University of Debrecen

The Problem of the Male Dancer

Analyzing Billy Elliot

Boda Krisztina

Modern British Literature and Culture 2

Ureczky Eszter

2017. 05. 15.

Hereby, I certify that the essay conforms to international copyright and plagiarism rules and
regulation.
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As once Fred Astaire said, “I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have

never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.” (Fred Astaire

Quotes) This quote perfectly sums up why dancing is such an amazing work of art. Dance is

for everyone: it is open to all ages, genders, races; it is not about being different. On the

contrary, it is about enjoying something collectively, does not matter what cultural

background we have, in what social circumstances we came from, etc. Dancing is a

performance, where everybody can be themselves. That is why Billy Elliot is an excellent

movie from this aspect. In this essay, I am going to focus on how dancing, as a form of art is

presented in the movie, and I am also going to elaborate on how gender issues appear

throughout the whole story, paying particular attention to the connection between masculinity

and dancing.

Billy is a young boy who is living with his family in a little city called Durham in

North East England. This is a typical working class family with very conservative views.

Sadly, Billy’s mother had passed away, and we just know her from Billy’s memories.

However, this particular event will be important from Billy’s perspective later on. There is

another woman in the family, his grandmother, who lives with the family. She could be a

substitute mother for Billy, and she probably was earlier, although now we see her as a

foolish, old nanny figure, who keeps repeating the same line: I could have been a professional

dancer!

The movie touches upon a lot of controversial issues: Thatcherism, working class

circumstances, inequality, culture, gender, arts, etc. From these issues I would like to focus

mainly on gender here. Theresa Buckland writes in her review of the book Dance, Gender and

Culture by Helen Thomas: “Recent Western performance and scholarship have increasingly

addressed the idea of the body and of gender as socially constructed” (Buckland 60), and I

have to agree with her. Gender is really constructed, and every constructed object has
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weaknesses that we need to face. These objects are inevitable if we want to talk about certain

phenomena, and we need to bear in mind that there will be people who support the idea

totally, and who are against it to the fullest. I think the movie makes an excellent job in

representing different groups of people with just one character. Obviously, the characters are

more or less stereotyped, but stereotypes do not exist without a reason. Billy’s father and

brother are the representation of people who are totally against this whole gender issue. Who

are thinking in binary terms: somebody is either a man or a woman. Men should be

masculine, brave and strong, and women should serve men’s needs by being a good

housewife. This is the kind of patriarchy that modern, third wave feminism is against (among

many other issues). As Steve Neale says: “Women are a problem, a source of anxiety, of

obsessive enquiry; men are not. Whereas women are investigated, men are tested.

Masculinity, as an ideal, at least, is implicitly known. Femininity is, by contrast, a mystery.”

(Neale 15-16) He is talking about gender roles in Western movies though; it is still the

mentality of lots of common people. But I think these things generate each other: if the movie

wants to be successful, it needs to be liked by many people. To be likeable, you need to have

stereotypical people in order to easily follow the storyline. But if you have stereotypical

people, the “gender-hate” will rise even more. Fortunately things are slowly changing

nowadays, so we can see a lot of powerful women in screen as well for example.

So how are arts and gender connected? In the movie, Billy first start to do boxing as a

sport, but we can see that only his father wants him to do that. There are signs that show Billy

does not find his place among these boys, but he agrees to do it anyways because his father

wants him to do it. He is also forcing himself to think that he likes boxing. He keeps telling

his friends, Debby and Michael that he does like doing it. However, his behaviour suddenly

changes when he sees the girls doing ballet at the other side of the gym hall. From that point

on, we can see that Billy really found something that he enjoys doing. This issue becomes
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problematic when his father accidentally sees him practicing dance moves with the other girls.

He becomes aggressive and wants Billy to stop continuing what he loves, just because he

thinks dancing (and especially ballet) is not meant for boys. But why is this such a current

problem in today’s society too? As Helen Clegg states, “Within the dance world, gender (as a

binary concept) appears to be central to lived experience. Whilst dance is known as a

feminine activity, males tend to be even more in the minority in more ‘feminised’ genres,

such as ballet. However, in other genres, such as street dance, which allows them to conform

to a more traditionally masculine identity, they are in the majority.” (Clegg 6) Ramsay Burt

also elaborates on being stigmatized in his book, The Male Dancer. He has a very nice

argument on how the body itself was viewed in different phases since the ancient Greeks. He

states that since dancing is a self-expression with your body, you need to be aware that it will

be criticized at some point. Although, if you look at different male body representations

throughout the centuries, you will realize that the ideal body type was always changing,

although we can always see a clear difference between the male and female body

representations. Somehow males are still represented as masculine, strong characters (as Steve

Neale also says), while women are the weak ones who need to be saved. “The idea that

masculinity, as Neale put it, is an ideal that is implicitly known, stops people realizing that

there is an open-ended range of evolving identities.” (Burt 15)

From these arguments we can see why men doing ballet is such a controversial issue

for people who are living in the Western culture. Our stereotypical representation of human

bodies are rooted so deep that we have a strange feeling seeing men doing soft, tender moves,

for example in ballet. That is what Billy’s father and brother also are afraid of. For them,

being soft as a man means being homosexual, which is obviously a fake idea. One cannot just

“become” gay by doing some dance moves. Still, these men feel so threatened by seeing a

man doing ballet that they want to stop Billy by any means. Just when his father sees Billy
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dancing it becomes clear for him that Billy truly loves what he is doing and he has an inborn

talent for dancing. As I have mentioned at the beginning, by not having his mother anymore,

Billy feels that his father is oppressing his talents, since his mother would have let him do

ballet or play the piano. It seems like Billy is more like a feminine type of boy, since he is a

substitute mother figure for all the family. Also, throughout the whole movie, Billy is on a

razor’s edge: we cannot decide whether he is attracted to boys or girls. He is eleven years old,

and his personality is still in development. That is why his father fears that Billy will go astray

(as he sees it), if they do not stop him dancing ballet. However, ballet is such an excellent

example for showing the controversy over being a male dancer: it requires soft moves along

with tremendous amount of muscle work. Dancers need to appear to be fragile and elegant,

but the moves are full of strength and precision. They need to be powerful, and also be able to

perform beautiful lines. To maintain this, they need to train hours and hours a day. Ballet is

everything, but an easy sport. We can even look at ballet dancers as athletes, professional

sportsmen who need to appear like what they are doing is nothing. They are athletes, yet they

are artists. (Ballet Men Youtube)

What I really like about the movie Billy Elliot is how the whole story remains truly

realistic. By Billy wanting to become an artist, a ballet performer, he goes through a lot of

struggles until finally his enthusiasm takes him where he belongs to: to the theatre. It is not

about just the family being a battle ground; we all have experiences from wanting something

other than our parents when we were at the age of puberty. This movie is about more: it is

about finding and expressing yourself, no matter what the family or other people think. Billy’s

best friend, Michael for example is a transgender person, so as his father. For him, the gender

issues are even more frightening. This film perfectly shows how a family can end your

dreams, or be a supporter to you. Here, we can see a family crisis from various points: the loss

of the mother, the mine strike, probably financial issues as well. For Billy’s father and brother
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the only way of living is the endless working hours in the coal mine. They are a typical

working-class family with basic mentality. That is why for them, dancing is a wasted time. It

does not bring money, it does not develop the economy, and it is not connected to the heavy

industry, what they have all been working in. In my opinion though, the chance for the change

has always been present in the family. It is not by chance that Billy’s mother got engaged to

this kind of man. In a relationship, you always need to be ready to compromise. I think the

mother could have influenced the thinking of these stubborn men: the father and the older

brother. The fact that they kept the piano in the house, and that Billy’s brother is also addicted

to music, are signs that show that deep down they somehow like arts. Maybe, Billy’s father

was frightened because Billy would remind him of the mother that they had lost. Maybe the

father was against of the whole process of Billy becoming an artist is because he wanted to

protect himself. When we see him at the end, at the edge of crying when he sees his son on

stage, we can see that he truly supports him. In my opinion, he has been in a constant struggle

through the whole movie, because he did not want his past psychical injuries to be torn up. So

I think the conclusion to the behaviour of his father is that we first need to look inside of our

own self, and then we may realize why we behave in a certain way. We should not limit the

personality of another person until they do not harm us. By letting Billy doing what he loves,

the family can again be the same old environment that they had had before the mother had

passed away. I think that is what the father’s story is about.

Conclusion

In my essay I wanted to put gender issues in the focus in connection with the problem

of male dancers in today’s society. From the articles and books written in this topic it is clear

that the whole issue is centred around the deep Western cultural facts, where males are tend to

be seen as a strong, masculine figure, while women stand on the opposite with being tender

and kind. These images are highly stereotypical, and nowadays we see that people are slowly
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coming to realize that the binary gender codes are not the way we are born. To confirm the

argument, I tried to analyze the movie Billy Elliot from this perspective. How the family can

be a burden for a young guy wanting to be a ballet dancer? How ballet and arts are

represented in the movie and what gender issues do they bring up? In my opinion by doing

my research, I got closer to understand why male dancers are struggling with fitting into the

society. However, I still think that males should not be ashamed by being dancers. Society

should not limit them in expressing their emotions through ballet. Ballet is a form of self

expression, a performance which requires a huge amount of muscle work. Male dancers are

both athletic and elegant at the same time, and nobody should criticize them for wanting to be

themselves.
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Works cited

Ballet Men. YouTube, uploaded by The Australian Ballet, 7 May 2013,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1wuOpCZvk.

Burt, Ramsay. The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectatle, Sexualities. 2nd ed. New York:

Routledge, 2007.

Clegg, Helen, Owton, Helen and Allen-Collinson, Jacquelyn. The cool stuff!: Gender, dance

and masculinity. Psychology of Women Section Review, 2016, 6–16,

http://oro.open.ac.uk/47491/1/POWS%202016%20Dance%20and%20gender.pdf.

Accessed 14 May 2017.

Fred Astaire Quotes. BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 14 May 2017.

Neale, Steve. Masculinity as Spectacle, Screen 24, 1983, 15-16.

Therese Buckland. Review: Dance, Gender and Culture by Helen Thomas. Dance Research:

The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 1994, 60,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1290711?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed 14

May 2017.