Introduction: Divo worship

Abstract

Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), a British film about a boy from the industrial north-east who forsakes his roots to train as a professional dancer, opens and closes with two almost mythic scenes of male dancing. In the first, the film’s opening, the eleven-year-old Billy lays the stylus on a T-Rex LP and, after a scratchy false start, the soundtrack begins with the 1978 ‘Cosmic Dancer’. Hopping onto his bed, Billy starts to leap up and down – first as any boy would, but then higher and higher, his body caught in slow motion in a variety of abstract poses. In the film’s final scene, we return to Billy dancing, this time as a mature, muscular adult arriving in the wings of a London theatre. This is the first and only time we see the grown-up Billy, and his face is kept from us so that we can focus on the strength and immensity of his limbs, the astonishing athletic body. At the climactic statement of a soaring late Romantic phrase – the music is now Swan Lake – Billy leaps onto the stage. Boy becomes man, adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism and film and soundtrack freeze, capturing Billy in another abstract leap.

Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d]y

“…(Lancioni 2006: 710) The journey for Billy is one of self-improvement and freedom. Dance is the medium for self-expression and change, where "adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism" (Henson 2007:1) and during that process, self-discovery is achieved. It would be helpful to note Sue Palmer"s insistence that males are still born with the genetic encoding of Stone Age hunters.…”