Dylan's Story

Dylan is a schoolboy who has been a participant in Boys Dancing projects for the last three years.

"I was at primary school when I started dance for boys, I’m in secondary now. At school someone said there was this boys dancing club, and my mum encouraged me to go along to the taster session they had. So I went along to the taster session and I got gripped!

Before I didn’t think much about dance, really. We did theatre dancing in school plays, but not real physical dancing. Usually the dance clubs were for both boys and girls, and usually you’d think: “Oh, that’s for girls” - but this was just boys doing it, so there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And there’s a male teacher, so that helped as well. Now it feels like boys can dance, it’s not just for girls, everyone can do it.

To start with it was a big challenge because I didn’t have any dance skills really - except the school plays when you learn the moves to words. So just dancing to music was new to me, I wasn’t used to it. But Adam [the choreographer] got me into it - I think he could see through my head and saw: ‘He can do this’.

It’s fun working with a professional male dancer - he’s got me into doing other dance stuff too. He told me to do ballet to build up my strength in other places where I didn’t have strength. He said that doing ballet would help me improve and to be able to do things like contemporary. So now I do ballet and street dance weekly, and contemporary dance clubs in the holidays.

It’s been fun performing in the different places too. It was interesting performing on the farm for Manitou - you don’t really expect to do a performance outside, on a farm! The only problem was there was lots of ducks where we were dancing! Performing in the theatre is just as fun, although you only get one chance to get it right. We did our dance on the farm six times. And with dancing on a film, you can do it again and again.

Dancing makes me feel great, and makes me do more exercise than just football. It’s made me a bit more confident in class. It’s made me put my hand up a bit more, because I got more confident in dancing. Because before, it was something that I wouldn’t do, but I did do it and I got used to it. It’s made me think differently and have more ideas in class as well. Like, in the dance lessons, you see how something can become something else - and that makes me think in different ways in class as well.

When I leave school I want to be a dance choreographer. I’d love to choreograph a performance and be in it at the same time. And have a studio somewhere - or you could just practice in a field!"