Backstage Report: New Dances Give Pros the Jitters
Julianne Hough and Cody Linley, Dancing with the Stars
If Dancing with the Stars producers wanted to shake things up with four new dances, they got their wish: They shook up the pros.
The pros were given the challenge of teaching the hustle, jitterbug, West Coast Swing or salsa to their stars. And they weren't kidding in their pre-dance video packages when they looked and acted— for the first time— like they were floundering. "This week was the toughest week for most of the professionals, I think," says pro Kym Johnson, who had to resort to researching her dance with Warren Sapp, the hustle, on the internet. "I remember calling Cheryl [Burke] and saying, 'I've had the most stressful day. I don't know if I'm doing this good enough.' And she felt the same way. We were both stressing out."
Then there was the added stress of doing lifts. Audience members seemed puzzled that judge Carrie Ann Inaba, who functions as the Lifts Police, didn't penalize the first couple, Lance Bass and Lacey Schwimmer, for doing one. Every couple after them did some amazing lifts, also— the kind of gee-whiz stunts usually reserved for the semi-finals.
"We asked [the producers] about that," says pro Julianne Hough, who partnered Cody Linley doing the jitterbug, "because the hustle and the jitterbug require lifts to make the dance. We were like, 'If we don't do lifts, it's going to be boring.' They said, 'If it requires lifts to do the dance, it's OK. But if you're going to lift somebody just to lift somebody, then you can't do it.'"
But even with permission, seasoned pros like Hough got the jitters Monday night. "I was really nervous going into it," she says, "but then I found that it was even more fun, because if you do the same dance over and over, it kind of gets old."
"I loved it," says her brother, pro Derek Hough, partnered with this season's frontrunner, Brooke Burke. "Sometimes I go into auto-pilot, like, 'OK, cha-cha, here we go again.' But this, I really had to think about it."
Ironically, the only pros who had a bad night were the ones who knew the dances they were teaching. Lacey Schwimmer is a former West Coast Swing champion, while Tony Dovolani, who knows all four new dances, felt very much at home teaching Susan Lucci the hustle. "Lacey and I were the only two who knew our dances and the only two who got slammed by the judges," says Dovolani, laughing. "So go figure."
