever did, and I forgot it.”

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Dance Nation is on at The Almeida Theatre until some time in the future – I'm not your effin calendar go look it up you mug.

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