‘Flesh and Bone’ is on pointe with dance world
dug into the seedier side of the New Mexico meth-cooking community as a writer on Breaking Bad. Now Moira Walley-Beckett is tackling the darker corners of the ballet world.
After dancing for 25 years, it’s a place Walley-Beckett knows well, and with her new Starz series, Flesh and Bone, she aims to be on pointe in exploring ballet’s inherent chaos and drama. The series premieres Sunday (8 p.m. ET/PT), when all eight episodes will be available on demand.
“This world is shrouded in mystery and covered in magic sparkles and glamour. I think people find that kind of intoxicating,” says Walley-Beckett, who won three Emmys for Bad. “Certainly for women anyway, everybody wanted to be a ballerina when they were little, but not everybody can be one.”
The road to professional glory is a rough one for Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay). A rookie in a famed but struggling New York troupe, Robbins escaped a rough childhood and her troubled brother (Josh Helman) and finally seems to have caught her big break. Soon enough, though, she's faced with her past coming back to haunt her, rivalries with her fellow dancers and a dictatorial artistic director (Ben Daniels), whom Walley-Beckett describes as “a grenade with a loose pin.”
Hay recalls having “the exact same first day” at her current gig dancing in Germany's Semperoper Dresden ballet. “Everything was going wrong.”
Though she has never met any ballerinas who moonlight as exotic dancers, Hay says, viewers might be surprised at how accurate the show really is. “I’ve seen people chased out of studios, I’ve seen people fistfighting and screaming. There’s definitely a lot of crazy stuff ... in the dance world.”
Recruiting dancers who could act was “vital” to the show’s success, says Sascha Radetsky, who retired in 2014 after 18 years with the American Ballet Theatre and plays a dancer in Flesh. Radetsky and former ABT principal Irina Dvorovenko were cast early, but finding the right dancer to play Claire and other roles “was like finding unicorns,” Walley-Beckett says. “I knew it was going to be hard. I just didn’t know it would be that hard.”
She had to go international to discover Hay.
“This world of Claire’s is really complicated and dark, and it goes to some twisted psychological places that are very, very grounded in real circum-She stances,” Walley-Beckett says. “It isn’t some ethereal magical realism where maybe she’s crazy. ... The character has survived some serious damage, and Sarah understood and was up to the task.”
Hay, an extra in the 2010 movie Black Swan, said of putting aside her usual lighthearted persona to be Claire: “I enjoyed the painful moments she had, because I really felt I could release the emotion.”
Radetsky adds he was able to stretch a little, too, as Ross, the company’s male lead. “He’s a bit lecherous with the ladies.”
For Radetsky, Flesh and Bone shows a different side of the ballet community than other dance-centered projects.
And Walley-Beckett is ready to rip the Band-Aid off.
“Ballet is an optical illusion,” she says. “It appears to be effortless and graceful. ... I really wanted to look underneath the tutu and show the slavery, the obsession (and) the religion that is ballet and take no prisoners in that regard.”