Cris Judd didn’t try to play it cool when OWN’s “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” asked him about Michael Jackson in 2013. He sat down in front of a window full of white flowers and said it straight out: “I have been and always will be a humongous Michael Jackson fan.”
Most people know Judd as Jennifer Lopez’s former husband. Before that, he was a dancer, and his biggest job came from Michael. “The very first time I ever danced with Michael Jackson was in the 1995 MTV Music Awards,” he told OWN. The show was at Radio City Music Hall in New York, and Judd called it “the beginning of my whole journey with him.”
That journey took him around the world. HuffPost, writing up the OWN interview in 2013, said the VMAs led to two world tours with Michael. Wikipedia lists him on the HIStory World Tour, where he reportedly became the lead dancer.
Even then, being near Michael took some getting used to. “When I got the opportunity to dance for him, I was just in total disbelief,” Judd said, as quoted by HuffPost. “You don’t want to just stare at him, you just want to be as professional as possible.” In the clip he admits what was running through his head anyway: “Oh my God, it’s Michael Jackson.”
Fourteen years after that first VMAs night, he was back at Radio City. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards he danced with Janet Jackson in a tribute to her brother. He even brought out the shoes for OWN’s cameras. Christian Louboutin designed them, and the dancers, he said, “actually got to keep them.”
Then he gets to the part of the job fans never saw. Listen for the moment he stops talking about the shoes and starts describing the rehearsal hall. It starts at about 1:06.
Cris Judd tells OWN what it was like to dance for Michael Jackson
This is OWN’s own upload from “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”, a little over two minutes long. He talks about the 1995 VMAs at about 0:18, shows the Louboutin shoes at 0:50 and describes the rehearsals from about 1:06 to the end.
So what happened in that studio?
“When we were rehearsing for his tours, when we would learn all the numbers, he would sit us down,” Judd said. They’d be in a rehearsal hall, “like a dance studio.” Then Michael had each dancer get up and “perform the entire show one at a time from top to bottom while the rest of the dancers would sit beside him on the floor.”
That meant every song of a world tour, in order, with nobody else on the floor but you. “He would make you go out by yourself and perform every song in succession in a row by yourself,” Judd said.
The other dancers sat right there next to Michael and watched. “Talk about the most stressful situation you could ever possibly be in, because you’re totally exposed,” he told OWN. “Every flaw, everything that you would do wrong it would be exposed. You had no one to hide behind.”
Judd summed it up in two short sentences, and they’re the last words of the clip. “He never demanded us to be at our best,” he said. “He expected it.”
MJWN, the Michael Jackson fan news site, wrote up the same interview on Nov. 23, 2013, and quoted those two lines too. OWN’s clip also shows an old snapshot of the two of them side by side. Judd has long dark hair and a wide grin, and Michael stands next to him in a black hat and aviator sunglasses, smiling too.