Jenna Dewan on Janet Jackson’s Most Iconic Dance Moments & Why Performing With Her Was ‘The Most Amazing Job You Could Ever Have as a Dancer’
Before Jackson’s 60th birthday, one of her OG dancers reflects on the star’s most game-changing choreography moments.
Black News 
Jenna Dewan can pinpoint the exact moment she decided to become a Janet Jackson dancer. “I was probably 17, and I watched [the HBO special of] the Velvet Rope Tour,” the actor recalls today. “I was two inches from my TV, literally obsessed. I had that ‘a-ha’ moment of, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a Janet dancer.’”
From that moment on, Dewan decided — as so many pop stars, from Britney Spears to Jennifer Lopez, did and would in the future — that Jackson would be her one-woman “vision board” for her career as a dancer-performer. She moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California, “but really so that I could be dance auditioning.” Eventually, that included an open call for Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter” music video in 2000, where Dewan was chosen as one of four female dancers added to the ensemble for the innovative clip — now well-known for its shifting, moving stage which required the dancers to be suspended from pulleys.
Dewan remembers it being a bit like being thrown into the deep end of Janet dancer life — weeks of rehearsals, 23-hour days — but completely worth it: “It was literally making art — insane.” And it kicked off a working relationship that took Dewan to the “All for You” music video and tour of the same name and about two years of dancing for Jackson.
“Janet tends to find a quality in all the people that have been dancing with her — you are your own little unique star,” Dewan says. “She wants the people around her to shine; she knows that energy makes her show. That attitude of ‘I’m the star and the rest are background dancers’ is not what she puts forward. It’s ‘I’m Janet Jackson, and you all are a part of this with me.’”
Dewan went on to become an actor and has had her own starring roles since — memorably in 2006’s now classic dance movie Step Up — but she’s still strongly connected to both Jackson her time dancing with her. And on the occasion of Billboard’s celebration of Jackson’s 60th birthday, she was happy to reflect on the qualities she and Jackson’s dancers over the years have shared.
“I think she’s attracted to dancers who have a sharpness, an ability to do really intricate choreography, but also to show personality onstage,” she says. Those characteristics could, of course, describe Jackson herself as well — as is evident watching her performances on video and live over the decades.
Below, Dewan speaks to Billboard about the best moments of “iconic choreography that truly changed the landscape for pop stars after her,” which made working with Jackson “the most amazing job you could ever have as a dancer.”
