His name may not be familiar, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen Vincent Paterson’s work as a dancer or choreographer.

Like, say, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” music video? Paterson’s one of the two gang leaders knife-fighting in the climactic dance-off. Or Madonna’s groundbreaking Blond Ambition tour? He co-directed its dance numbers for the Material Girl and her troupe of backing dancers. How about movies including “The Birdcage,” “Evita” and “Dancer in the Dark”? It’s Paterson’s name as choreographer in the credits.

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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.

“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. “All I had was a sleeping bag and a duffel bag in the corner of a room in Hollywood.

“It was insane,” he says. “But I really wanted to do this.”

After nine months, however, the savings he’d arrived with was running out.

“I was down to so little money,” Paterson says. “I promised myself: if I have to be a waiter, I’m going to stop dancing.”

One day, Paterson decided it was time. He walked into a restaurant to ask about work and was told to come back at dinner. With a few hours to kill, he took what he thought might be his last-ever dance class.

“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. “‘Please, sir, please!’

“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.

“It was the beginning of the destiny that said, ‘This is what you are supposed to do.’”

A late bloom

That Paterson even got a chance to dance professionally in Hollywood is remarkable. 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.

“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. “Where I grew up was kind of like the Liverpool of the United States along the Delaware River and the oil refineries.

“People did not dance there,” Paterson says. “You only danced because you went to a wedding or a party or something like that. People did not go and take ballet class. I mean, you would have had  your legs broken, probably.”

Rather, Paterson was a theater kid in high school, an interest that continued upon entering Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1968.

“It was alternative, crazy theater or a little bit of mime that got me into a little bit of movement,” Paterson says. “But I left that behind to keep getting into more avant-garde stuff or the classics and work like that.”

In 1973, Paterson and a friend fled the cold Philadelphia winters, driving toward the warm sunshine of Tucson, Arizona. 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.

“If anybody had seen me at that point, they’d have said, ‘You’re gonna go take dance classes?!’” he says. “I was hunched over. they’d say, ‘Touch your toes.’ I could hardly touch my knees.

“But something happened,” Paterson says. “I took one class and I was like, ‘What the heck is this?’ I just fell in love with it. I never had any aspirations to do it in terms of something professional.

“But life just presents itself, and if you keep yourself open, you find the path. And this seemed to be the path for me.”

Meeting Michael

In Los Angeles, after landing that first job, things quickly picked up.

“I went from there to doing a lot of television gigs at the beginning,” Paterson says. “A lot of those variety specials. Cheryl Ladd and Linda Carter and, gosh, Karen Carpenter. Anybody who had a name had a variety show at the end of the ’70s.”

Olivia Newton-John hired him to dance as her partner in a pre-MTV era music video for her 1978 single “Totally Hot.” (They remained friends ever after, Paterson describing her a few weeks after her death this year as “one of the sweetest women in show business.”)

He toured as one of Shirley MacLaine’s dancers until she fired him. (They later made up and worked together again.) He danced on the 1981 Christmas special “John Denver and the Muppets,” and then for several years, as Barbara Mandrell’s partner on the “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters” TV series.

Then, in 1983, friend and choreographer Michael Peters invited Paterson to be his assistant choreographer and featured dancer on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video, launching a collaboration between Paterson and Jackson that would last nearly two decades.

“When we first started working with him, he was just this shy, little kid that seemed very quiet, never said a word, and was just so humble and sweet,” Paterson says of Jackson. “The weird thing was, when you start dancing next to this man, he turned into this dance-music monster.”

Paterson repeated his role as assistant choreographer on Jackson’s “Thriller” music video but soon took over as his go-to choreographer, creating not just the dance moves but also much of the style and story of videos for songs such as “Smooth Criminal,” for which he writes about coming up with Jackson’s famous “lean” move, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Black and White.”.

He did the choreography for Jackson’s BAD tour, for his 1988 Grammy Awards performance, and his 1993 performance at the halftime show for Super Bowl XXVII at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

There’s a melancholy moment in the book when Paterson writes about the last time he saw Jackson, in 2001, and came away troubled by the changes in his friend and former collaborator’s performance. But mostly he focuses on the good times they shared.

“Talking to you now my arms are covered in goosebumps,” Paterson says. “This is what happens when I talk about dancing next to Michael Jackson. You could feel the energy literally coming off his body.

“I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. Ever, ever, ever.”

Madonna the muse

Madonna was one of Paterson’s musical idols so when director Joe Pytka invited him to stop by the soundstage where he was shooting a Pepsi commercial with the star, and maybe offer a bit of choreography, he was ecstatic.

“And when he introduced me, and she said, ‘Excuse me, I don’t need a (bleeping) choreographer,’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ My heart just dropped.

“But Joe said, stay around, and I helped make some things happen that got her off the set quickly, and she became a little bit more interested,” he says.

By the time the Pepsi shoot wrapped, Madonna warmed to him enough that she asked him to choreograph her “Express Yourself” music video, giving her suggestions for things “she didn’t even know a choreographer could do,” he says.

“Like teaching you how to be elegant sitting in a chair, teaching you how to crawl across the floor and elegantly pour a bowl of milk down your face,” Paterson says. “They look simple, but there’s always something behind it that makes it happen.”

When Madonna asked him where to place her hand at the end of that video Paterson suggested she try a move he’d given Van Halen several years earlier for its “Hot For Teacher” video.

“I said, grab your crotch,” he says. “Every female after her started grabbing their crotch. I don’t know if I’m gonna be punished for that after I die or not.”

His work with Madonna continued as choreographer for her Blond Ambition tour, a show that pushed the envelope so far that Pope John Paul II declared it had “rereleased Satan into the world.”

He also came up with the concept for her and her dancers to perform her hit “Vogue” dressed as Marie Antoinette and her fan-snapping courtesans at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, and ultimately worked with her on Alan Parker’s movie musical adaptation of “Evita.”

Björk and beyond

Over time Paterson did music videos for a who’s who of modern pop stars, from George Harrison and Hall & Oates to Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell.

For movie directors, he helped Robin Williams find his moves in Mike Nichols’s film “The Bird Cage,” and the same for Björk in Lars Von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark.”

“It was amazing,” he says of working with the Icelandic singer. “You’d walk around with her in the streets. She’d have a tape recorder and she’d hear a garbage truck doing something and she’d go, ‘Oh, Vincent, wait a minute,’ and she’d take her tape record and tape the sound. Or a newspaper flying down the street in the wind. ‘Oh, Vincent, I’ve got to chase it!’

These days he mostly works as a theater director. He met his coauthor, Amy Tofte, while directing a play she had written. He’s also a leader in the quest to create a Choreographers Guild to represent their ranks in Hollywood in the same way that writers, producers, actors and others have unions to fight for their rights and interests.

All of this life he’s had is the result of deciding long ago to trust his instincts, Paterson says.

“There was just something in me that always said, ‘Vincent, this is what you’re supposed to do,’” he says. “And every time I tried to move away from it life would push me back into it again.”

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