How did michael jackson dance
Doctors explain Michael Jackson's impossible dance move
Published
Image source, Manjul Tripathi
Neurosurgeons have described in detail how Michael Jackson achieved biomechanically impossible dance moves in his music video Smooth Criminal.
In the 1987 routine, Michael leans from the ankle at a 45 degree angle, while keeping his body straight as a rod.
The illusion, which many have tried to copy, was thanks to specially designed shoes and the artist's core strength.
The spine experts warn others against attempting the potentially injurious but mind-boggling move.
Manjul Tripathi and colleagues from the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India, say in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine: "Most trained dancers with strong core strength will reach a maximum of 25 to 30 degrees of forward bending while performing this action. MJ pulled off a gravity-defying 45 degree move that seems unearthly to any witness."
Image source, RUBEN RAMOS
How MJ did it
If a person were to attempt the Smooth Criminal lean, they would notice that the bulk of the strain to strike the pose moves to the Achilles tendon in each ankle, rather than the erector spinae muscles of the back.
This allows for only a very limited degree of forward bend, even for someone matching Michael's strong athletic abilities, explains Assistant Prof Tripathi.
Michael got the extra degrees of tilt thanks to some fancy footwear.
A v-shaped slit in the bottom of each heel of his spats slotted onto a strong nail or "hitch member" driven into the ground, allowing the dancer to pivot and lean further forward, for the gravity-defying move.
Image source, Manjul Tripathi
Prior to the patented footwear invention, Michael had relied on supporting cables and a harness around his waist to create the illusion.
It's said that he and two Hollywood colleagues borrowed the footwear idea from US astronauts' boots, which can be docked to a fixed rail when working in zero gravity.
But even with specially designed footwear and the support of the hitch member, the move is incredibly hard to pull off, requiring athletic core strength from strengthened spinal and lower-limb muscles, say the doctors.
"Several MJ fans, including the authors, have tried to copy this move and failed, often injuring themselves in their endeavours," they caution.
Dr Tripathi said: "The chances of injury to the ankle are significant. You need strong core muscles and good support around the ankle. It's not a simple trick."
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How Michael Jackson's tilt move defied gravity
Story highlights
Michael Jackson created a dance move that defied gravity
To accomplish it he patented a special shoe
CNN —
Michael Jackson’s musical achievements are legend: the first artist to win eight Grammys in one night; the first artist to sell more than a million digital tracks in one week.
Michael Jackson Best MoonWalk Ever!! [HD]
His impact on dance has been just as powerful. Fans around the world have tried to imitate his smooth slides and spins, his racy crotch grab and pelvic thrust and, of course, his trademark moonwalk, with varying degrees of success.
But there’s one move that stunned the watching world: the gravity-defying tilt he debuted in his 1988 music video for “Smooth Criminal.
” In one scene, Jackson and a few of his dancers lean forward 45 degrees, backs straight, feet flat upon the floor, and hold the pose until they return upright with little apparent effort.
Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal Secret Anti-Gravity Lean
“It’s not really possible physically to do it,” said neurosurgeon Dr. Nishant Yagnick, a longtime Jackson fan who practices at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. “He was cheating gravity.”
“You can bend a maximum of 25 or 30 degrees forward before you fall on your face,” added his colleague Dr.
Manjul Tripathi, another fan. “I tried to do it, and I fell.”
Fascinated by Jackson and his seemingly inhuman abilities, Yagnick and Tripathi began to investigate just how the pop legend was able to accomplish his feat. Along with another colleague, Dr. Sandeep Mohindra, they published their observations from a neurosurgeon’s point of view on Tuesday in the Journal of Neurosurgery: “How did Michael Jackson challenge our understanding of spine biomechanics?”
On the left, how the body is supposed to bend; on the right, how Michael Jackson did it
Journal of Neurosurgery When the human body bends forward with the back straight, the doctors explain, the erector spinae muscles that run parallel to our vertebrae “act like cables” and support the body as the center of gravity shifts.
But when the focus of bending is switched to the ankles, those erector muscles aren’t the major support. Instead, the strain is put on the calf and Achilles tendon, which aren’t really built for that role.
“This allows for a very limited degree of forward bending from the ankle joints, while keeping a stiff straight posture – unless you are Michael Jackson,” they explain in the study. “Most trained dancers with strong core strength will reach a maximum of 25 or 30 degrees of forward bending while performing this action.”
Though Jackson was in marvelous shape, even he couldn’t do the maneuver without help. So he and his team invented a special shoe that would anchor him to the floor during the tilt.
Michael Jackson's patented shoe.
United States Patent Jackson et al.Patented on October 26, 1993, the shoes “have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged” with a “hitch” (such as a nail) projected through the stage surface “by simply sliding the shoe wearer’s foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member,” according to the US Patent Office description.
“Very inventive idea of him,” Tripathi said with a laugh, “because even with that shoe, I am not able to do 45 degrees. You need a very good core of strength, and that strength was in Michael Jackson and his Achilles tendon.”
Yagnick agreed: “Normal people, even with the shoe, probably can’t do it. It takes a lot of practice to develop the core muscles, abs and central trunk muscles to get the strength to do it.”
Not only would most people need intensive training to accomplish the move, said Atlanta physiatrist Dr. Jose Garcia-Corrada, but they could seriously injure themselves if they fell. Garcia specializes in the medical rehabilitation of the spine at Emory School of Medicine.
“If you were to lose your core balance during the lean and didn’t catch the fall with your arms, you could hit your jaw,” Garcia-Corrada said.
“That might hyperextend the neck and cause serious spine damage.”
It’s not just the spine that might be affected, he added.
“You’re holding most of your weight with muscles that you normally wouldn’t use in this way,” he said. “You could really strain your back and legs muscles and tendons.”
Many audiences who watched Jackson and his dancers perform the feat on video and in concerts had no knowledge of the trick. To them, Yagnick said, it seemed like magic.
“When Michael Jackson brought out the video and then did it live on stages around the world, people didn’t know he had this shoe system,” he said. “Particularly in India, where Michael Jackson is very popular, many people tried to copy him, and some even hurt themselves.”
“MJ style,” as it is called in India, is so popular that one of the top dance groups is called “MJ5” because they imitate Jackson, while children emulate the moves in competitions like “Dance, India, Dance.”
junior michael jackson from INDIA(must watch)
Tripathi believes that Jackson’s legacy has “pushed whole generations of dancers to go beyond their limits,” which he says is putting new kinds of stresses on the spine.
“So in India, neurosurgeons are perplexed due to all these new kinds of neuroskeletal injuries we are now seeing.”
Studies on the newer forms of dance inspired by Jackson back up the doctors’ observations.
A 2012 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports followed three types of hip-hop dancers: popper/lockers, breakers and “new schoolers.”
Popping and locking are foreshadowed in many of Michael Jackson’s routines.
Locking requires freezing from a fast movement and “locking” into that position for a short time before suddenly moving again. Popping involves quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to produce a jerking motion or “pop” in the body.
Breakers or “B-boys” practice a highly acrobatic type of dance that involves tumbling, spinning headstands and lifts in which the entire body is supported by one arm. “New schoolers” borrow inspiration from many styles of dance and fit them to the music.
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There were 738 injuries among the 232 dancers in the study; breakers had the highest number of injuries.
The study’s conclusion: Hip-hop dancers “should be educated concerning injury prevention, biomechanics, and use of protective equipment.”
A 2009 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found 1,665 injuries among 40 breakdance professionals and 104 amateurs, mostly in the wrist, spine, shoulder and ankle. Breakdancing, said the authors, “must be considered as a potentially high-risk dancing sport,” especially since dancers didn’t often take enough time to heal before jumping back into training.
That is a significant problem in India as well, Yagnick said, particularly among young people who see dancing as a pathway to a profession.
“We are seeing a lot of complex dance moves that they just copy but don’t really learn from a professional,” Yagnick said. “They are young, 18 or younger, and they want to get ahead, and they are pushing themselves. They don’t know what they are dealing with. There should be education on the right and wrong way to do things.”
Michael Jackson is the best dancer of our lives - Unsportsmanlike behavior - Blogs
Performed at the Super Bowl and came to Fulham.
In the spring of 1999, the third English division football match between Fulham and Wigan was attended by Michael Jackson. For a figure of this status, the event was not at all obvious, and when, after the game, the owner of Fulham, Mohammed Al-Fayed, invited Jackson to the locker room, the players decided that this was an imitator.
Just in case, they asked him to show the moonwalk. nine0005
It is unknown if the most successful artist in the history of mankind slipped into the dressing room of a modest English stadium to confirm that he was not an impostor.
But how cool would it be if it was.
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Michael Jackson spent 45 of his 50 years in show business. He recorded the highest-grossing album in the history of music (and in total, according to various estimates, sold from 200 to 750 million copies of his work), won hundreds of awards, turned MTV and Super Bowl concerts into a global phenomenon, and also anticipated more or less all pop music. music at the turn of the century and was once seriously crowned an African king. In his peak years, he collected Wembley 15 times, and when in 2009-m announced a return tour, a million tickets were swept away in two hours. At various times, Jackson has been a cartoon character, a doll and an advertising face for Pepsi, and now for almost a decade he remains the highest paid deceased celebrity.
In the entire world culture of the 20th century, units are comparable to Jackson in terms of scale, recognition and influence: Chaplin, Disney, Elvis, Lennon.
In his autobiography (correctly titled "Moonwalk"), Jackson told how he worked with Diana Ross, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, and on national television joked personally for Hollywood Golden Age legend Katharine Hepburn, who motherly reprimanded him for eternal dark glasses. But in a surprising way, in the most touching moment of his (rather on-duty) memoirs, there is no namedropping, and it’s not even about music, but about dancing:
“I wanted to do a really long spin and stop on my toes for a moment,” Jackson wrote of his iconic 1983 Motown record label performance. - But I could not freeze as much as I wanted, and lowered my heel. [Later backstage] I was still upset about it, but then a little boy came up to me - about ten years old and in a tuxedo. He looked up at me with eyes full of admiration and said: “Where did you learn to dance like that?”.
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“I've always been good at dancing,” said Jackson, the only musician in America's Dance Hall of Fame. The choreography is already present in Jackson's earliest performances as part of his family group the Jackson 5, the sensation of the era of bubblegum pop.
Jackson joined the Jackson 5 when he was only five, and spent his entire childhood in rehearsals and performances: first in talent shows, and then with his own concerts. He recalled being alone backstage as a child “watching all the headliners to learn as much as possible from them. I looked at their feet, at what they were doing with their hands, how they were holding the microphone, trying to understand why. I did not miss a single step, not a single movement, turn, turn, twist, emotion, half-movement. That was my education and my recreation." nine0005
Having already become a star, Jackson in many ways remained a child, full of unique androgynous innocence. In particular, he retained this awe of great artists, as if refusing to see that he himself became one of them: “I grew up on real showmen: James Brown, Sammy Davis, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly.
A great artist does not leave anyone indifferent - this is an indicator of greatness. It's like Michelangelo - whoever you are, it can't help but touch."
At the same time, the professional drive and ambitions of Jackson himself have always been very powerful. The song Dancing Machine came out at 1974, when 17-year-old Michael had already grown to the role of the frontman of the Jackson 5, and he was "determined to find a dance element that would enhance the song and make the performance more interesting for both the band and the audience." Thus, by a conscious effort of the creative will of a teenager, nothing less than a robot dance was born. The movement, seen on the street, catapulted the Dancing Machine to the top of the charts, and showed Jackson the power of television. “In just a few days, it seemed like every American kid was dancing the robot. I have never seen anything like it,” he recalled at 1988th. 30 years later, the world has survived macarena, gangnam and (sort of) floss, and the robot is still the highlight of school discos, street sessions and Sex and the City.
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Four years after the robot, Jackson played the Scarecrow in Visa, Sidney Lumet's fantasy based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Jackson, who always dreamed of cinema, worked on the film with its most complex choreography:
“Since childhood, it was enough for me to see a dance movement once - and I immediately knew how to perform it. Someone had to explain step by step, beat the rhythm, show where to put your foot and move your hip, and where - with your neck. But if I saw it, then I could repeat it. nine0005
But, as it should be in the film industry, this became a problem. One day during filming, Diana Ross, who played Dorothy, took Jackson (with whom she had a great relationship) aside and explained that he puts her in a bad light because he learns dance chords too quickly. Until the end of filming, 20-year-old Jackson generously pretended to be a worse dancer than he was, and the film eventually received four Oscar nominations:
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-star" and became at first just a star, and then the main star of the planet: for the first time, four tracks from one disc hit the Billboard top 10 at once, more than 20 million copies of the album were sold worldwide, Jackson won his first (out of 13) Grammy and received the highest percentage of sales in the industry from its label Epic - 37 (almost $ 2 from each record sold in the US). nine0005
He himself, however, felt that Off The Wall deserved more, so he began recording the next album with a thirst for revenge. Thus was born Thriller (1982), the most successful release of all time, making Michael Jackson a legend. Of the nine songs on the album, seven were released as singles, all of them in the national top 10, and a year after the release, Thriller was still selling over a million copies a week.
In 1984, Time declared the 25-year-old Jackson "the sole savior of the music industry: a decade-defining songwriter, a dancer with the craziest legs, and a singer who transcends tastes, styles, and colors.
" nine0005
By then, Jackson had already performed at the 25th anniversary of his former label Motown with the "thriller" track Billie Jean (which was almost named Not My Lover to avoid being associated with tennis player Billie Jean King). And if the Thriller album turned from a hit into a blockbuster thanks to the Beat It single, then it was Billie Jean and the performance at Motown 25 that turned Michael Jackson from a classy dancer into a visionary. scene. Back at 1972, while touring with the Jackson 5, he wanted to run backstage to get the hat he wore for the cover of the album before performing the hit Got to Be There. “They didn’t let me do it then, because I was small, and the adults thought the idea was stupid. But soon Donny Osmond was performing all over the country wearing a very similar hat, and people were ecstatic. Even then I trusted my instincts. I believed that I knew how to do it."
More than a decade later, preparing for Motown 25, the first thing Jackson ordered was a hat: "a cool spy-type fedora, like a secret agent.
" Until the last evening before the performance, however, a hat and a black jacket he accidentally found were his only plan. nine0005
“Then I went down to the kitchen and turned on Billie Jean. Loud. I was there alone, the night before the show, just standing there and waiting for the song to tell me what to do. I let the dance create itself, let it talk to me. When I heard the first bar, I put on that spy hat, struck a pose, and followed Billie Jean's rhythm, letting him dictate the moves. And this moment, when I faded into the background, skipping ahead of the dance, was amazing, ”said Jackson at the end of the decade.
On that day in Pasadena, Michael Jackson's moonwalk saw the light of day for the first time - perhaps the single artist's signature move in the history of popular culture. “I didn’t invent the moonwalk,” Jackson never hid, “but I perfected it. It was a dance piece from the ghetto and was taught to me by three black guys. They showed me the basics, and then I practiced alone for a long time and combined it with other steps.
All I knew for sure was that in losing to Billie Jean, I would go forward and backward at the same time, as if I were on the moon. nine0005
There is another version of the origin of the moonwalk. Choreographer Jeffrey Daniel, who worked with Jackson on later videos for Bad and Smooth Criminal, said that she appeared after Jackson and "little Janet" saw him dancing at Disneyland in the early 80s.
“They watched me dance from backstage. And then he called me and said he wanted to meet and work on the movements.” According to Daniel, Jackson didn't even manage to do the moonwalk right away ("It's like the Matrix - everyone fails the first attempt"), but "then seeing him do it on stage and launch it into the stratosphere was something." nine0005
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It is important to understand that in the early 80s Jackson's creative authority was already so high that he invited choreographers to cooperate so that they would broadcast his ideas, and not supply them with their own.
“MJ gave them instructions on what type of movement they would like, so the choreographer would already put it into concrete form. Then he came in, looked at the material and adapted it for himself, ”says Steve Knopper, editor of Rolling Stone and author of The Genius of Michael Jackson.
The cult videos Thriller (the world's premier music video: a 14-minute, half-million-dollar horror movie that hit theaters and inspired the annual pre-Halloween dance festival) and Beat It (a gangland story that references West Side Story compositionally) were directed by Michael Jackson Peters. He said that the secret of Jackson's bombastic choreography is his brilliant knowledge of both the history of dance and its present. This allowed Michael to combine elements of break dancing with borrowings from Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. nine0005
By the way, with Astaire, the maestro of musical comedy of the first half of the 20th century and the first person of the IMDb database, Jackson has an episode that allowed him to truly feel like a dancer for the first time.
“Fred Astaire called me the day after Motown 25. He said, verbatim, “You move like the devil, boy. You put them all in a puddle yesterday.” I wrote it down yesterday and rewatched it this morning. You're just the devil." [When Gene Kelly said the same thing to me] I felt like I was introduced into an informal fraternity of dancers, and it was a huge honor, because these are the people I admire most in the world. nine0005
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In addition to rope feet, spins, toe-stands and monster dancing, until the late 80's Jackson's big dance inventions were the groin grabs and the anti-grav tilt from the Smooth Criminal video. About the first in 1993, Oprah Winfrey asked him bluntly in a long interview: “Why are you always grabbing your groin? Do you have some problem?" Jackson, with a childish laugh, explained that he just listens to the music and does what it says: “It happens unconsciously. Dancers, they just interpret music and accompaniment. If there are basses, you yourself become a bass.
If the strings - you become a string and the emotion that it expresses. So if I'm dancing and I'm like, bam, grab myself, I'm doing it because the music says so. I don’t think: so, but is it necessary to do this, otherwise the place is not the most successful. This happens by itself. Sometimes I look back at the records and think: did I really do this? nine0005
The week before the interview with Oprah, Jackson did a half-time show at the Super Bowl: now the dream of any artist in the world, but then the halftime of the most important sporting event in the United States, to which viewers left and did not always return. It so happened that at that moment not only Michael was needed by the Super Bowl, but also vice versa: Jackson remained a megastar and collected stadiums with the Dangerous tour, but the very music that he played: light, danceable, naive - already sounded a little outdated and receded under pressure grunge, alternative and hip-hop. nine0005
And Jackson delivered. In his autobiography, he wrote that he always gave the best work under pressure, and this was just such a case.
For 12 minutes at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, he showed a mashup of hits, and then, with the participation of the stands and 3,500 children who filled the field, he sang the humanitarian anthem Heal the World. As a result, TV ratings for the match rose during the break and remained high until the end, the Super Bowl break became one of the top shows on Earth, and Jackson regained the title of King of Pop and, in a sense, even anticipated YouTube. nine0005
Smooth Criminal is not so romantic. The 45-degree slope from there looks as luxurious as it is implausible - even for Michael Jackson.
The video used threads and wires for support, and for live performances, Jackson patented a special shoe with ankle support, which was attached to the stage surface by a mechanism in the heel and allowed the dancer to shift the center of gravity from the feet, but remain on them.
Sometimes, however, it failed - as, for example, in Moscow at 1996th (Jackson's second and last visit to Russia with a campaign for antiques and a meeting with Yuri Luzhkov).
The 90s were not the most glorious period in Jackson's life. He married, got divorced, defended himself against accusations of pedophilia (he was not convicted, but the residue remained), waved a child from the balcony and turned suspiciously white (an autopsy confirmed that he really had vitiligo, not racism). So over the years, he went from an eccentric celebrity living at home with a boa constrictor, a llama and a chimpanzee, into a grotesque celebrity who walks in a mask, avoids any contact with the media, and is experiencing financial difficulties. Plus, he built a ranch that evoked the sinister Xanadu castle from Citizen Kane, even though it was for kids. nine0005
Jackson's star power from all the PR failures, however, did not suffer much, and when he went on a farewell tour in 2009, due to frenzied demand, the number of gigs on the London O2 was increased five times: from ten to an unimaginable 50.
From this megalomaniac project, only one documentary about the rehearsals of This Is It came out, but its effect is even stronger because nothing came true.
The film begins with the selection of dancers for a concert troupe, and almost every member is crying when he tries to explain what it means to him to dance next to Michael Jackson. nine0005
“Life is hard, isn't it? says a boy in a leather jacket over his naked body in a trembling voice. “And I kept looking for something that would give me meaning and hope and faith in something. I found Michael."
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It is generally accepted that great work is behind great success - this is prestigious, pedagogical and almost always true. But behind the biggest is always something else (luck? cunning? magic?).
Perhaps that is why when you meet a person who has found his business, then you remember him for a long time.
It could be Jamie Oliver explaining that a good omelette doesn't need milk, or Alexander McQueen with his holographic Kate Moss, Leo DiCaprio with his Russian accent, or Cord yelling about "####### simple and simple ### ####". nine0005
And very rarely it can be someone like Michael Jackson - a born showman who, when asked about his destiny, answered: “It is a great honor for me to be the chosen one who gives the world music, love, harmony. The meaning of my life is to give everything I can with my songs, dances, music.” Jackson is most often called not a musician or even an artist, but a hard-to-translate word entertainer - an entertainer. And it's so true about him - a man who appeared to walk back and forth at the same time, as if he were on the moon, while everyone else thinks: like him, there are only once in a hundred years or just once. nine0005
Photo: REUTERS/Roy Beardsworth/Action Images; Gettyimages.ru/NBCU Photo Bank; mjlyricsonly.com; globallookpress.com/Harrison Funk/ZUMA Press
Michael Jackson The Elements of Dance online edition
He was deified, he was attributed to an alien origin, he was loved endlessly and just as endlessly hated.
In 1997, he was recognized as the most famous person in the world. Michael Jackson is a name associated with incredible fame and dirty scandals, an artist who created modern pop culture, becoming its king, its golden idol. With bated breath, the world watched his moonwalk. He went out on a huge stage, and his fragile figure suddenly captured the entire surrounding space. Defying gravity, incredibly plastic, dancing even in stillness, Michael Jackson said that he felt the touch of something sacred while dancing. Perhaps this sacred was also accessible to the audience, because, looking at it, it was hard to believe that a person, the same as everyone else, from the same flesh and blood, is capable of such a thing. Music, his voice and image complemented such a vivid impression, he seemed great and immortal. And later, in 2009year, when his body refused to fight another dose of propofol, it was as if an entire era had ended: the king had died, his subjects were mourning, they simply did not believe in another king.
They say that already at the age of seven, Michael Jackson was choreographing in The Jackson Five, and in 1969, when the boy was eleven, fame came, and the group's debut song was at the top of the American charts. Being stars is not easy, and the five Jackson brothers fully appreciated this fact: the father of the family created not just a children's group, popular among their peers, but a serious and profitable music and dance project with far-reaching plans. Consequently, the children had to work, and those who failed to show a decent result were flogged. Early 90's, Michael talked a lot about how his father beat him and his brothers, and Joseph Jackson himself did not hide this. Be that as it may, success came and entrenched for many years, although his father's upbringing left a certain imprint on the fate of the artist. Michael Jackson, like his favorite character Peter Pan, never became an adult - perhaps out of a sense of some kind of internal protest, because he was unfairly deprived of his childhood.
A man without age and gender, but armed with talent and hard work, Michael Jackson once began a solo career. His name was already well known in certain circles, but the general public found out about him in the early 80s, when Thriller was born, an album that broke every imaginable and unimaginable record in popularity and became the best-selling record in history. And at 19In 1983, the artist demonstrated his trademark "moonwalk", the elements of which he had previously tested in his performances.
Dancing skills were always easy for him: he memorized movements almost instantly, reproducing them with incredible accuracy. Saying that consciousness expresses itself through creativity, Jackson called creativity precisely the dance that allows him to open up, liberate himself, remove the shackles of natural shyness. At the same time, he gave the dance the same thing, popularizing complex techniques, conveying to the general public the beauty and perfection of dance movements.
