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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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

Cheap Essays: Protagonist Culture

Protagonist culture.

What I mean by this is culture in which you become the locus of attention, you become the protagonist in the narrative of the world, the telos. Rather than looking at objects, we think of the objects as looking at us. This finds its apotheosis in the internet and social media: an interconnected web in which I am its centre, a sprawling matrix – a simulacrum of the world – in which we are the gravitational axis.

In the world, we don’t matter. But in the internet we have our own page, our own fanbase, every connection we see is made to us, every foreign word is translated into our own, every advert is perfectly primed to make us see ourselves more clearly, and every instant of our lives is rendered ordered and recogniseable: a wondrous panopticon, constantly shifting depending on where we put our attention.

It’s a beautiful thing, social media. And while it does serve to connect people – to allow people to communicate openly and instantaneously, the primary reason it has succeeded is because it allows us to curate our own personal narrative, our own experience of the world – always partial, always private, always and for everyone, unique.

So far, so… well… every cultural theorist ever.

But I wonder whether this is what attracts people to particular kinds of cultural experience, specifically immersive theatre. I’ve been to a couple of immersive theatre experiences over the past few years – I guess probably everyone who has ever claimed to be interested in theatre has been to them as well (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the majority of them have been gifts from kind, well-meaning friends and family who are not involved in the theatre). I’ve always been suspicious.

I think immersive theatre has its head more firmly turned towards a theme park ride, than theatre. And is precisely of the kind of thrill that rollercoasters offer: whoosh, your body is being flung around and this experience in this part of the ride is yours and yours alone, and though you might be on rails that are strictly controlled, you are in your body – the flinging of you is what matters for this brief moment. One might think of the rise of video-games as offering the same sort of relief to a sudden painful realisation that you are not really that important: here’s a narrative where the world is everything it never will be, there you go, run free.

So, too in an immersive environment: you are what matters, your good time matters, your body is the locus of our attention, and though you are the puppet being led through a controlled environment, ignore that for a while and feel the thrill of being all you.

In a piece of immersive theatre (and I wonder too whether part of the attraction of certain kinds of fourth-wall-breaking theatre where the audience becomes within the play, cf gig-theatre) you are never asked to do anything more than be yourself and allow yourself to become a part of the story, to become a protagonist.

Which stands in direct contradiction with theatre: where the locus of attention is so determinedly not you. Is so determinedly somewhere else, so determinedly not of your world, where you are not the protagonist nor even a bit-part, and you have to accept that you are just one node in a matrix that doesn’t really have much of a centre, and certainly does not spin around you.

I’m not sure I want to conclude that this makes it better. Or worse. Or that social media is bad for us. Or even that we are wrong to want any of this. I really like rollercoasters a lot and I use twitter all the time. But… well, I’m suspicious, I suppose and this explains – to me at least – why my suspicions about immersive theatre and what it’s doing are less inchoate and more based on a cultural model of which I am also suspicious.

Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Oh, and don’t go and see immersive Great Gatsby or else you are a tory. Theeend.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.