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In the film Billy Elliot, when the boy's father discovers that his son has been sloping off to ballet coaching instead of boxing, he feels rage and incomprehension in equal measure. "I could understand if it were football ... or wrestling," he splutters. "But not frigging ballet." The brother puts it more succinctly: "Ballet is for poofs."
It's important that Stephen Daldry's film is set 20 years ago, and not just because that was the era of the miners' strike, whose dented macho values provide the tradition for Billy's generation to kick against. Attitudes like that of the Elliots just wouldn't be plausible today. Where once every male classical dancer was assumed to be somewhat limp in the wrist, today such prejudice is untenable. Ballet's men have become progressively more rugged, more overtly masculine on stage. Off-stage, there are girlfriends, wives and children, viz Channel 4's Ballet Boyz - two series of video diaries (a third coming soon) made by a pair of ex-Royal Ballet dancers, the matey, unpretentious and decidedly straight William Trevitt and Michael Nunn.
Post-Fame!, and post-Billy Elliot even more so, dance is no longer perceived as a girly option - a turnaround now being felt by vocational schools in a marked rise in applications from boys. Slowly but surely, the hard personal and physical discipline demanded by dance is beginning to be seen on a par with, say, that of professional football. It's understood that dancers have to be muscular and tough. Not just in order to lift eight-stone ballerinas above their heads without wobbling - a supporting role, literally - but also as stars in their own right. Magnified sex appeal has inevitably become part of the mix.
So how has this sea-change come about? Channel 4, in a documentary called Bourne to Dance to be broadcast on Christmas Day, would like to lay the responsibility at the feet of Matthew Bourne, the choreographer whose 1995 production of Swan Lake redefined the role of the male dancer by gender-switching that most famously feminine of ballet images: the swan. The programme is presented by Bourne, and - using archive performance clips and a variety of...