How True to Life Is ‘Billy Elliot’? Some Experts Reply

In the new and endearing movie “Billy Elliot,” an 11-year-old boy from northeastern England decides, against all odds, that he wants to be a ballet dancer. His widowed father and older brother, both tough coal miners on strike, at first hate the very idea of Billy’s dancing, believing that it means he’s unmanly. But Billy, a tough and stubborn kid, perseveres and, in the end, reaches his goal.

Is this a likely story? Does it accurately reflect the attitudes and problems a young man faces when he chooses dance as his career? Or is it simply a sentimental rendition and a bit of wishful thinking about the life of a male dancer?

To help answer these questions, we asked four men in the Chicago dance community to share their thoughts on the movie and their own lives in dance: Daniel Duell, former principal dancer with New York City Ballet and now artistic director of Ballet Chicago; Larry Long, artistic director of the Civic Ballet of Chicago and director of the Ruth Page School of Dance; Brian McSween and Davis Robertson, both dancers with Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Here, in edited form, is what they had to say.

Question: “Billy Elliot” takes place in the 1980s in a coal-mining town in England, which is pretty far removed from the time and place in which we all live. Nevertheless, now that you’ve seen the movie, did you feel that it spoke to you, that it related to your life?

Long: I come from a background not very different from Billy’s. None of my family was involved in the arts. I didn’t start dancing until I was 17, and until then, I had no idea what ballet was. I studied music--trumpet and French horn. In high school, in Los Angeles, I was a gymnast, and our coach thought it would be good for the team to take ballet, so this strange little woman came in and gave a ballet lesson to the team. Out of that, I became interested and started to study dancing.

When I said to my father, “I want to give up music because this dancing stuff seems really good to me,” he raised holy Cain. His idea of dancing was very different from what dancing really is, which is practically like taking the vows of priesthood. For him, it was dancing in the back rooms of carnivals, the devil’s amusement, or worse. As I was graduated from high school, I had to move away from home because my father wouldn’t support me if I was going to dance.

I didn’t see my father for seven years, until I came back to California with Ruth Page’s company and I had a job as a dancer.

Duell: My parents actually encouraged me to audition. The first time, in 1963 in Dayton, Ohio, there were 15 other guys, and my brother. I was the one skeptical about it. Like Billy, I loved music, and I loved certain sports--tennis, especially, and baseball. It took time, but I fell in love with how the array of skills in dancing felt when I was moving to music. I was about 15 when I decided, yes, classical ballet is what I want to do.

I had seen Edward Villella dance on television, and he was utterly compelling, such phenomenal energy, every moment of giving to an audience. I loved that. And there was another thing. I played Amahl in a performance of the opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” which was very beautiful. After months of rehearsal, I went on stage, and I didn’t know what was going to happen in performance. It was a whole other world. There was an element of risk. Very fascinating, I thought.

Robertson: I came from a family that was not culturally aware, in Jacksonville, Fla., and I actually started with breakdancing, in the mid-’80s. I was kind of a hippie kid. But even when I was just spinning on my back on street corners, I put on music and wanted to move to that music and express myself, just like Billy in the movie. After I got into dancing, I was one of three men among all these women in dance in public arts school, and, naturally, the three of us were stars in every production. I had a real misconception of my talents, which soon popped when I arrived in New York.

I found myself at the School of American Ballet at an audition, just like Billy in the movie, being poked and prodded and being told to stand in first position and do the splits. To tell you how little insight I had, I picked that school because it had the biggest studio and there was one other dancer with long hair, which made me think they were very open-minded and this was the place for me.

McSween: I got into dance haphazardly. I did some acting with my father when I was a kid, but I was really short and fat, so people said to my parents, “As long as Brian likes being on stage, why don’t you get him into dancing? Maybe he’ll lose some weight.”

By the time I was 15, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Most guys my age were trying to figure out how to win at Nintendo, but I was dancing seven days a week. I got to escape the feelings of not being good enough. I used to love just going into a studio, putting on music and seeing what I could do, pushing myself. You lose track of time, everything. You don’t have to worry about society or life or problems. You just go in there and go. It is an incredible feeling.

Q: In the film, at his audition, Billy is asked why he wants to dance. What was your reaction to his answer?

Duell: I loved how he described the feeling in his body when he was dancing, muscles on fire and electricity. I felt things happening in my body as he was talking. It was a treasure to see his original responses. His dancing wasn’t classically perfect, but it was captivating and beautiful and believable. The film was so psychologically insightful about the story of a person deciding to dance.

Robertson: It was an incredibly articulate speech for a boy who’s only 11, yet it came out very real. He was able to press the inner fire, and losing yourself. That’s a very poetic moment, when you lose consciousness of the real world and you’re truly in the moment. Very powerful.

Long: What’s truly touching is that Billy doesn’t have any idea what ballet dancing really is. Neither did I. That struck home. You’re almost giving your life to something that doesn’t make sense to you. You see, the film is not really about becoming a ballet dancer. It’s about the boy’s battle with his background to escape from his place in society.

Q: The movie delicately handled the matter of how much pressure was put on Billy not to dance, because it was not considered the manly thing to do. Did that resonate with you?

Duell: Absolutely. I used to play a game called tetherball. And man, there was nothing better than to beat that ball, especially when I was called Twinkle Toes Duell.

McSween: The year I started dancing, I went to a Christian school, and dancing in the Christian community was really misunderstood. That made things even harder, because I never fit in school. When I was 16 and got back from Joffrey school, these guys in school used to sing “Private Dancer,” by Tina Turner, or “Dancing Machine,” by Michael Jackson, when they saw me, and I would just walk down the hall.

I hated school. I used to leave there a lot of times, almost every day, in tears. I was never who I wanted to be when I was at school. But when I was at dance, I was always who I wanted to be.

I was someone else on stage. I was accepted on stage. I gained respect being on stage, and that was a really good feeling, not something I had gotten a lot of in society.

Robertson: I liked the scene in the movie where all of a sudden you see Billy as a grown man, and you see that he is this Adonis-like body. He’s grown up into this ideal picture of a man. His argument as a boy was, “Dancers are athletes,” and there he is. He’s looking like our ideal thought of a man.

Q: Do you think the movie will have a significant impact on a large audience, like “The Red Shoes,” which made every little girl want to be a ballerina?

Long: It’s not going to have the same impact as “The Turning Point,” which had some of the glamour of the dance world. After “Turning Point,” the best thing in the world was to own a dance school, because you got 18,000 young men coming in to take dance. It was an enormous phenomenon.

But “Billy Elliot” isn’t a glamorous movie. It’s a dramatic movie, a story movie, a heart movie, but it doesn’t have to do with glamour.

Robertson: It’s not going to inspire people the way seeing Baryshnikov dance the “Le Corsaire” variations in “Turning Point” did. They’re not going to say, “Oh, wow, I want to do something amazing like that.” No, this was a high-quality dance movie without any high-quality dance.

But it might inspire parents. It’s possible that parents who see their son dancing around the living room will say, “Maybe I should encourage this. Who knows? I might have the next star on my hands.”

McSween: That’s where it has to start, with the parents. My parents had no idea about dancing. It took a lot of faith and trust to allow their son to go into something that neither one of them had any idea about.

My father’s called me his hero, but my father is my hero, because he’s enabled me to live out my dreams and he’s given me the courage and strength and the stability to step out there and do things that people don’t think guys should do.

Maybe parents will think, “Wow, what am I robbing my child of if I’m not giving him all the support I can?” I hope that’s the real message people come away with.

Long: And there’s a message for young people too about someone like Billy. You have impulses you don’t understand, but you pay attention to them because they feel right, they feel true. And because you do pay attention, you discover that, my God, there’s a life, a place in the world for me.