Moonwalking the Hard Way: How the illusion works + How to do it

in 1983 Michael Jackson performed a dance routine on television that jettisoned a particular dance move into public consciousness in a way that we never thought possible before right and that dance move of course is the moonwalk Michael Jackson's popularization of this dance move has arguably inspired a whole bunch of other dance moves a whole bunch of other dancers and a whole bunch of other dance forms that are all based on footwork illusions this move is really important to me as a dancer because not only does it give me the foundations for gliding and other footwork illusions but when you really understand how the mechanics in the illusion works it helps you with all of your illusions your upper-body illusions as well so today you're going to learn the moonwalk you're going to learn all the muscle memory and all the little individual pieces of the moonwalk but more importantly you're going to learn the theory behind the moonwalk all that juicy meaty good stuff that makes it exciting and fun to learn so what is the moonwalk the moonwalk is an illusion where it looks like the performer is walking forwards but in reality they're actually walking backwards so before we dive into the mechanics of the moonwalk let's not take anything for granted and let's examine just plain old why the purpose of conventional walking is to get from point A to point B in the most physically efficient way possible now the mechanics are simple you put all your weight on one foot and then you lift the other foot and place it in front of you this is a step and doing a series of steps in succession means that you're walking human beings walk everywhere and we do it all the time so it's in our best interest to walk in the most energy efficient way possible so the most energy efficient way to take a step is to make sure that your foot is really close to but not quite touching the ground bringing your foot high off the ground requires excess energy for no useful gain and dragging your feet on the ground creates friction which creates more work if you are a flip dragger you'll notice that the heel of your foot doesn't touch the ground as you move it forward only the toes and the ball of your feet this is because the heel the foot is known as the point of most friction in fact when we say someone is digging their heels into the ground that means our being stubborn and they don't want to move they're creating a lot of friction as you walk each flop can be in one of two positions weight bearing or freely moving the weight bearing foot has the entire foot on the ground for added friction and stability the knee that's connected to this foot is straight the freely moving foot is close to but not quite touching the ground the knee connected to this foot is bent and because of this the heel is going to be pointing up in the air as you walk you're going to be swinging and twisting your legs which as it turns out accounts for about 35 to 40 percent of your body mass to make sure you don't fall over as you do this the upper body is going to counterbalance by swinging your arms in opposition to your legs for a quick demonstration of how this works try standing on one leg and swinging the other back and forth your arms are going to naturally start swinging in opposition to that leg now try swinging your arms in sync with your legs and notice how much work this is now the last thing I want to talk about when it comes to conventional walking is the story that goes into each step in order to do moonwalk you're going to need to perform the idea of conventional walking so having a story helps the story begins with you lifting your leg you're moving forward and pushing up against gravity also your upper body is twisting to account for your lower body's distortions then you land your foot on the ground shift your weight and gear up for the next step now that we understand the basics of walking let's reverse engineer to better understand the moonwalk now if the purpose of walking is to get from point A to point B in a physically efficient manner the purpose of moonwalking is to look like you're walking while in fact you're going from point B to point A begin by standing with your right foot behind your left bring your right heel into the air and put all the weight of your body into the ball of your right foot while keeping your left heel on the ground you're going to slide your left foot as far back as you comfortably can when you can't go any further I'm going to switch which heel is in the air and you're going to put all the weight of your body on the ball of your left foot now keeping your right heel on the ground slide your right foot as far back as comfortably possible now the main rule the thing you always have to keep in mind is that you always will have exactly one heel on the ground and that heel will be moving backwards now I want to point out that the principles of locomotion between the moonwalk and conventional walking are really quite similar all your weight goes on one foot and then the other foot moves and also if you've ever seen a toddler try to learn how to walk you know that it's not the easiest thing in the world to pick up so if you are getting confused and you're losing your balance when you're trying to learn the moonwalk that's super natural if I had only one piece of advice for this it would be always try to focus on where does my bodyweight need to go in order to move my feet in the way that I want to move them so let's take a moment to dissect the illusion of what's going on now the first thing you'll notice is that it's super awkward to move your foot back while your heel is still dragging on the floor right this is crazy inefficient and nobody in their right mind would actually walk in this manner and this is where we get to dig into the human psychology of the moonwalk right if everybody and their mother knows that intuitively there's no way that a foot with the heel on the ground should be moving like this then you get to mess with that expectation if someone has two feet on the ground one heel up and one heel down and those feet move relative to one another the most rational story that your body is going to tell you is that the foot with the heel on the ground is planted and the foot with the heel in the air is moving like this I mean after all this is what people look like when they drag their feet which is often imperceptibly different from what people look like when they walk by bearing your weight on the opposite foot of what people expect you're exploiting these assumptions and creating the illusion that one foot is moving while in reality the other one is now let's take a moment to look at the knees even if we're not paying attention to the feet the illusion still works as we demonstrated earlier with conventional walking whenever you bend your knee you're taking your weight off that leg so that you can move it the weight transfers on to the strong leg through the straight knee and down through the heel of the foot as a whole my lower body is being quite deceptive in this shape you'd expect the weight of my body to this one leg if my legs were to move relative to one another you'd expect it to move like this while in reality the weight of your body is on what looks to be the weak leg and you move what looks like the strong leg this is how the lower body creates a solution so now we have a clear understanding of how the illusion works for the lower body but we're not quite done yet right because while the lower body mechanics are the most confusing parts of the illusion if you really want to sell the full package you have to include the upper body as well if you don't pay attention to your upper body you're naturally going to be doing this this doesn't help your illusion at all right the whole point of the emulsion is to make it look like you're walking forwards naturally and unfortunately nobody walks forward like that so after you get comfortable with your lower body movements you'll want to make sure that your upper body is swinging in opposition to your legs obviously this may be a lot of moving pieces to try to coordinate all at once right the heels the way to the body the legs the arms so here's another perspective how you can create this illusion let's take the whole thing from the approach of the story of the step stand with your right foot behind your left and as dramatically as possible take a step forward slow everything down just a little bit and pay attention to how you're moving push off the ground counterbalance with your arms and land with your foot forward now memorize how this feels you want to memorize this feeling because you want to apply it as a template on top of your moonwalk step the only difference between this step and the moonwalk step is where your weight is actually bearing and that wraps up all the tips for the specific dance move and now a little piece of meta advice you should practice this until it's committed into your muscle memory you want to be able to forget about the mechanics of how you are actually moving backwards and you only want to be able to focus on the illusion itself be inventive as a dancer you should be telling stories why are you moving backwards is this some external force or is it an internal force do you care how do you feel about all these things are you surprised or reverent or are you just playing it off as just cool having a deep understanding of all this will simply make you a better dancer not only will you understand the moonwalk but it'll be an entryway for a bunch of other illusion based footwork it'll also be an entryway into a bunch of different illusions whether or not they're involving for work at all if you're interested in learning about any of those check out my other videos click subscribe below and if you like this video click on like and lastly if you want to get better at your moonwalk you should probably be sharing it with some other people and getting some feedback so if you want to I'm happy to take a look at those just post your video responses below it doesn't matter it could be just day one or day 100 regardless I'm happy to give some feedback thank you for tuning in hopefully you have a new appreciation not only for the moonwalk but for all illusion based dance my name is Albert Wong a que FedEx aka professor liquid signing off peace you

Channel: Albert Hwang

Views: 2,788,844

Keywords: Moonwalk (Quotation Subject), illusion, Dance (Interest), glide, slide, tutorial, Michael Jackson (Celebrity), mj

Id: C8M-Hvjm5ns

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2015