Photo: Andrew Eccles/Disney
I know from years of watching Dancing With the Stars — and So You Think You Can Dance, for that matter — that the Argentine tango is one of the hardest ballroom styles to tackle. It requires flawless technique, precise movements, and the very important mandate that you not whack your partner in the balls with a crystal-studded heel. It is so intimidating, in fact, that even longtime professional hip-hop dancer Jenna Dewan, best known for her starring role in the aughts dance film Step Up, is claiming amateur status.
On Wednesday, the 45-year-old confirmed she’s competing in the upcoming 35th season of DWTS alongside three-time Mirror Ball champion Val Chmerkovskiy. While the news was mostly met with excitement, some fans found it unfair that a woman skilled enough to dance backup for Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake was going up against true beginners like, say, Connor Leavitt. But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly later on Wednesday, Dewan defended her right to compete on the series because she does “not know how to ballroom dance.” “Let’s be clear,” she told the outlet. “It’s two different languages.”
“There’s parts of my dance training that’s helpful, obviously,” she went on. “I’ve learned choreography, I can perform, but there is a certain sense of unlearning for me. It’s a brand-new technique, and it almost threw me off initially because I had to unlearn a lot of — I don’t want to say bad habits — but just habits of the style that I’m used to.”
Dewan added that her experience doing body-rolls in the back of Mandy Moore music videos and getting lifted by Channing Tatum actually makes her more nervous to perform. She finds ballroom stylistically “really foreign,” adding, “It’s not like you’re giving me a style that I’ve done — I can go out there and do that.”
If viewers still have a problem with her participation, they can take it up with Dewan’s partner and 20-season veteran Chmerkovskiy, who told EW it’s “naïve to think that this show is just about dance.”
“It’s about the human experience and the human journey and how much you’re willing to reveal yourself; dance is a vehicle for us to find out more about these people,” he said. “But, totally, she comes in with incredible talent and with great talent comes incredible expectation.”
I guess we’ll have to see how she fares with the foxtrot. Something tells me if Charli D’Amelio and Whitney Leavitt figured it out, Dewan will be just fine.
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