I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  That there was any question on the subject took me by surprise. To me, the answer was ragingly obvious. Of course the male pro had a bigger challenge, simply due to the nature of ballroom dancing.

  In the pure, original, authentic tradition of ballroom, the dynamic between male and female partners was extremely well defined. The woman was the work of art, while the man served as the frame for that work of art. The man’s job was to present his partner in the most ideal manner possible. The female carried the heaviest load and was the focus of the spotlight. The role of the male in the ballroom dance world, the authentic ballroom world, was to complete her in every way.

  The woman had much more work to do, much more business to attend to, than the man ever would. There’s the famous line about the difference: “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backward and in high heels.”

  I would be the first to tell you it was a lot easier to learn how to be a male ballroom dancer than it was to be an effective female ballroom dancer. I didn’t think anyone could seriously deny that, but I got plenty of pushback from the women pros on the show. With the celebrity contestants, they said, the assumption was that a man couldn’t dance and that a female could. Plus men were clumsier than women, men were awkward, and men were harder to teach because their egos got in the way. I could see the women’s point, but I wasn’t buying their argument.

  Look, I can furnish a simple example of the double standard in ballroom. A male celebrity dancer could spend four-eighths of a bar of cha-cha music—a bar being one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and . . . eight!—just unbuttoning his shirt, then spend another half bar taking his shirt off.

  Afterward he could throw in a pelvic thrust and maybe, depending on the song, whip that shirt around his head and throw it at the audience, ending up with a “New Yorker,” posed with an arm raised high. The judges would score the male dancer’s routine, the audience would love it, and people watching at home would praise the energy and excitement, with comments such as, “Oh my God, that was my uncle’s move at the wedding!”

  Meanwhile, what was the female of the couple up to? She couldn’t just stand there and watch the male take four-eighths of a bar stripping his shirt off. I knew I could never leave my partner stationary, have her stand there smiling like a mannequin while I ronde around her, do two spins by myself, hold onto her, and then do a dip while she does her New Yorker. For a female to do what a male did simply wouldn’t make sense.

  In authentic ballroom the woman dancer is always absorbed in movement. She has much more to do than the man. Girl pros on the show did incredible moves by themselves and finished by themselves, only to have the male celebrity next to them strike a pose and shout, “Yeah!” The camera zoomed in for the guy’s triumphant moment. Take the same choreography and reverse the gender, and we would have the male celebrity flying around doing crazy spins, stopping, and hitting the line, with the female pro doing the “Yeah!” moment.

  The whole essence of ballroom dancing—as opposed to, say, solo tap—is that men and women dance together. We are creating with each other.

  Who has it easier? The question reminds me of Zeus and Hera in Greek mythology, debating over who took more pleasure from sex, males or females. Zeus said women did, while Hera said men. Luckily they had someone who could settle the question with authority. The prophet Tiresias had spent some years as a male and then other years as a female (don’t ask me to explain how, even though I do live in West Hollywood), and he answered that it was women who had the better time of it.

  Did that end the debate? Nope. The conversation continued, just like ours did about whether male or female pros had the harder time on the show. I had my own opinion, but no one was interested in the new guy on the show putting in his two cents. So I just kept it moving and agreed to disagree.

  AS THE SEASON PROGRESSED I REALIZED I HAD TWO JOBS, dancing well on the show and slipping out from the shadow of my big brother. During the period when he was toiling away season after season on Dancing with the Stars and I was killing it on the competition circuit, our dynamics had shifted, and I wasn’t sure Maks was aware of that fact. I had become a different person from the one he had known so well before, and he had changed, too.

  The years he had been in Los Angeles had affected us deeply. While I concentrated on competing, our lives took separate tracks, his on the West Coast, mine on the East. We saw each other often, but not as much as we used to. In his absence, I stepped up to be the man of the household whenever my dad was away. I had the impossible job of trying to fill my brother’s shoes coaching kids at Rising Stars.

  Now, signing on to Dancing with the Stars and entering into what had been Maks’s exclusive arena, I didn’t want to give up my newfound independence. I couldn’t change the fact that Maks had been introduced to the show long before me. I couldn’t help that audience members saw him first. I had to demonstrate to them that appreciation was not a zero-sum game, that people could appreciate me for being me, while still leaving enough space in their hearts to appreciate him for being him. My brother and I had to coexist and not lose our individuality, which took a lot of effort for a long, long time.

  By the time I joined Dancing with the Stars, Maks had become jaded. He was more or less over it. He was a veteran of eleven seasons. Never once did Maks not give his all in a performance for the show, but I detected some of the old Russian gloom beneath the surface, a bitterness and tension. Something was bothering him. Perhaps his agitation was warranted, but I didn’t see addressing it as my battle.

  From the beginning I filtered his advice on how to survive on the show, separating the good from the bad. There was good, productive advice that I could use, unproductive advice that I couldn’t use, and there was also productive advice that I chose not to use.

  Ultimately, as much as you learn, as much information as you take in, and as much influence as you allow to shape you, you’re the decision maker. “I’m the decider,” as President George W. Bush said. Owning your decisions is the only way you fully insulate yourself from regret. When you allow someone else to make your decisions for you, that’s when things can go south in a hurry. Maks had a different attitude toward the show, one that I didn’t want to adopt just yet. I needed to go through my own growing pains, my own honeymoon period, and my own fed-up, disappointed period, too. I had to find my own gray clouds and my own silver linings. I didn’t need him to hold my hand the way he had done in Odessa, in Brooklyn, and beyond.

  They say you become an adult the instant you forgive your parents for whatever wrongs you imagine they’ve done to you. There was nothing for me to forgive with Maks, but I still had to fight my way out from his shadow.

  I don’t know if people realize how addictive the spotlight is, especially when you work so hard for it. Then it’s the sweetest piece of cake you’ve ever tasted. The more you have to divide that piece, the harder it gets to share, and you find yourself wanting the whole thing. Being forced to split it with eleven other diva dancers creates a lot of intrigue and tension. Sharing the spotlight with a sibling has its own tricky challenges, working out to be great and awkward at the same time.

  On Dancing with the Stars, everybody was a star. Hollywood itself was a town of big fish coming out of small ponds, and a few of the biggest fish gobbled up all the attention. But I was determined to get my head on straight, forget about my past success on the competition circuit, and consciously became the humblest pro dancer that had ever appeared on the show.

  I had bombed out with Elisabetta, so I had nowhere to go but up. To get there, first I had to get myself invited back for the next season.

  Steps

  Dancing with the Stars has spring and fall seasons every year, and the period of time in between them is called the “midseason.” What people may not realize is that none of the professional dancers are guaranteed a spot on the show. The producers like to keep us in suspense until the very last minute. We find out we’ve been picked up only the day befo
re we have to pack our bags and head back to work.

  In defense of the producers, they are simply real people wrestling with the monumental task of coming up with the perfect mix of dancers for a million-dollar show. I came to see such last-minute dramatics not as an example of the cruelty of the world, necessarily, but simply as an indication of how show business worked. All the pro dancers signed a deal that gave the show priority in their lives, but it didn’t work the other way around—the professionals weren’t the main priority for the producers. Ratings were.

  Us dancers were mere cogs in a machine run by the higher-ups. I didn’t hate the players even though I might have disliked the way the game was played. I tried to keep my mind off the drama of whether I’d be re-signed and spent the midseason going about my business.

  At that point, I wasn’t reaping the fruits of my labor. I had stopped competing and came onto the show, only to receive a slap-in-the-face reality check. After that first season I returned to New York down but not defeated. I told myself that even a faltering move forward is still a step in the right direction.

  I discovered my situation at home had changed a little. I couldn’t go back to my work at Dance With Me studios and do it anonymously as I had in the past. Without realizing it I had become something like a D-list—no, not even a D-list—I had become a G-list celebrity. I wasn’t a B, a C, a D, an E, or an F. I was stuck farther down the alphabet.

  To my surprise I found that even G-list celebrity status translated pretty well in the suburbs. In America, television made things real. I now had a wider audience appeal than I had enjoyed before, and when I did a seminar at our Dance With Me studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, for example, I’d attract not just the school regulars, but also some outside fans who wanted to stop in for a sniff. G-list was A-list in Fort Lee.

  All the talk about the big payoff for joining a hit TV show was great, but it wasn’t the money that was inspiring me. I’d been broke for years before that, and had always been happy as hell. I was after something else in Hollywood. I never wanted to be a little G-list bitch for anybody. That just wasn’t my style. I came off the competition circuit as an alpha individual who had gained not just notoriety but respect. I wanted the same result from Dancing with the Stars.

  And then a development came along that crystallized everything, allowing me a crucial bit of insight into myself. That midseason in 2013, at an event held in an Irish pub on Long Island, I was introduced to the concept of the meet and greet. The bar had dark wooden paneling and smelled of sweat and beer. I showed up to find a crowd of people who really, really wanted to hang out with me. I was astounded. G-list or not, I was able to attract a group of strangers willing to pay money to stand in line, have a picture taken, and engage in a five-second conversation.

  I was about to turn twenty-six, and that first humble meet and greet represented a “Holy fuck!” moment for me. At first, it came off like every other meet and greet in the world, with the fans herded along one by one. Step up, take a picture with me, move out. In, photo, out. The arrangement felt impersonal, so I turned to the organizers.

  “These people have dedicated their time to coming out here,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “Yes?” one of the handlers asked, not getting my point. “Keep it going!”

  “Forget what they paid for this, that’s on them,” I said. “But what about their time?”

  The expression on the faces of the organizers said it all: What about it?

  Step up, take a photo, move out.

  The fans were giving up moments of their life to stand and wait for an opportunity to speak to me. I wasn’t going to give them a fake hug, a frozen smile, and send them off from my perch in the land of not-giving-a-fuck. Faced with actual flesh-and-blood human beings, I found that I couldn’t treat them as mere units. How many units did you do today? Oh, I did two hundred units. At $50 a unit, that’s . . .

  I just couldn’t behave that way. Right then and there, I felt myself changing, starting to care about people more now that I saw them caring about me. Some of their concern might be shallow—“That’s the dude on TV! I want to get a shot with him!”—but others showed a deep appreciation. They could cite chapter and verse of what I had done on the show.

  “Bro, that number you did, the quickstep to the Pretenders doing ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong,’ that made my day, made my evening, and I went to bed that night dreaming about dancing.” “Hey, my mom and I had a couple of years of watching the show together and it brought us a lot closer.” “My grandma passed a month ago, and your season was the last thing we shared—I always remember she loved your cha-cha to Katy Perry.”

  Connection. That was what was happening in that smelly pub on Long Island, and I came to realize that connection was what I’d been searching for my entire life. Suddenly I understood what I was really doing on Dancing with the Stars. I had been given this opportunity to have an impact on people, simply by virtue of (a) doing what I loved, but also (b) just by showing a little bit of care.

  The agents and meet-and-greet organizers failed to understand that connection took time. They wanted the usual process of stepping up, taking the photo, moving out. They looked at me with pity in their eyes, as if I wasn’t grasping an essential truth about my place in the world.

  For me, the process was different: Step up—connect!—take a picture, say thanks and goodbye with a smile. We’re both human beings, I thought, justifying the process to myself. This was one area where my usual motto of “keep it moving” did not apply. The ratio of effort to happiness seemed to be mathematically magical. I was a superhero with a superpower, where I could affect so many people in such a positive way. It was the best thing ever.

  From that point on, Dancing with the Stars took on a different meaning for me. I still wanted the glitz, the glamour, and the status—I mean, I was still a performer—but now I understood the incredible power of connecting to people. I had always believed I had to act in keeping with my moral compass. I was raised that way, and it was still as if I was representing my parents with my actions. But I never really cared about strangers before, or what strangers’ perception of me might be.

  In that moment my attitude changed completely. Ah, so this was what I had been doing that first season on prime-time television. It wasn’t about hauling down a big payday (though that was nice), or beating out my fellow competitors (or, as in my case that season, not beating them out). No, I was in the business of connecting with people.

  All of which made me desperately want to get re-signed for a second season, because that would allow me the opportunity to embark upon a similar trajectory with hundreds of thousands of new people. It didn’t matter who the audience member was, or what their situation in life might be. The exchange worked both ways, inspiring and being inspired. It was always possible that I could inspire somebody else, and that fact inspired me to stay inspired myself. Now that’s a lot of inspiration.

  There were three tiers of producers in charge of Dancing with the Stars. First there were my employers, the production company that worked with me, the in-the-studio, boots-on-the-ground team. They were hired by BBC Worldwide, the folks who held the rights to the program’s original concept, first used by a popular show in the UK called Strictly Come Dancing. The BBC execs had the power to say, “Hey, we like this guy and we don’t like this guy.” They in turn had been contracted by the show’s distributor, ABC, and execs at the network could also weigh in: “We don’t like this gal, but we really like this gal.”

  The production company, the BBC, and ABC. That was a lot of people I had to answer to—me, who had never had to answer to anyone but my father before. I could not possibly question his love, and though his discipline was hard, I knew his intention was to give me the best shot at success. So this was a new situation, interestingly different and really terrifying at the same time. All told there were maybe forty people who were making the ultimate decision on my life, and I didn’t even know a lot of their names—never lo
oked them in the eye or shook their hands.

  Given my less-than-stellar showing in my first season, the thread I was hanging from was probably a lot thinner than most of the other pro dancers. But maybe the producers heard about what was going on at those meet and greets during the midseason break. Perhaps the people I met with and greeted had been inspired to post positive stuff about me on the show’s discussion boards. Or the harsh reality could have been that I was still simply riding on Maks’s coattails.

  Whatever the reason, the thread didn’t snap. I found myself on the receiving end of a Hollywood phone call, inviting me to join Dancing with the Stars for the upcoming fall season. It felt like a reprieve, as though I had dodged a bullet.

  MY SEASON 14 PARTNER WAS SHERRI SHEPHERD, WHO AT THE time was a host on The View. Super smart, super bubbly, she was a comedian in her forties who had just had a kid, and was a woman who had been through a lot in her life. I always think that the funnier a comedian is, the darker her journey to that laughter must have been. And this turned out to be the case with Sherri. Her strength came through in her personality, which had a lightness to it, yet at the same time a gritty drive. She had a generous energy despite her past experiences, from poverty in Chicago and homelessness in L.A. She made the arduous climb up comedy’s ladder in little clubs around the country, and for her to wind up where she was represented a huge accomplishment. Now she had a beautiful son as well.

  Sherri rose super early every morning and took her place alongside ABC powerhouse Barbara Walters and one of my all-time favorites, Whoopi Goldberg. She had her hands full with The View and being a new mom, but she was so much in love with Dancing with the Stars that competing on the show had been her longtime dream. Every year, she had requested time off from The View, and every year, she was told no. It didn’t seem to matter that ABC broadcast both programs.