I really enjoyed seeing the return of former DWTS celebrities in the trio dances this week, even if I do find them a bit odd.
Rog and I danced in the trio dance round last year with another great professional dancer Kirsten. I thought it could work better with a celebrity as the third dancer, but I was still not a fan – that was before I saw two fabulous performances, carefully choreographed and created for the stars this weekend.
While a few of the stars struggled with it a little, the ones that didn’t produced a really great show, and that was Laura and William.
The choreography in Laura’s dance, which she performed with dance partner Shae Mountain and Shortland Street’s Ben Barrington, and the way the three of them made that routine work was magic. Laura is clearly comfortable with this dancing gig now and is turning out some great performances.
The twerk made a return in Amelia and William’s trio dance with David Seymour.
William and Amelia were absolutely fantastic with David Seymour and I loved how he said it took him two weeks last year to get close to their final score last night! Who would have thought that there would be 10s following a David Seymour performance!
He was visibly ecstatic, and Amelia secretly told me when she started back on the show that David had serious FOMO, so it’s great he got a chance to make a comeback!
When I heard that there were quicksteps in this trio week I was concerned… This is a fast dance and in hold it would have been pretty difficult with three. But they made it look like fun. This was also an incredible performance by William, I think his best dance yet, and a brilliant routine put together by Amelia. This was my favourite dance of the season.
Quickstep is a tricky dance but the most fun of the five ballroom dances. There is speed, movement and rotation to conquer, and you need to be light on your feet and perfectly synchronised with your partner to produce a good show.
There were tears when Glen Osborne left the show.
Seeing Glen in the dance-off was heartbreaking and it was so sad to see him go. It wasn’t his best performance, but neither was it Manu’s.
However, anyone at this level cannot rest on their laurels because every one of those five remaining couples left are worthy winners of the competition and it only takes one bad performance, slip-up or mistake and that will be their undoing.
It is getting harder for the judges to separate the couples as they have all had a lot of training now. In fact, they’ve had the equivalent of about three years of dance lessons at this point.
If you think of a competition couple that on average would have two to three one-hour lessons with a professional teacher a week and the celebrities have had around 30 hours of lesson time with their professional teacher a week, that’s a few years’ lessons condensed into a short period of time.
I have to end with a big shout-out to all the stars who came back this week. They all looked fantastic and just remembered and picked up where they left off before, very impressive.
