Ask anyone to name a Michael Jackson dance move and you’ll probably hear about the moonwalk. But there’s another one that still has people scratching their heads.
It’s the lean from “Smooth Criminal.”
Michael and his dancers stand with their feet flat on the floor and their backs straight. Then they tip forward, slowly, about 45 degrees, and come right back up again. Nobody bends at the waist or puts out a hand to catch themselves.
Spine doctors in India got so curious about it that they wrote a study for a medical journal. They found that even strong, trained dancers can usually only manage 25 to 30 degrees before they fall on their face. One of them said Michael “was cheating gravity.”
Here’s the moment that started it all, in the 1988 video.
The lean in the original “Smooth Criminal” video
That was film, and film can hide things. For the video, Michael reportedly wore a harness with cables to hold him up.
That works fine on a movie set. It doesn’t work in a packed stadium, where stagehands hooking a star on and off a wire would ruin the whole effect.
And Michael wanted to do it live.
So he went to work with the two men who made his stage clothes. Together they came up with an idea, and in June 1992 they sent it to the U.S. Patent Office. Michael’s own signature is on the paperwork.
That same year, he took the lean on the road. Fans in the stands saw him tip forward and hang there, and they had no idea how he was doing it. The doctors who studied the move said it looked like magic to audiences, and plenty of fans tried to copy it.
Here’s Michael performing “Smooth Criminal” live in Bucharest, Romania, in October 1992. It’s the fourth song of the night.
Michael performs “Smooth Criminal” live in Bucharest, 1992
On October 26, 1993, the government granted the patent. Its official name is “Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion,” and it’s number 5,255,452.
So what was holding him up?
The secret was in his heels. Each of Michael’s special shoes had a V-shaped slot hidden underneath. At just the right moment, a pair of metal pegs rose up through tiny holes in the stage floor. Michael slid his foot forward, the slot locked onto the pegs, and he could lean far past the point where anyone else would topple over. When he stood back up, he slid his foot back and the shoes let go.
Even then, it wasn’t easy. The doctors point out that the move still takes huge strength in the stomach and back muscles. One of them tried it with the shoe and still couldn’t get to 45 degrees.
Today Michael’s signed patent papers are kept at the U.S. National Archives in Maryland.