21 May 2009

Toe tapping in Everington



This dance sequence is from a British film Billy Elliot (2000). The dance is performed to A Town Called Malice by The Jam. The town called malice is Everington, a fictional mining town in Northern England. The boy is »a boy apart«. His vice is ballet dancing.
Billy's dancing, even at it's most angry and desperate like in this sequence, is neither a rebellion nor an escape. For Billy, dancing is as inevitable as breathing. It is two steps beyond walking, one step from running and two little red shoes short of dancing on to the end of time.
And when he wanted to go to the right, the shoes danced to the left, and when he wanted to dance up the room, the shoes danced down the room, down the stairs through the street, and out through the gates of the town… (Hans Christian Andersen, The Red Shoes, 1845).

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