Fired by Shirley MacLaine and scolded by a pope, Paterson shares stories in his new book about working with Björk, Robin Williams and the Muppets
His name may not be familiar, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen Vincent Paterson’s work as a dancer or choreographer.
One day, Paterson decided it was time. He walked into a restaurant to ask about work and was told to come back at dinner. With a few hours to kill, he took what he thought might be his last-ever dance class. “Well, first of all, it just never entered my life,” he says of how far the blue-collar Pennsylvania town where he was born in 1950 was from the world where dance was an actual career. “Where I grew up was kind of like the Liverpool of the United States along the Delaware River and the oil refineries.
In 1973, Paterson and a friend fled the cold Philadelphia winters, driving toward the warm sunshine of Tucson, Arizona. There, a few months later, he walked into a dance studio and at 23 signed up for a beginning ballet class otherwise filled with preteen girls. Olivia Newton-John hired him to dance as her partner in a pre-MTV era music video for her 1978 single “Totally Hot.”
Paterson repeated his role as assistant choreographer on Jackson’s “Thriller” music video but soon took over as his go-to choreographer, creating not just the dance moves but also much of the style and story of videos for songs such as “Smooth Criminal,” for which he writes about coming up with Jackson’s famous “lean” move, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Black and White.”.
“And when he introduced me, and she said, ‘Excuse me, I don’t need a choreographer,’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ My heart just dropped. When Madonna asked him where to place her hand at the end of that video Paterson suggested she try a move he’d given Van Halen several years earlier for its “Hot For Teacher” video.
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