Dancing With The Stars - Week 6

A Teacher's Perspective

By Debra Stroiney

This was such an interesting week on the show. I love how everyone did a different dance we had not seen them perform yet. It shows even those who have a bad couple of weeks still have dances they can dance well.

The next few weeks of this show are going to be tough. Everyone is improving so much and this week all of the scores were within points of each other. It will be interesting to see how things play out from here. I suspect it will come down to luck and which dances they perform. For instance, we know Ty is much better at the Ballroom/Smooth dances; if he has to dance more Rhythm/Latin dances, his scores will be lower. The same with Chuck and Lawrence; they also have dances that are better than others. Since there are so many great dancers on the show this season, I think the judges may start being a little harder on the celebrities. They are looking for the celebrities to bring everything out onto the dance floor. This week, I thought Lil' Kim performed a solid Rumba yet the judges told her to bring back her spunk that makes her who she is. o basically the message is: make sure the dance is technically perfect and also wow the judges with the entertainment.

I was watching Gilles this week trying to figure out why he has come out every week and has done so well. I saw it this week: CONFIDENCE. Gentleman dancers out there… that is the key. His body completely says confidence. The way he held his head in frame, the arm movements, even when he was not so sure of them, he made us think he was! Confidence is a very important factor when you first start competing. If you go out onto that dance floor and you are scared of people watching you, and of judges scoring you then it shows. It doesn’t matter how technically perfect you are because the lack of confidence will affect your posture, how far you extend your arm, smiling and connecting with your partner. This is what Gilles has and this what we need to teach to ballroom students.

The group dance was great! Why? The whole group was in sync with each other. Again, these stars do have talent out there and it shows while performing a group dance such as this. If you remember last season there were some dancers that struggled through the group dance, weren’t on time, and just looked out of place on the floor. This group dance was completely different and was fun to watch.

Hmm…. I have been so good at predicting whose been getting the boot these past few weeks. I have to say Lawrence will probably go but who knows?