NPR reminded us today of how Gene Kelly brought an all-American athleticism and machismo to dance while the Huffington Post whipped out video clip after video clip to show how everyone from Patrick Swayze to Michael Jackson and Chris Brown wanted to dance like Gene Kelly.
“It was at a time when the male was not viewed as some kind of dancing entity,” [Edward] Villella recalls. “We were so used to Westerns and frontier-type masculinities, so the idea of a guy dancing was very, very foreign to American popular culture.”
Kelly was living proof that male dancers didn’t have to be “effeminate” — shouldn’t be stigmatized as “sissies,” which regrettably was the prevailing opinion in those days. His first wife, Betsy Blair, said Kelly “democratized” dance in movies. He came across as a regular guy; he gave audiences the idea that they, too, could dance in the streets.
His genius was evident as early as 1944 when he gave us this astonishing pas seul à deux in the film 'Cover Girl', using camera technique and his unique brand of virile choreography to portray a man in a romantic dilemma, struggling with his alter ego.
