Friday, March 24, 2023

Preview: Dance Nation
Syracuse University Drama Department
Katherine McGerr, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"This is a play about 13-year-old girls. It's also a play about women, ambition, and desire," writes Clare Barron about her 2017 Susan Blackburn Prize-winning play Dance Nation. Set in the pressure cooker milieu of an impending national dance competition, Barron takes us into the insular world of a team from Liverpool, Ohio, to expose their rivalries, competitiveness, support, and joy, and to reveal not only their sensitivities and insecurities but their fierce undeniable power. A refreshingly unorthodox play that conveys the joy and abandon of dancing, while addressing the changes to body and mind of its characters as they peer over the precipice toward adulthood.