Janet Jackson has seemingly never worked within an industry that has long been characterized by ranks, ego, and the unseen yet very present barriers that exist between headline acts and the individuals who carry them on stage. At least this is the image depicted by actress and dancer Jenna Dewan who during her early career stages toured with the pop icon and never forgot the lesson she got not only about dancing or performance, but about how to treat people with true dignity and warmth.
Dewan was the guest on the March 31 episode of the podcast Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and the memories that she described were vivid, personal, and obviously still significant to her several decades later. At only eighteen years of age, she started touring with Jackson, and this is one of the chapters of her life that she has recounted on several occasions as being one of the most defining moments she has ever in her life. What is interesting, as one listens to her discuss it, is that the lessons she learned were not so much about choreography or stagecraft as they were about character.
Janet taught me many things of just life, but being in this business, she recalls all the names of people with whom she has worked, and this information alone speaks volumes. In large-scale touring productions, where crews may have hundreds of crew members, performers may switch in and out in various legs of a tour, remembering names is not as mundane as it may seem. It is a gesture of interest, of admiration, and of the faith that the individuals surrounding you are worth getting to know.
Dewan continued and made it clear that Jackson was more than attentive at his surface level. She remembers every dancer – where we are. She knows our life. I mean, she makes us part of her life and not many artists do that with dancers, you know, there is a real sometimes feeling of: you are the dancer, she said. It is a phrase that is said with that knowing weight that an individual who is not in the entertainment industry might not grasp fully. Backup dancers are in a peculiar place in the ecosystem of live performance. They are vital to the visual and kinetic language of a performance, they may have been training years to get where they need to be to stand with a big artist, and yet they are frequently regarded as fungible, unseen, or just inferior.
The ranking that Dewan explains is not of a single artist or a single period. It is institutional and is ingrained in the logistics and economics of touring and it takes both big and small forms. You are in a different hotel than we are at, or you are not as good as the singers or the backup singers… there was sort of a hierarchy, but that was not the case with her, before she made the comparison with Jackson. The suggestion is obvious: separation and stratification had to be the default, and it took a conscious and ongoing choice on the behalf of Jackson to not act like that.
What Jackson did instead, as explained by Dewan, was inclusion. You were on her team, you were on the tour, you were in her family. we used to have spa nights, we always stayed at the same hotel with her. I mean it was just little little things and as you grow older in this business you sort of start to see, well, not everybody that graceful, did you know, I mean, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I The choice of the word graceful is fascinating and quite appropriate. In this regard, grace is not about big things and philanthropic acts. It is concerning the silent, unvarying decisions that an individual makes when the cameras are off and nobody is scoring. Accommodating your dancers in the same hotel. Being aware of their origin. Hosting spa nights. Such are little things, and that is precisely what renders them important.
Dewan is not an amateur who tells us one story to make a point. She has come back to these memories with a number of years and media and every time with the same feeling of real thankfulness. A 2022 post of her Instagram feed included a carousel of throwback videos and photos when she was touring with Jackson, and the caption she placed with them gave a definite idea of what the experience meant to her. She started off with a post: “TBT to living out one of my biggest dreams,” before giving the reason that touring with Jackson was her only goal when she first moved to Los Angeles. When she went to LA she wrote, she had one goal and one goal only; that was to go on tour with the legend herself. That particular ambition was so specific, and that it was achieved, that it influenced the direction of all that followed in her career.
It is also through that post on Instagram that she managed to put into words that transcends professional admiration. Dewan wrote: “Not only did I have one of the best experiences of my life when I went on a tour with Janet but she also demonstrated to me just how strong a woman can be at the same time remaining as kind and respectful to everyone around her as she always is. It was truly an experience of a lifetime. I adore you, Janetjackson! Power and kindliness that she recounts is a combination that is mostly considered as a paradox in the entertainment industry where strength is mistaken with coldness and authority with distance. Jackson, as she was to Dewan, never made that false choice.
In a previous episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in 2017, Dewan had also attributed her career to Jackson, implying that this appreciation was always a long-standing and deep admiration of the past, and not a recent redefinition.
