You Love to See It: Flesh and Bone

Moira Walley-Beckett’s Flesh and Bone isn’t what I’d call a good TV show. The pacing is jumbled, the plot both absurdly grimy and off-puttingly precious, and the characters often repetitive. Still, scattered throughout its bog-standard “the dark side of ballet” story are moments of true transcendence, flashes of insight into the self-destructive core of the famously rigid and exacting art form that put other entries in the genre to shame. Foremost among these is the final audition of Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), the aging prima ballerina of the ballet company around which the show revolves. Struggling with a knee injury and desperate to retain the place in the company she’s fought and trained for all her life, Kiira bullies her admirer/drug dealer into giving her a numbing injection that will allow her to dance her audition routine without debilitating pain. His inability to refuse her, a woman who regards him with nothing but impatient contempt, is deeply moving. Even as he warns her that she could cripple herself for life, he administers the injection with only the gentlest resistance.

The audition itself is at first so tense as to be almost unwatchable. Kiira flies into her routine with total abandon, the onlooking company officials enraptured by her grace and technical command, but the knowledge that at any moment she might rupture a joint or tear a tendon makes the whole production feel as though it’s taking place on a razor’s edge, never further than a millimeter from explosive carnage. And then, miraculously, it’s over. The officials burst into stunned applause. Kiira takes a bow and a small, guileless smile flits over her gaunt and nervous face. No disaster, no meltdown, no gory injury. The wave of relief is still breaking when Kiira’s rival takes the stage and simply does it better, winning the role out from under her.

And that’s it. That’s the story’s end. A desperate woman stretches herself to the breaking point, likely aggravates an old injury past the point of recovery, and finds a new well of talent and inspiration deep within herself to give the performance of a lifetime. It’s just that it isn’t enough. Her agony and ecstasy are swept away in an instant by someone else’s story, pushed out of a spotlight that never cared for her beyond what it could suck out of her body, how much of her it could strip off her graceful skeleton and feed to the adoring public. You could mistake it for a love story, at least until its jaws snap shut.