Staged Reading: Dance Nation

Middlebury Acting Company’s Cutting-Edge Staged Reading series presents Dance Nation by Clare Barron – on Friday May 13, 7:30 pm at ArtsRiot in Burlington and on Sunday May 15, 4pm at the ART Performance Space in the Hannaford Career Center, Middlebury.  Our goal with this series is to share the bold, clever work of some of the most dynamic young writers to hit the New York scene in the last 5 to 10 years.  Each play enjoyed a successful run in a boundary-pushing Off-Broadway theater. Each play speaks to our contemporary moment.

Somewhere in America, an army of pre-teen competitive dancers plot to take over the world. And if their new routine is good enough, they’ll claw their way to the top at the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2019, Dance Nation is about so much more than cutthroat competitive dance, as playwright Clare Barron fearlessly tackles the under-explored dramatic territory of young adolescents entering puberty.  The play is weirder and darker than its subject matter might lead you to presume and with it’s (sometimes crude) adult language is not a play for children.

It’s a brave, visceral, somewhat off-kilter play. It’s angry and it’s sad. It’s brash and it’s funny. And it gets at something rarely explored: the burden of modesty on young American women. Clare Barron’s manifesto seems to be: No more apologizing. No more downplaying my own talent. No more insidious, self-sacrificing, accommodating, niceness! 

While most of the characters in the play are between the ages of 11 and 13, the playwright specifies that the roles must go to a group of diverse adult actors.  In our largest cast yet

the Liverpool, Ohio, dance team training for the nationals is led by Dance Teacher Pat (Andy Butterfield) and includes six “girls” (Aly Perry, Marianne DiMascio, Cael Barkman, Wendi Stein, Zeina Salame, Rohini Prabhakar and Meili Huang) and one boy (Delente Keys)—there’s always one boy! 

In Dance Nation, Clare Barron conjures the passionate ambivalence of early adolescence with such being-there sharpness and poignancy that you’re not sure whether to cringe, cry or roar with happiness...Blazingly original and unsettlingly familiar...Cuts to the bone  Ben Brantly-. The New York Times

Please join us:

Friday, May 13, 7:30 pm – ArtsRiot, Burlington

Sunday, May 15, 4:00 pm – Hannaford Career Center, ART Performance Space, Middlebury

($10 recommended donation)

(Warning – ADULT LANGUAGE – high school age and above)