MY little boy is very keen on dancing.

He doesn’t get this from me.

I took a few ballet and tap lessons when I was a child, but the least said about that the better.

Suffice to say that after much tripping over my own feet it was decided that perhaps I was better suited to Brownies.

But my stompy tendencies appear not to have been passed on to the next generation.

After the boy spent several episodes of Strictly Come Dancing twirling enthusiastically around the living room, I decided that maybe he would enjoy lessons more than I had.

So off he went to Salisbury Dance Studios and the tender care of Miss Kim.

Not surprisingly, the boys were greatly outnumbered by the girls.

I asked if that bothered him, and got a look of total incomprehension in return.

“No,” he said. “Why would it?”

No reason at all.

Attitudes have changed since I was a kid, when a boy taking dance lessons would have been seen as an oddity and would likely have been teased into considering sport instead.

It never occurred to my son that the fact that he is a boy has any relevance at all to whether or not he should dance.

However, boys and young men are still very much in the minority when it comes to taking part in dance, and in performance arts in general.

Part of that is probably just down to the natural inclinations of children.

However much parents try to be gender-neutral, some little girls simply won’t be swayed from their delight in a tiny pink tutu, and there are few young boys who seem able to resist booting a football as hard as they can at the nearest breakable object.

But part of it is that attitudes still have a way to go.

That’s why events such as Salisbury Arts Centre’s male-focussed programming last week are so great.

My boy is getting to the age now when gender does become more relevant, and performances like this are invaluable when it comes to showing a child that it’s fine to follow a path you enjoy, whatever other people’s opinions might be.