The Forgotten King of Dance

by Sydney Mulvenon

If you were to ask people who they thought was the so called king of dance then who do you think they would say? Googling the answer as any college student does, Michael Jackson’s name appeared in a large size 20 font. Accompanying his name was a dash and the words “The King of Dance.” I thought he was the king of Pop music? Michael Jackson’s career spanned over 40 years, but what other moves does he do besides pop and hip hop? What about ballet, tap, or ballroom dancing? These types of dance are one of the biggest contributions to early Hollywood Film Cinema. Gene Kelly, actor, singer, film producer, dancer, and choreographer, was one of the earliest game changers in the dancing world. He was the true King of Dance.

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 hour long versus the 21 minutes of the same four dance moves in repetition by Jackson.

According to The New York Times, “He made a splash, and Dance History. Kelly’s widow states, “Very often he is left off lists of directors and choreographers. People remember him up on the screen but forget he was behind the camera. That’s what he wanted to be remembered for.” After years of historic numbers and moves, many people don’t know the man
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.