Why is dance so butch these days?

For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be retreating towards the butch – ironically, just as the rest of the world is moving obsessively to the femme.

Scroll back a century or so and Nijinsky cross-dressed at masked balls, danced on pointe and covered himself in petals as le spectre de la rose; in Les Biches, his sister Nijinska shamelessly choreographed all manner of sexual indeterminacy and suggested that girls could also be boys. Then came the Carry On stereotype of limp-wristed ephebes in pink tights with an ominous bulge – every mother’s nightmare in the homophobic post-war era, and perhaps still a source of psychotic contempt among certain sections of society.

But all that is in marked decline: today men who dance spend more time pumping iron than they do inhaling the scent of lilies. And while the dwindling of the stigma is welcome, perhaps something of value has been lost, or is in danger of being devalued – an ambiguity of manner, an embrace of the feminine, a grace and delicacy of gesture that goes beyond the merely dainty.