Oliver Dennis portrays Luke in Dance Nation.Elana Emer/Supplied
Title: Dance Nation
Written by: Clare Barron
Director: Diana Bentley
Choreographer: Alyssa Martin
Cast: Salvatore Antonio, Katherine Cullen, Oliver Dennis, Amy Keating, Beck Lloyd, Annie Luján, Amy Matysio, Zorana Sadiq, Jean Yoon
Produced by: Coal Mine Theatre, Outside the March, Rock Bottom Movement
Venue: Coal Mine Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: Runs to May 10, 2026
There’s an outlier in the dance squad of Clare Barron’s 2018 play Dance Nation. Thirteen-year-old Amina is the only talented member of her troupe, but fears the social fallout of being too good. Virtuosity requires a ruthlessness that doesn’t square with the rules of preteen friendships, not to mention the broader expectations of how girls should behave. A label such as “show-off” can take several middle-school grades to live down – better to err on the side of nice, polite, chill.
Reader, I aspire to be nice, polite and chill.
Responses to Dance Nation have been exultant. The play was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The New York Times called the premiere “ecstatic.” Vulture called it “daring” and “raw.” The audience at Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre last week couldn’t contain their delight, their laughter so big and aerobic I felt deprived of oxygen-rich air. The people sitting behind me cheered so emphatically I wondered if they were part of the show. I’m not exaggerating when I describe an atmosphere of uniform and relentless euphoria, in which only a humourless grinch could remain unmoved.
Reader, I am that grinch.
Jean Yoon, cast as Sofia, performs a move in Dance Nation.Elana Emer/Supplied
I did not get this play to the extent that a conventional review won’t serve me. I need to elicit your empathy, your pity, because some part of my funny bone is clearly out of joint. What for me amounted to a mildly funny Saturday Night Live sketch – the kind that featured Molly Shannon in her “smelly armpit” phase and may have held my interest for two minutes – was apparently two-and-a-half hours of great art. I have scoured the internet to help me unpack why critics and audiences have loved this play. I remain extremely confused.
The play’s coup or gimmick is to cast multigenerational actors as 13-year-old girls (and one boy). They pounce onstage in leotards and tights, ostensibly unaware of their ungainliness (though, of course, that’s the joke), performing ridiculous over-the-top routines that involve next to no real dancing. It’s funny for about half a minute. Then, the clichés descend like a storm.
Dance teacher Pat (Salvatore Antonio) sashays through the studio with his nose in the air, upbraiding the girls for their lack of commitment, admiring his pout in each sequential mirror. He announces that the new dance competition piece will be about Gandhi. When he mentions “Sabina,” a lionized dance-team alumnae, the girls gush in a chorus of fanatical reverence.
Clearly, we’re supposed to experience a quasi-Brechtian alienation in seeing these women of all ages speak the words of preteen girls, an effect meant to distill the raw intensity of being 13. But the lines that Barron has written for them, and the actions that director Diana Bentley and choreographer Alyssa Martin have created, are so caricatured and unreal that any effective juxtaposition is lost in the utter weirdness of it all.
Beck Lloyd, centre, is a rare bright spot in Dance Nation in the role of Amina, according to the writer.Elana Emer/Supplied
Nothing sounds authentic. Ashlee (Amy Keating) has a poetic facility describing her buttocks as “two little deer droppings smooshed together” that feels way beyond her years, as does the deluge of hypersexual dirty talk that pours from her moments later. During a rehearsal of the Gandhi number, the choreography devolves into an orgiastic muddle in which the girls grope at each other’s bodies and feign oral sex. Whose head are we in at this point?
I found myself waffling between blaming the play and blaming the production. Barron’s script often feels stilted, trying to capture the intensity of adolescence without ever quite hitting the mark. At one point, Maeve (Katherine Cullen) tells fellow dancer Zuzu (Annie Luján) that she can fly, a claim your average 13-year-old might roll her eyes at and challenge. But Zuzu buys it so unquestioningly, she proceeds to throw herself against a wall. It’s hard to be convinced.
However, there was one performance that made me think this play could be produced quite differently and, perhaps, was when it premiered in New York. Beck Lloyd is utterly convincing as the outlier, Amina, giving a beautifully tender performance that still hits the high notes of satirical humour. Torn between the desire to fit in and the desire to excel, Amina doesn’t want her friends to hate her. She worries that she hurts people “by just existing.” She wants to apologize for her ambition, for being different, for stepping away from the crowd.
Reader, I’m sorry, too.
Being an outlier is lonely. But like Amina, who ends the play in a glorious dance of shameless independence – truly the high point of the show – I must ride my wave alone.