by Sydney Mulvenon
If you were to ask people who they thought was the
Academy Award acclaimed movies like “An American in Paris,” “Singing in the Rain,” or “On the Town” brought enjoyment to billions of people over the years. Consider the countless amount of hours it took to create, teach and learn these iconic dances whose difficulty ceases to exist on the big screen by how easily Kelly could make them look. That’s right, Kelly Choreographed scene by scene establishing new approaches to dance. He would go on to experiment with special effects, adding animation and split screens to enhance the overall dances in the pictures. He enhanced careers by the countless hours of work put into the choreography. Actress Debbie Reynolds said that working on “Singing in the Rain” was one of the most challenging projects she has worked on, but because of Gene Kelly, she was able to instill a strong mentality that set her up for a long career.
I next put how many different dance moves did Michael Jackson invent into my search bar. Jackson’s has four memorable dance moves including the moonwalk, circle, spin, and the robot dance. Watching his performances over the years on Youtube, those same moves are repeated over and over again throughout each of his top seven icon hits. Kelly was in about 30 films and the majority of them he choreographed with fresh, new moves to match the film’s storyline. Just as Jackson had those four moves match those seven hits, Kelly created hundreds of moves to match dozens of films. An average song lasts three minutes. If you combine the three minutes to Kelly’s 20 hit songs in the motion pictures it equals 60. This means new and innovative dance moves can be seen for an
According to The New York Times, “He made a
who wasn’t credited for The MGM musical classics. I hope from this article people can see that although Michael Jackson was a good dancer, Gene Kelly was phenomenal.