DANCE NATION comes to Fells Point Corner Theatre
Clare Barron’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Dance Nation, one of the most successful, acclaimed, and influential among recent American plays, gets its Baltimore premiere at Fells Point Corner Theatre February 13th – March 8th, in a production directed by former Single Carrot Artistic Director Genevieve de Mahy.
It’s a piece the New York Times celebrated for capturing with wit, wisdom, and whimsy “the passionate ambivalence of early adolescence” and the Washington Post hailed as a fierce harbinger of The Future. On the surface, the play follows the fraught ups, downs, ins, and outs of a group of adolescent competitive dancers as desperate about complicated social machinations as they are eager to seize the trophy at Nationals. Friendships tussle with rivalries, ambition tussles with anxiety, and “blood, sweat, and tears” are more than just metaphors. Behind this, meanwhile, lurk larger, deeper, and sometimes darker questions and issues that resonate more pervasively, providing a societal snapshot at times hilarious and at times less than comfortable.
Barron’s play joins such related recent hits as The Wolves and John Proctor Is the Villain in using the dramaturgy of young women coming of age, navigating the complicated journey into individual and collective adulthood against what can sometimes seem like impossible odds. Onto this she throws the spin that the preteen teammates and rivals, as well as parents and teachers, are played by an intergenerational company of adult actors–expanding the play into the universal realms of reverie, memory, and yearning.
You can hear my conversation about the play with director de Mahy here:
And you can enjoy the playwright speaking about the work and its development in this video.
Performances of Dance Nation run Fri-Sun weekly, with an additional PWYC preview on Thu Feb 12th. More information, details, and tickets are at https://www.fpct.org/dancenation
Please note the producers have provided a content notice for some of the challenging material contained in the play and the production: This play is best suited to adult audiences and contains explicit material and content that may be triggering to some. To request a full content warning please email support@fpct.org.
