Gaining power, step by step, in Apollinaire’s ‘Dance Nation’
CHELSEA — It’s time to add another one to the win column for the small but mighty Apollinaire Theatre Company and its consistently adventurous artistic director, Danielle Fauteux Jacques.
Jacques is at the helm of Apollinaire’s outstanding production of Clare Barron’s psychologically astute, multilayered, and fiercely unflinching “Dance Nation.” It’s a play about a middle-school dance team in Ohio preparing for a national competition — in the same way that “Moby-Dick” is “about” whaling.
All but one of the dancers is a girl, all are roughly 13, and all are played, per the playwright’s instructions, by adult actors of varying ages. That opens a kind of double lens: We see the dancers as they were when entering adolescence, and catch occasional, inferential glimpses of the people they became. Barron clearly understands that 13 is one of those watershed ages that, while fleeting in a chronological sense, can have a lasting impact.
After premiering in 2018 at Playwrights Horizons in New York, “Dance Nation” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama the following year. Structured as a series of brief blackout scenes, the play steers clear, refreshingly, of “Mean Girls” caricatures; the dancers are competitive but seldom cruel.
Director Jacques deftly balances the play’s tricky elements, including its frequent bursts of surrealism. Though there are a couple of sluggish spots, you are, on balance, fully absorbed by the Apollinaire production. Joseph Lark-Riley’s sound design does an excellent job of establishing and emphasizing the play’s multiple moods. The cast is strong across the board, adept at externalizing the girls’ complex inner lives.
Audrey Johnson is a graceful and sensitive Amina, the best dancer in the troupe. (Johnson also crafted the production’s vibrant choreography.) Katie Pickett is poignant as Zuzu, the embodiment of a second banana, one who is excruciatingly aware of her limitations. Schanaya Barrows, so good last summer in Company One Theatre’s production of Francisca Da Silveira’s “can i touch it?,” is superb in “Dance Nation” as Ashlee, a dancer brimming with confidence and big dreams.
But Ashlee and the rest of the team still have to navigate tremendous pressure, from within and without. They can’t escape reminders of the stakes: As they go through rigorous rehearsals in their studio, they’re face to face with several rows of gleaming trophies won by previous teams, along with a framed photo of a former champion who made it to Broadway, and whose name the dancers speak with hushed reverence.
Their autocratic and creepy dance coach, Pat (a very good Dev Luthra), is constantly playing mind games. He frames the upcoming competitions as an epic Darwinian struggle, a matter of do or die. And he finds a way to make it about himself, exclaiming: “This is the future! I am making the future!”
When he chooses Zuzu, not Amina, as a lead dancer in a new piece about the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a series of events is set in motion that test the troupe’s camaraderie.
Traces can be detected in “Dance Nation” of Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” the William Finn-Rachel Sheinkin musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” “The Lord of the Flies,” and even “A Chorus Line.”
But only traces. This is far from a derivative work. Playwright Barron has her own wonderfully distinctive voice and her own very specific set of concerns: the weight of expectations on young girls and the way the world can conspire to squelch their individuality and undermine their confidence; the latent power they possess — and, with luck, discover — to push back against those forces and construct a self that is wholly of their own making.
When Ashlee delivers a ferocious, go-for-broke monologue about her talent, smarts, and beauty, and concludes with “What am I going to do with all this power?,” you sense she will come up with a satisfying answer. And you find yourself hoping all the other girls will as well.