I was a dancer in NYCB for fifteen years and I can say that there are no New York City dance companies that could survive one season with this kind of behavior. For any kind of insight into a dancers life you would do better to look to "The Last Ship". A dance company is much more like the Military than what this schlock tries to pass off as anything resembling the life of a dancer. There is no time for the kind of physical risk taking that any of these dancers displays when you have a fourteen week season and a hundred ballets to perform and perform better than anything that you have done in your life because that's how it always is every performance every class every rehearsal at a professional level is demanding everything you have and there is no room for anything other than professional focus. As far as the drama of the work it is much more than whats being shown because if you are facing a commander whose skill set is WAY above anything you have ever done its a lot more like if Glen Gould walked into a classroom situation and started throwing phrases at you to see if you could even come close to measuring up. That would be his job. And it would be yours to see if you can handle the intricacy clarity and sheer physical stamina it took to complete a passage. If you had been doing "extracurricular" crap the night before then you might as well leave before the barre started. Its a shame that there seems to not be enough drama in the fierce commitment dancers give in their lives to this art form that instead some amateurs had to turn it into a sex show. I've seen some of the greatest dancers in the world knuckle under from the stress of working in a high level company and still do it with grace and honor and they have the support as best as the rest of the company can give them because we all know what it is to try and fail every day every night and we all know that in any moment that may happen to any of us. That's the reality. The truly harsh reality of dance in America. There isn't any government support and no you can't go around selling sex to sponsors and expect to have an institution that survives. You have to give fantastically magical performances and that comes from drive sacrifice and the will to perfection. Why isn't that interesting?
Review of Flesh and Bone
