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'Flesh and Bone,' 'Mozart in the Jungle' and the fight to keep fine arts alive

Television loves diving deep on subjects from surgery to Indiana parks management to Yonkers public housing development. But even by those standards, there's something fascinating about that fact that there are now two shows focused on a particularly niche subject: the struggles to keep orchestras and ballet companies alive.

"Flesh and Bone," which debuted recently on Starz, and "Mozart in the Jungle," which will return for a second season on Amazon, present, respectively, a sexed-up vision of life in a struggling corps de ballet, and a sexed-up vision of life in a struggling New York orchestra. (Standard disclosure: Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) But while both might manage to bring new audiences to their art forms, TV is in the middle of its own business transformation. It's in no position to offer another medium a way out.

"Its audience has been dying out. And companies are trying to inject new life into ballets, and contemporary ballet has come into the forefront of public consciousness," "Flesh and Bone" creator Moira Walley-Beckett told me when we spoke in Los Angeles about the series and the state of ballet this summer.

"I think the community has been afraid that it's a dying art form because it's an expensive art form, and the tickets are expensive, and because, in our culture right now, everything is so immediate. And we're used to things happening really fast. And the art of dance isn't generally a narrative story that's told physically without words. So I think it's a lot to ask of this generation, and because in the States it's not funded by the government, it's all benefactors and fundraising and entirely precarious."

Walley-Beckett tried to work the economic vulnerabilities that plague ballet companies into the plots of "Flesh and Bone," whether it's expressed in the tensions that flare in the small apartments the dancers have to share due to their low salaries, or the way dancers like Claire (Sarah Hay) are encouraged to socialize and even sleep with wealthy donors.

"Oftentimes the dancers are indentured in all ways," she explained. "So it's really important to show up for these cocktail parties, it's really important to not bite the hand that feeds you, because the right benefactor - look, it costs $80,000 for pointe shoes for one dancer for one season. $80,000 each. The amount of shoes that they go through. So if a company can sponsor your favorite ballerina's pointe shoes ... it's a really brilliant marketing strategy."

The financial disparities between salaries for principal dancers in ballet companies and dancers in the corps can also exacerbate tensions, like the ones between Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), a dancer who fears being displaced by Claire not merely because of the shame of a professional demotion, but because of the catastrophic financial consequences.

"I really wanted to carve that out in a variety of ways, to show how deeply resented the dancers would be when someone like Claire appears on the scene as such a threat, and how somebody who wants to be Claire, like Mia (Emily Tyra), who doesn't have a financial safety net, and someone like Daphne [Raychel Diane Weiner], who's fighting for her own integrity as an artist," would react to those financial pressures, Walley-Beckett said. "I wanted to show all the different facets."

Blair Tindall, whose memoir of her oboe career is the basis for "Mozart in the Jungle," is even more scathing about the economic structure of the classical music business. She suggests that orchestras fatally overextended themselves as arts funding expanded in the 1960s, fueled by the beliefs that fine arts would both enlighten and elevate the masses and drive economic development. These expanded seasons, new facilities and transition from part-time to full-time employment created enormous economic commitments for classical music organizations.

Places like Lincoln Center meant "new business for contractors, service industries, transportation, investment companies, law offices, and accounting firms. Moving companies provided exhibition tour packages, with insurance firms securing the precious artworks. Consultants peddled management surveys to orchestras, troupes, and civic organizations planning the arts centers, while manufacturers sold the centers' ingredients: carpeting, seats, lighting, concrete, steel, easels, and industrial tiles," Tindall writes.

But this expansion didn't necessarily consider whether audiences actually craved so much classical music. "In 1961, only nine of America's top 26 orchestras worked more than 30 weeks a year, with only four of the nine providing hospitalization insurance," Tindall notes.

"The irony is that arts administrators, orchestra trustees, critics and others in influential positions have worked hard for generations to help bring about the current state of doubt and confusion. Driven by economic winds and, in some cases, fearsome ambition, they have sold the American public on the need for quantity in music rather than quality, on the necessity for glamour at the podium and on the crippling belief that music is a product that must be promoted, advertised and devoured like so much fast food."

Both "Flesh and Bone" and Amazon's adaptation of "Mozart in the Jungle" manage to make their art forms beautiful. Walley-Beckett doesn't have to explain what Claire's doing for us to be transported when she dances. And while Tindall may emphasize that career prospects for oboists are limited, when Hailey (Lola Kirke) - the Tindall character in the show - plays, she doesn't need an orchestra backing her to sound beautiful.

That beauty may draw some new audiences to ballet and classical music, teaching them that they might love a new art form without forcing them to take a chance on an expensive ticket. And there's a real value, at a time when consumers seem resistant to the idea that culture has any financial value at all, to making it clear just what it costs to put on a single concert or show.

But "Flesh and Bone" and "Mozart in the Jungle" are more diagnostic than they are prescriptive, which maybe is the point. TV can't save high culture. Orchestras and ballet companies will have to figure out ways to save themselves.

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