Transcript
What’s up? My name is Matt Steffanina, and I’m going to show you how to dance like Michael Jackson.
Now, Michael Jackson is famous for a lot of different dance moves but we’re going to take his biggest move today, and I’m going to break it down for you step by step, and that’s the moonwalk.
Now, it’s important to note that Michael did not invent the moonwalk, he actually was taught the moonwalk, but he did make it famous.
You should also know that the moonwalk is a different move and the move that Michael made famous was called the backslide.
The moonwalk is the same glide, but in a circle, whereas the backslide is done in a straight line, the way Michael did it. Let’s break it down step by step.
The first thing we’re going to do is take our back foot, lift the heel up, and press the ball of our foot into the ground. The left foot, or the front foot, is going to slide back across the floor. Now, when you slide your foot, you always want to keep it flat. This goes for almost every glide.
The illusion is created when it looks like a flat foot is sliding across the ground. For instance, if I bring my heel up and slide my foot on the toe, I lose the illusion. You want to make sure that that heel is in contact with the floor as you’re sliding back.
From here, you’re just going to switch your feet, bringing up the heel of the left foot and pressing down the heel of the right foot. Slide the right foot back. Switch your feet again.
You’re going to repeat this process as many times as you want to get your backslide going across the floor.
A couple things that will help you. Michael was really good at switching his legs really quickly and really strongly. A lot of times when you see people moonwalk, it’s very lazy whereas Michael’s was very clean and very snappy. So, each time you switch your feet, you want to think of pressing your heel into the floor, and lifting your other heel as quickly as possible. It also helps to get higher up on your toe, so really lift that heel of the supporting foot.
Let’s try and do a few of them in a row and start to practice travelling across the floor while doing the backslide.
So, we want to start up on our right toe, we’re going to slide our left foot back, and we’re going to connect four slides to glide all the way across the floor. And that’s how you dance like Michael Jackson.
