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DWTS’ former dancer Carol-Ann Hanna: I felt sorry for William and Amelia, that was a hard song to samba to

The former DWTS judge and dancer says William and Amelia couldn't have had a worse song to try and do a samba to.
William Waiirua and Amelia do the samba in Dancing With The Stars

Rocketman week was fabulous with all the razzle dazzle we would expect of an Elton John show – the makeup and outfits again fantastic, and how exciting to dance to all his great tunes. Except for one… so, Benny & the Jets has to be one of my all-time favourite songs, but this is too slow to dance a Samba to.

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I really felt for William and Amelia, but once again they brought it home for a place in next week’s show… and about those batucadas! They are not easy to execute and he smashed them, totally worthy of ‘move of the week’.

Manu and Loryn performed a beautiful foxtrot.

We saw two really fabulous foxtrots this week with Laura and Manu. This is an exceptionally hard dance to make look good; there is a lot of shaping and elongated swing and sway, and the foxtrot timing is a little difficult to pick up.

The count is called ‘Rubato’ which is Italian for “stolen time”, where you have a fluctuation of speed within a musical phrase against rhythmically steady music. In the ballroom dances you can get a bit of “bumping” if the timing isn’t right but we didn’t see any of that!

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Some people ask me if they use dry ice to hide footwork from the judges. Bad footwork cannot be hidden by dry ice, you can see by the movement of the body and the rise and fall of each group if they have their heels and toes correct and it really has to be right for it to flow like that. Very impressive, I was shocked to see Laura in the bottom two.

K’Lee’s jive proved her last dance of the season, even though she did a good job.

It was goodbye to K’Lee. She was no stranger to the bottom two but she went out on her best performance, best marks and the one she appeared to enjoy the most. Go figure, but up against Laura was always going to be tough.

I think her jive was great. Scott put together a really great routine that was challenging and she did a great job of it.

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The judges told Randell they expected more from him because he dances like a professional dancer. No pressure!

I thought Randall’s contemporary dance was good. It was expressive and fluid with all the combinations of the different genres I would expect to see in this dance.

I didn’t really understand the judges’ comments but was happy the judges gave him a good score because I thought the entire piece was lovely. In fact, I thought that he and Brittany’s partner work in this dance was stronger than the partner work they’d showed in the traditional genres.

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There are now two weeks left to go and then the final. My picks for the final haven’t changed.

I’m looking forward to this week where we welcome back the Trio dance but with a twist – stars from the previous shows will join the couples in a dance that is difficult enough with two professionals. There’s a job for the pros… get two of them working together and throw yourself in the middle! Fun!

Dancing with the Stars NZ airs Sundays at 7pm and Monday’s at 7.30pm on THREE.

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