And this seemed to be the path for me.” Meeting Michael “But life just presents itself, and if you keep yourself open, you find the path. I never had any aspirations to do it in terms of something professional. “I took one class and I was like, ‘What the heck is this?’ I just fell in love with it. they’d say, ‘Touch your toes.’ I could hardly touch my knees. “If anybody had seen me at that point, they’d have said, ‘You’re gonna go take dance classes?!’” he says. There, a few months later, he walked into a dance studio and at 23 signed up for a beginning ballet class otherwise filled with preteen girls. In 1973, Paterson and a friend fled the cold Philadelphia winters, driving toward the warm sunshine of Tucson, Arizona. “But I left that behind to keep getting into more avant-garde stuff or the classics and work like that.” “It was alternative, crazy theater or a little bit of mime that got me into a little bit of movement,” Paterson says. Rather, Paterson was a theater kid in high school, an interest that continued upon entering Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1968. I mean, you would have had your legs broken, probably.” “You only danced because you went to a wedding or a party or something like that. “People did not dance there,” Paterson says. “Where I grew up was kind of like the Liverpool of the United States along the Delaware River and the oil refineries. “Well, first of all, it just never entered my life,” he says of how far the blue-collar Pennsylvania town where he was born in 1950 was from the world where dance was an actual career. Unlike dancers today, who often enter the field at a young age and train at high levels for years, Paterson didn’t take his first dance class until he was almost 24. That Paterson even got a chance to dance professionally in Hollywood is remarkable. “It was the beginning of the destiny that said, ‘This is what you are supposed to do.’” A late bloom “So this incredible man, Joe Bennett, a major choreographer at the time, came over to watch me for a little while and gave me my first gig, and it saved my life. “And then a choreographer called me and said he was looking for one more guy, and could he come and watch me in class,” Paterson says. With a few hours to kill, he took what he thought might be his last-ever dance class. He walked into a restaurant to ask about work and was told to come back at dinner. “All I had was a sleeping bag and a duffel bag in the corner of a room in Hollywood. “I lived on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment with this guy and a girl and their two French poodles,” Paterson says of those early months in the city. Yet when he landed in Los Angeles in the mid-’70s, hoping for a life of dance in film and television, Paterson – whose memoir, “Icons & Instincts: Choreographing and Directing Entertainment’s Biggest Stars” was recently published by Rare Bird Books – nearly gave up before he ever really started. Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more How about movies including “The Birdcage,” “Evita” and “Dancer in the Dark”? It’s Paterson’s name as choreographer in the credits. Or Madonna’s groundbreaking Blond Ambition tour? He co-directed its dance numbers for the Material Girl and her troupe of backing dancers. Like, say, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” music video? Paterson’s one of the two gang leaders knife-fighting in the climactic dance-off. His name may not be familiar, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen Vincent Paterson’s work as a dancer or choreographer.
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