By Christina Murphy - Columnist It seems like every few years the supposed dark side of ballet will pirouette onto the big screen. These films and shows are typically jam-packed with storylines about catty ballerinas, body image issues and scandalous affairs. Such tropes were established by classics like the salacious melodrama, “Showgirls” in 1995; the cheesy underdog story “Center Stage” in 2000; the psychological thriller, “Black Swan” that earned Natalie Portman an Oscar in 2010; and the heartwarming, coming-of-age, one-season series on ABC Family, “Bunheads.”
Starz is the latest to attempt telling a ballerina’s story with their limited series, “Flesh and Bone,” a dark tale of a troubled young woman’s rise to stardom which doesn’t quite exude the same fuzzy feeling as “Bunheads.” The series premiere was titled “Bulling Through,” which is defined on screen at the start of the episode: “To force through an unsafe situation to extricate soldiers from danger.” Before there is even a tutu on screen, the art of ballet is compared to combat.
Created by Moira Walley-Beckett, who won a Primetime Emmy for her work on “Breaking Bad,” “Flesh and Bone” portrays dancers, and those who run the fictional American Dance Company, as vicious and egotistical maniacs.
The series is over-the-top and at times absurd, but it’s a riveting hour of television that I could not stop watching. Claire, a 21-year-old from Pittsburgh, runs away from her home to audition for the prestigious ballet company in New York City. She gets through to the final stage of the audition, where she goes before the program directors by herself and they critique her based on her resume and solo performance.
The judges are stern and callous, with one even dismissing a dancer because her hips are too wide. Claire’s resume has questionable gaps in it, but her talent is flawless, so they asked her to join the company.
The program director, Paul, reminds her that her acceptance to the company was not a given and that he’s hoping she “won’t disappoint” him. Paul is an effeminate older gay man, whose desire for power and perfection borders on sociopathic. He delivers some of the most cliched lines of the entire episode. At times, his dialogue sounds as if RuPaul and Gordon Ramsey wrote the script together.
Claire doesn’t initially have the warmest reception from her fellow ballerinas, namely Kiira, the company’s aging, cokehead principal dancer. She does, however, find companionship with Daphne, a fellow dancer who takes Claire with her to her secret second job as a dancer at an upscale strip club. Despite there being several explicit moments like this one in the episode, Claire remains a sexually repressed character. There are strong suggestions that she was the victim of sexual abuse, likely at the hands of her brother Bryan, who until very recently was deployed in Afghanistan.
“Flesh and Bone” doesn’t stray too far from common dancer film tropes, specifically with Claire’s naive wide-eyed disposition and Paul’s controlling “I-can-make-you-a-star” hold on her, but it does have some striking moments.
Ethan Stiefel, American Ballet Theater principal dancer and hunky bad boy from “Center Stage,” choreographed the cast of professionally trained dancers, which makes for several beautiful performances.
If you can move past the cliches, it’s a pretty entertaining series.