Dance: Real men wear tights

Football and rugby are for sissies, says Jenny Gilbert. If you want to be really butch, get into ballet

In the film Billy Elliot, when the boy's father discovers that his son has been sloping off to ballet coaching instead of boxing, he feels rage and incomprehension in equal measure. "I could understand if it were football ... or wrestling," he splutters. "But not frigging ballet." The brother puts it more succinctly: "Ballet is for poofs."

It's important that Stephen Daldry's film is set 20 years ago, and not just because that was the era of the miners' strike, whose dented macho values provide the tradition for Billy's generation to kick against. Attitudes like that of the Elliots just wouldn't be plausible today. Where once every male classical dancer was assumed to be somewhat limp in the wrist, today such prejudice is untenable. Ballet's men have become progressively more rugged, more overtly masculine on stage. Off-stage, there are girlfriends, wives and children, viz Channel 4's Ballet Boyz – two series of video diaries (a third coming soon) made by a pair of ex-Royal Ballet dancers, the matey, unpretentious and decidedly straight William Trevitt and Michael Nunn.

Post-Fame!, and post-Billy Elliot even more so, dance is no longer perceived as a girly option – a turnaround now being felt by vocational schools in a marked rise in applications from boys. Slowly but surely, the hard personal and physical discipline demanded by dance is beginning to be seen on a par with, say, that of professional football. It's understood that dancers have to be muscular and tough. Not just in order to lift eight-stone ballerinas above their heads without wobbling – a supporting role, literally – but also as stars in their own right. Magnified sex appeal has inevitably become part of the mix.

So how has this sea-change come about? Channel 4, in a documentary called Bourne to Dance to be broadcast on Christmas Day, would like to lay the responsibility at the feet of Matthew Bourne, the choreographer whose 1995 production of Swan Lake redefined the role of the male dancer by gender-switching that most famously feminine of ballet images: the swan. The programme is presented by Bourne, and – using archive performance clips and a variety of specialist opinion – pieces together a chronology of men in dance that is part textbook history, partly a collation of Bourne's personal heroes.

The fact that sex has always been part of the allure of dance performance helps explain why the academic study of the subject has taken so long to arrive. Unlike classical music, which had its roots in medieval monasteries, dance has always been tainted by association with the flesh – from Salome dancing to earn the head of John the Baptist, to the Folies Bergère, all the way to Rudolf Nureyev's reputation for visiting dodgy Turkish baths. Also, in the absence of any standard system of notation, there is often no "text" for dance works of the past, nothing written down. Until as late as the mid-20th century, steps and sequences were routinely handed down from dancer to dancer, with inevitable omissions and additions as each adapted the material to their own particular strengths.

In Bourne's look back at the male lineage, he makes only the briefest allusion to Gaetano and Auguste Vestris, a father-and-son duo of the late-18th century. But they were megastars of their day. So popular were their appearances at the King's Theatre in London that Parliament stopped sitting in order to see them dance (can you imagine Tony Blair announcing a day off so that MPs could catch Michael Clark?). Auguste was reportedly short of stature but possessed an extraordinary jump and a dizzying multiple pirouette that was considered superhuman.

It was the arrival of the pointe shoe that clobbered male virtuosity, which lay dormant for the next 100 years. Around 1820, a technical innovation of stuffing slipper-ends with cotton allowed ballerinas to perch so high on their toes that they seemed to hover supernaturally. Romantic ballet, with its focus on fragility and feminine mystery (highly erotic in its day), cast the male dancer in the role of tormented pursuer, maddened by desire for the elusive sylph, wili or nixie determined by the fantastical plot. Men, in their regular soft ballet slippers, were left standing – with the odd spot of jumping and turning to justify being on stage at all.

And thus it continued more or less until the second decade of the 20th century, when a Russian called Vaslav Nijinsky burst on the scene as the star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes seasons in London and Paris. Freed by new-style choreography from the requirements of lifting and supporting a female, Nijinsky reclaimed the solo spotlight, developing an exotic persona that varied wildly from ballet to ballet. He was savagely erotic as the Golden Slave in Scheherazade, and dreamily perfumed in Spectre de la Rose. He was his most controversial as the masturbatory faun in L'Après-midi d'un faune, and in the flat-footed stomping of The Rite of Spring. His appeal was certainly sexual, but androgynous. Lady Ottoline Morrell once said to him: "When you dance you're not a man, you're an idea."

Bourne's next port of call is another Russian émigré, who deserved to have a horse named after him but didn't. It's a surprise to find that the explosion of power and personality that was Rudolf Nureyev just isn't done justice by the camera in the film footage. As one of Bourne's experts reveals, "He almost killed himself to make himself into a great dancer." Another admits that Nureyev's technique frankly wasn't all that marvellous. It was his charisma and physical beauty that blew audiences away. It was sexual charisma, certainly, but with an AC/DC ambivalence that made the man seem doubly fascinating and seductive. Margot Fonteyn said: "The era of the ballerina is over."

And so to Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1970s – a much finer dancer in terms of pure technique, versatility and strength, and the last to enjoy the media hype of a Soviet defector. The evidence is all there in the film footage. It takes no specialist knowledge to see that Misha had something Nureyev lacked, as well as the bravura they shared. Even so it's a shock to hear our own greatest living stylist, the former Royal Ballet director Sir Anthony Dowell, bow the knee to Baryshnikov's technique. "I used to look at him and think, God, I wish I could dance like that." So it's pleasing that Bourne follows up with archive footage of Dowell at his elegant peak. His style shows the other side of the coin: slender, androgynous, almost female in its quality of line. Women admired Dowell to bits. But they didn't fall in love with him.

They did and still do with Adam Cooper. Which brings the programme full-circle to Matthew Bourne's own creation: the image of that powerful, male swan that catapulted himself and his leading dancer to stardom. Cooper talks intelligently about the initial difficulties of learning to partner a man on stage (Scott Ambler's bewildered Prince). "With a ballerina, you're the one in control. With another man, you both have to learn to trust." And Cooper firmly denies the reputation the show quickly attracted as "the gay Swan Lake". He never saw it that way, he says. Yet a large part of the drama is highly sexual. As Bourne has said elsewhere: "The swan is free, he's beautiful. Everyone's interested in him, everyone wants him ... that can be seen, and interpreted, in many different ways."

So does all this really amount to a grand resurgence of masculinity on the dance stage? Or is the field simply opening up to a greater range of sexual possibilities – a truer reflection of the way we live now? Matthew Bourne's latest dance drama, The Car Man ("An auto-erotic thriller of adultery, murder, false imprisonment and revenge"), broadcast next weekend, would seem to confirm the latter. But there will always be those who hanker for the old ways. The American, Mark Morris, for instance. He is frankly dismayed at how ballet – classical ballet that is – has become "masculinised". "I go to see ballet shows," he wails camply on the programme, "and all I see is men! Turning and jumping non-stop ... and I'm thinking wait a minute. Ballet is woman. Where are all the damn women?"

'The Car Man', Channel 4, 9pm, Saturday; 'Bourne To Dance', Channel 4, 6.30pm, Christmas Day