PRODUCTION NOTES

“Flesh and Bone” follows Claire, a young with a distinctly troubled past, as she joins the ranks of a prestigious ballet company in . The gritty, complex series unflinchingly explores the dysfunction and glamour of the ballet world. Claire is a transcendent ballerina with vaulting ambitions, held back by her own self-destructive tendencies; coping mechanisms for the sexual and emotional damage she’s endured. When confronted with the machinations of the company’s mercurial Artistic Director and also an unwelcome visitor from her past, Claire’s inner torments and aspirations drive her on a compelling, unforeseeable journey.

It is Moira Walley-Beckett’s first project following her Emmy-award winning tenure as a writer and Executive Producer on “Breaking Bad.” Walley-Beckett partnered with a team of Executive Producers whose backgrounds include premium programming and insider dance connections – former ballet dancer Lawrence Bender (, , ), Kevin Brown (“Roswell”), whose family of former ballet dancers was the basis for the 1977 feature The Turning Point, and Emmy-award winning producer John Melfi, whose extensive credits include “House of Cards,” “The Comeback,” “Nurse Jackie” and the film and TV versions of “Sex and the City.”

“Flesh and Bone” is a character-driven drama that “rips the Band‑Aid off the glossy, optical illusion that is ballet. Ballet appears to be ethereal and perfect - and the dancers make it look easy - but the underbelly is pain,” said Walley- Beckett. “It’s dedication. It’s obsession. It’s an addiction. And it is perfect fodder for drama.”

“Ballet is the backdrop for the story and many of the characters are involved in that world, but I’m not telling a story about ballet,” Walley-Beckett explains. “I’m telling a story about these characters.”

In addition to Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay), the characters include her brother Bryan (Josh Helman), Romeo (Damon Herriman) a schizophrenic homeless man who befriends Claire, Paul Grayson (Ben Daniels), the Artistic Director of the American Ballet Company (ABC), and a company of 22 professional dancers. Casting authentic, trained professionals was the first challenge the production faced.

“I didn’t want to fake it,” said Walley-Beckett. “I didn’t want to have body doubles. I didn’t want to have actors who could dance a little. I wanted dancers, and I wanted to be able to put the camera anywhere. I wanted to watch them sweat and bleed and suffer and soar. So we went on an exhaustive, seven‑month, international search for my main characters, and we got down to the wire. We found some remarkable dancers, including Sascha Radetsky (Ross) and (Kiira) but I couldn’t find my Claire. And then Ethan Stiefel, our choreographer, who is a former principal dancer at the (ABT) remembered Sarah, who had studied at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis pre-professional school there. And we tracked her down, dancing for a company in Germany. The rest is history.”

CHASING A DREAM According to Walley-Beckett, “She [Claire] just wants a normal life, but this may be an impossible goal. She’s struggling to be ordinary while doing something extraordinary. Claire is our eyes into this world, and it’s her journey

we’re following. She is a very complicated character. She’s suffered a lot of adversity. And when we meet her, she’s making one last kinetic thrust out of her dysfunctional life and into a future, and the stakes are high. But anything is better than where she was, so, she’s going to try her hardest to capture this elusive dream. It’s a last ditch effort, because at 21, she’s old to be starting again in a company. This is her moment, and it’s all or nothing, and nothing is truly nothing.”

“We watch as Claire tries to overcome her enormous obstacles. Bryan, Romeo, and Sergei (Patrick Page), the Russian mobster who hires her to dance at his strip club, and a lot of other people who aren’t in the ballet world are vital parts of her journey.”

In fact, Walley-Beckett says the time Claire spends at Sergei’s club, Anastasia, is as crucial to her growth as her time in the dance studio. “She’s so desperate to be in control of herself and to be the kind of woman that she had always hoped to be. There is an allure to the strip club. Claire starts to think of it as an opportunity to blossom into a woman who’s in control of her circumstances and her sexuality. That’s what draws her, like a moth to flame, because all her life she’s been completely powerless and completely at the mercy of men and her circumstances. So, she’s looking at the strip club as an opportunity to save herself and to transform.”

NO BOUNDARIES Of course, the most formidable adversary on Claire’s transformational journey is Paul, the volatile artistic director. Paul sees Claire as a rising star, as the promise of a new future for his struggling company.

“People like Paul exist,” Walley-Beckett confirms. “The artistic directors of companies are wildly creative people. Paul doesn’t have any boundaries, and he isn’t expected to have any. He’s a very extreme personality and within the world of ballet, not that unusual. The dark side attracts me, and so all the characters have lots of color, lots of circumstance. Nobody has an easy road, and that’s what I like.”

Ben Daniels relished the challenge of bringing a character “with no off button” to life.

“He’s such an incredible mixture of self-confidence and arrogance, self-loathing and deep, deep insecurity,” he says. “On the one hand, he’s like he feels like he’s the biggest, worthless piece of human trash. And on the other hand, he’s virtually a god. And he vacillates between those two poles daily, and sometimes in the same minute he can be both. And it’s quite fun to play that as an actor. He’s very instinctive and he never knows until he opens his mouth what he’s going to be like. He sort of borders on the sociopath – other people and their needs and wants don’t really enter the frame. He expects nothing but the best, because that’s how he danced when he was a dancer. He is living through these dancers and if they’re not at their hundred percent then neither is he; he can’t be the best.”

With no professional dance experience, Daniels loved immersing himself in the community. “I hope I’m not offending anyone, but people involved in the ballet world are heightened, crazy people. And it’s so brilliantly written by Moira, who knows that world. None of it feels fake – talk to any of these dancers and they will tell you it’s not exaggerated in any way. He’s not a well man, Paul. In the dark of the night, he feels that he’s just not good enough and that his whole life is a lie. He has no family other than his dancers, and in his position he is the father, the brother, the lover. And Claire is very special. The moment he sets eyes on her, the moment she dances, he falls in love with her completely. And that plays out throughout the series.”

“IT’S NOT A TEAM. WE’RE ALL AFTER THE SAME PART” Walley-Beckett started dancing when she was three, and continued through her 20s, including some years on

a professional level, so she is deeply familiar with the idiosyncrasies of this world, which gives the series a realism that helps drive the narrative. “Coming from my background on “Breaking Bad,” authenticity is everything – dramatically, character-wise, story-wise. And in terms of the ballet component, that’s something that I wasn’t willing to show without full verisimilitude. All of it is true. It’s a very dynamic environment and there is a lot at stake and a lot at play, a lot of jockeying for position, a lot of ambition. You’re in this microcosm, thrust together all the time, and within that, you’re in a very familial, congenial-seeming place and yet, maybe you’ll get an opportunity because someone gets hurt. Or maybe your relationship with somebody will help you further your position. Your friends are your competition so it’s like a little stew.”

Sarah Hay, who returned to the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany as soon as production wrapped, says she has experienced many of Claire’s challenges in her own career. “Being torn apart by people can be an everyday thing depending on who you are working with. I’ve been there. The anxiety from people judging you and people being jealous can take a toll. When any new dancer comes into a company, they want to size you up and know what your background is, where you came from. Everyone is wondering: Is she going to get my part? People can be pretty terrible within any competitive field, but ballet is a sport as well as an art and you’re not playing on a team. That’s what people always forget about dance companies – you’re all together all the time, but it’s not a team. You’re all playing for the same part.”

Ethan Stiefel, a former ABT principal dancer who was working as artistic director of the , was brought in as choreographer for the series. His expertise also served to ground the production within the realities of ballet at the highest level. “Moira and everybody consistently said they wanted to make sure that dance is more than a side attraction – it should be an anchor and something that propels the show forward in a way that is real as possible.” “As choreographer, I was essentially responsible for all of the original movement in the show, which was fantastic because it wasn’t just ballet or just classroom scenes which I’ve lived and breathed for so many years; it was quite diverse. And the vocabulary I worked with – the different scenarios including more modern dance, and the scenes for cocktail parties, stripper numbers – was really inspirational. It was stimulating to step outside what I was most familiar with and have that challenge.”

Walley-Beckett and Stiefel collaborated on a 13-minute original ballet created for the series. “Ethan has a wonderful, complex, and diverse background; he’s embedded in classical ballet, but he also choreographs in a contemporary style, and I needed both. His work is really speaking to the story that I want to tell, which is set in a cutting edge ballet company that is trying to move forward artistically and step out of the museum that ballet can be and try something different. I absolutely had a look and a vision in mind for what the contemporary piece would be – I wanted to shake things up in the company, but there are a lot of echoes and themes that recur and that are explored over the course of the series. And it has elements of Claire’s journey, so the choreography reflects that to a certain degree.”

Stiefel’s goal was to create something that looks and feels like a one-act ballet you would see in a program in any theater. “The narrative for the ballet was obviously created by Moira, which was following a woman going through these different phases of growing and becoming empowered,” he explains. “A Dakini is a Buddhist figure who acts as a muse for spiritual practice. When I was researching the dance, Dakini seemed to be a good dramatic anchor for the ballet and luckily, everybody liked it, and that became the title. The ballet has four different sections and there are some parallels that can be drawn with Claire – there’s nothing that is overtly literal, but certainly there are lines that can be connected. Basically you are looking at the main character from when she’s being born, to childhood and adolescence as she builds relationships. Then we go into sexual exploration and then from that point she is basically finding her sense of self. And I think that was another reason the concept and title of Dakini really worked because in many people’s minds, there’s a Tantric element to a Dakini which translates to the sexual nature – it’s basically the

development of a goddess.”

“I had to create something that works not only as a ballet that looks good and is effective on camera, but also works within the context of the actual episode and what else is happening while that ballet is being performed. And what’s really fantastic is that we had a fantastic composer, Adam Crystal, create an original score for Dakini because the producers wanted something completely fresh, completely new.”

IN SEARCH OF PERFECTION DESPITE THE PAIN Casting a company of world-class dancers for the series brought more than just the ability to shoot authentic representations of ballet. These elite athletes have focus, determination and abilities to endure pain that imbue their performances with authenticity.

“One of the most amazing moments of my life was when I first went to a class with our American Ballet Company dancers in the first two weeks of preparations before we started shooting,” Ben Daniels explains. “And I sat at the front of the class in this beautiful studio and just watched. And it was extraordinary because it was the first time I realized the athleticism and the energy and the power of their bodies. And saw what happens when they stop dancing. When they’re dancing it’s grace and their faces look so serene. And then literally, they stop and they are practically vomiting. Their lips go blue. They’re white. They’re sweating. And it was so incredible to see that close-up. And it just taught me you just don’t ever see that. You have no idea how fierce what they do is.”

It’s an important part of the story Walley-Beckett is telling. “Pain is a part of dance,” she explains. “Dancers don’t experience pain physically the same way that everybody else does because it’s so much a part of their lives. Ballet dancing is not good for you. It’s a punishing endeavor. Pain is always present. And for dancer’s, pain is something to be stoically endured – every day. It is a really interesting, almost noble part of being a ballet dancer.”

Sarah Hay says her character probably isn’t really aware of the pain – and she is speaking from experience. “When you’re dancing your mind really goes somewhere else. You don’t feel anything except what you’re doing in that moment. So for Claire, dancing is a huge escape. In her real life, she doesn’t get to express those feelings very often and this feeling of romance and the freedom of jumping through the air really is a way of expressing herself through movement without having to actually speak anything. To be honest, there’s not that much beauty in ballet. It’s so much work! There are little glimpses and moments of beauty that you feel when you’re doing it and the subtlety of the movements can be just intoxicating. But there’s more pain than beauty in it. That’s the whole point of dance, you have to make it look like it’s the easiest thing you’ve ever done, as you are doing something that’s physically painful while also thinking of all the details and little mannerisms that you want to bring into the performance for the audience. You have to completely internalize it and make it a performance as well as keeping it at this athletic level.”

Walley-Beckett agrees. “Perfection is less about success and more about artistry – when technical precision merges with perfect emotional connection that is the recipe for artistic perfection – for flawlessness. It isn’t enough just to be a technical master, although there is a fervent, urgent, obsessive, addictive desire to be masterful technically, but perfection cannot be obtained without true emotional connection, and that is the engine for any ballet dancer.”

“IT WAS A HELL OF A THING” Creating an environment where the dancers could maintain their level of fitness, learn new choreography and shoot entire days of production created the need for “a scheduling Rubik’s cube,” Walley-Beckett remembers. “The cast have

all the duties of dance in addition to all their acting duties, and a regular day on a set is 12 to 16 hours, and they have to maintain the physical component, as well, so it was a hell of a thing.”

“There were plenty of unique challenges that had to do with keeping the dancers safe with the arduous hours and strategizing on how to dance them in the most economical fashion – normally when shooting a scene, you rehearse it and you film the whole scene with all its dialogue in its entirety, a “master,” and then you move in, bit by bit and get coverage; medium shots and overs and close-ups,” she explains. “If we’re dancing, we can’t shoot that way, because we have to keep the dancers warm and we have to dance them first. So they’d come in at 6:00 a.m. and take the barre, which is their regular class, in advance of our filming day, and then off the top of our filming on a dance day, we would dance the hardest parts first and work backwards, and sometimes that meant even if there’s dialogue at the beginning of a scene, we would hold it in reserve and come back for it. It was really complicated, but necessary to keep the dancers safe.”

Production Designer Henry Dunn says that actually building the rehearsal stages was just as complicated, and created challenges he hadn’t faced during a career that includes stints on series from “The Sopranos” to “The Good Wife.” “The floors were very particular. They had to be sprung floors built to Ethan Stiefel’s specifications. The dancers cannot dance on the regular floors, because there would be too many injuries. We had to build something called a Marley, and it was a learning curve for everybody. We knew that we had hit it right when all of the male dancers said they wanted it more slippery and all of the female dancers said they wanted it more sticky. We were in touch with the head of production at the American Ballet Theater, who gave us some invaluable advice as to the care and the maintenance of it. He said no matter what we do, the dancers will complain about it, and if they’re all complaining, you’ve balanced out all of your possibilities and you are exactly where you should be. And I have to say it was a bizarre pride: They’re all complaining so I think we got it right.”

“And we had to be very clear with the crew that we had a limited amount of equipment that was allowed to be brought in, and you can only wear a certain type of shoe on the floor to protect from scuff marks, so all of the crew had to wear blue booties on those studios, so they all looked like Smurfs on the set.”

THE RELIGION OF DANCE Beyond the floors, Dunn’s brief was to create sets that work as a backdrop for the story, and to subtly add to that as much as possible. His goal for the main sets, the dance studio and company spaces, which were located at Kaufman Studios in Astoria, Queens, was to represent the world of ballet. “I needed to give this idea that from the top to the bottom, these are cash strapped organizations. They don’t put their money into their rehearsal spaces. They don’t put their money into their offices. Everything goes into the stage and paying the dancers and whatever. And touring some of the top companies in the city, I saw pipes everywhere, and electrical conduits, and I realized that this was all bone and sinew. All the architectural underpinnings of what you see on stage are hidden by the fact of this beautiful dancing.”

“It’s just like when you see the dancers’ feet. They’re kind of crushed – and they’re blowing out their knees and their legs ache and they come off and they have to ice themselves, but for the few moments that they are on stage you get that sort of transcendence. But if you look closely there is a kind of realist pain. A knee can only bend so far, so many times in a day. The toes can only hold up for so long, and I kind of wanted to reflect that in that ABC set. I wanted to make it as real as possible. And emphasize it even more, perhaps. And then we found a dance studio in the city that had a huge cathedral window. And I thought, well, that’s it; this is the religion of dance. It’s all here. It’s all of the discipline that they have to go through which allows them to do what they do on stage. And the transcendence is sort of the light coming through this big cathedral window that fills this whole space and makes what is effectively an ugly

space filled with conduits and pipes become beautiful.“

“We also had to create a whole history for the company. Claire has to arrive into a fully working environment, and so that’s what we tried to give in very broad strokes. They’ve been doing what they do for a very long time. So in the offices there’s a broken down copier and there are mismatched chairs and they’ve bought five desks of one type and then realized they needed two more, and so those don’t quite fit in. And on the walls you see posters from old productions we created – did they do you know, two seasons ago before our story begins?”

Beyond the studio, the city itself plays a strong supporting role in the series. “New York is Mecca for the arts in the ,” Walley-Beckett explains. “This city just has an incredible tempo. We wanted to be here to keep the show grounded in truth – if you’re trying to compete in one of the top three national companies, this is where you have to be.”

CAPTURING DARKNESS AND BEAUTY Sascha Radetsky plays Ross, ABC’s male , a role he mastered in real life at ABT. He is looking forward to audiences’ response to the series. “Filming dance presents some unique challenges. On stage, we know the curtain is going to be at 8:00 and then my big variation is going be at 9:15 so we prepare ourselves accordingly, go out. We bang it out. Bust it out. Give it your all. And then you’re done. And dance is an ephemeral art form. Performances are fleeting which is part of the appeal. Things go wrong. Something wonderful can happen spontaneously. There were many things that make shooting the dance segments challenging: Sometimes the camera operators are weaving among us, like ninjas, bobbing around to avoid us. They’re super talented and quite agile, but it’s a little disconcerting at times to have a camera right there, as we’re moving. At the same time, the camera can get in and see things that an audience in a theater can’t see. So I think they captured some interesting angles and interesting feelings that otherwise aren’t presented to an audience.”

Sarah Hay agrees. “Throughout the series, we present a lot of real life situations: When we come off stage, we’re not happy and smiling, we’re exhausted. You’ll see performance aspect, before performance, after performance, everything that goes on in between and a lot of that stuff is really stressful. There’s a lot of pressure from people that is just unbelievable and you also just want to do the best that you can do but you have choreographers, and ballet masters and directors and your colleagues and everyone is preparing for their own things and that means that you have to be prepared for everything that they have to do and you have to do. I think we’re seeing most of the dark things that happen as well as the beautiful aspects of dance. And for the dance world, it’s going to be very exciting to finally not see someone’s face pasted on another person’s body doing this. You can’t train an actor to do ballet because you have to do it your whole life – you can’t just start when you’re 25.”

And the dancers are optimistic “Flesh and Bone” will generate some love for their off-camera work as well. “I hope that by virtue of just showing some good dancing and some new works, maybe it’ll recruit a new audience for dance,” says Radetsky. “But I think even non-dance lovers will really enjoy the drama and the storylines.”