The talk-show host wanted to hear about a dinner. The first question to Debbie Allen was whether she remembered “the year you and Michael Jackson danced and turned out the Caucus.” The way the host told it, guests at that Black Caucus dinner lost track of what the evening was for, “because all they were talking about was you and Michael Jackson dancing together.”
Allen didn’t stay on the dinner for long. Viewers know her as Lydia Grant, the dance teacher on the TV series “Fame,” and later from “Grey’s Anatomy.” The Michael she wanted to talk about was the one in the rehearsal room.
“What’s amazing is Michael, he redefined dance,” she said. She put him on a very short list of dancers, next to Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines.
Then she got to the work. Allen said she was the supervising choreographer on “one of his big specials,” which she doesn’t name in the clip. What stayed with her from that job was how he kept himself ready. “He would be in there pop locking for two hours just staying sharp,” she said.
Two hours of that wasn’t the end of it. Michael “wanted to train,” Allen said, so he would come over to her house. “We would work on things.”
She gave more of the picture on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” on November 3, 2009. “I have a dance studio in my house. I used to train him. He wanted to learn new things,” she told host Rebecca Roberts. The two went back a long way. “Our friendship has always been based on dance, and I’ve known him since he was probably about 14 years old,” Allen said.
This was the same Michael whose moonwalk on the Motown special, Allen told NPR, left the whole world standing “on its ears and on its toes.” So what did a dancer like that want from a teacher?
Debbie Allen tells the story on a talk show
This is a fan upload of a talk-show appearance, and the page doesn’t say which show it comes from. It runs 1 minute 23 seconds. Allen talks about the two hours of practice at about 0:32 and gets to the lesson at her house at about 1:03.
The move was a spin.
“I’d show him things,” Allen says in the clip. Then she repeats what he told her: “Debbie, I want to learn how to spin like that. I want to learn that spin like that.” Her reply was short. “Mike, you already spin like that.”
Michael wouldn’t take it. “No, but not like that,” he told her. “It was precious to me,” Allen says.
On NPR she told the same story with one more name in it. “Michael would spin like a top,” she said. “But he wanted to learn how to turn like Baryshnikov.” She remembered telling him, “Baryshnikov can’t do what you do.” It made no difference to her student. “He said, but I want to learn it, Debbie. I said, okay. So we worked on that.”
The turn wasn’t his last request. “Then he wanted to learn about tap dancing,” Allen told NPR. He loved the tap star Savion Glover, she said, and she and Michael had spent time on a movie idea for him and Glover. So the visits went on. “He actually would come to my house and we would work very privately,” she said.
Allen wasn’t always the one teaching. For the tap, she said, Michael practiced in her studio with “one of my master friends.” The main one was Paul Kennedy.