These seasons with Elizabeth and Danica were where I built a whole new relationship with dance. From a very young age, the reality had been that I always looked at dance as a sport. I thought that if I wasn’t winning, what was I doing there? The kids answering those surveys had it all over me, since they understood the truth of why we do what we do much better than I did back then.
I had an interview when I was fifteen, after winning the Junior Worlds. A journalist questioned me on dance and dancesport, how it was growing more and more popular, and how Russian immigrants were reshaping the international scene, competing and winning under the American flag.
The journalist asked a simple question: “What do you like most about dance?”
And in my Brooklyn accent I answered, “I like to dance because I like to win.”
Now I can laugh at my young self, but at the time winning was the major motivator for me. Looking back I wonder if I would have kept dancing if I had been ranked 48th, or 90th, or 200th. If I wasn’t in the finals, if I wasn’t first at these competitions, would I have continued to pursue my life in dance?
I don’t know. Perhaps I would have gone further in academia, or perhaps the violin would have won me over. There was no competition in violin, except for what section I sat in in the orchestra. It’s significant that I finally abandoned my musical career when I went from concertmaster to last chair in the first violin section, before finally sitting in the second section. Then the violin stopped being my passion. So in my teenage years was my goal to be number one, or to pursue the art as a means of self-realization, to help myself grow, and help the world appreciate the music?
Being on Dancing with the Stars and experiencing growth through my work on the show, I built a whole new relationship with dance—not initially, but eventually. I started to appreciate the healing power of it, the creativity involved that went way beyond the competitive nature of the show.
My passion for winning a Mirrorball trophy, I realized, was still my old competitive nature creeping up through my DNA. I could never wholly resist the temptation to want to win. But the idea of victory began to take on a whole different color and shape. For me, victory without actual growth wasn’t worth it. That first win was still an important objective, simply to validate myself as among the greats who ever taught on Dancing with the Stars. But the seasons with Elizabeth and Danica were the beginning of my changing relationship with dance.
Common wisdom says that as soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I was about to test the truth of that concept.
Rumer Has It
A first-meeting moment I treasure came in 2015, on Season 20 of the show. But before I explain what happened then, I have to go back and first get into the previous season.
That installment of Dancing with the Stars established me as a contender on the show. My partner was actress Janel Parrish, who played bad girl Mona Vanderwaal on Pretty Little Liars. She proved to be talented, ambitious, and a super hard worker. But in terms of the competition on Season 19, no one ever gave us a fighting chance, since the fans all agreed it would be Alfonso Ribeiro’s show all the way. He was going to own it. The actor and TV host had talked about wanting to do Dancing with the Stars for a long time, and he was perfect at it.
The producers paired Alfonso with a professional dancer named Witney Carson, who had appeared on So You Think You Can Dance when she was just eighteen years old, and had been a troupe dancer on Stars for multiple seasons. Witney was a bubbly, wholesome, girl-next-door beauty, so red-blooded American that when she came on the TV you could almost see an eagle fly by gripping the Stars and Stripes in its beak.
Alfonso and Witney. The viewers all thought the couple already had the Mirrorball all sewn up. The rest of us could just go home.
But I was telling myself, Fuck that. I looked forward to a great season with Janel. I swore that I would give the two of us the absolute finest, absolute toughest fighting chance that I possibly could.
“We’re going for the upset,” I said to Janel.
Looking back at that season I still believe I created the best choreography, best performances, and best content that I ever have produced for the show. I wasn’t the only person who had a hand in creating what I did, of course. Family and friends supported me and helped the whole process immensely.
Janel and I made it to the finals and wound up taking third. Purely in terms of performance, the final product was outstanding. Season 19 had turned out well, but something happened in the aftermath that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Particularly in partnered dancing, what makes a performance so incredible was the same quality that makes the preparation hard to bear. Rehearsals can be exhausting, and the season with Janel was no different. Gradually all the interactions between us took on a highly personal flavor. We entered into a romance.
As happens all the time in ballroom, essentially Janel fell in love with her dance teacher. And her dance teacher (that would be me) was too weak, too stupid, and too trophy-hungry to take her aside and tell her, “Hey, I’m really not interested in this. I just want to dance.”
If I had been a wiser man, that’s what I should have said, would have said. But I was too blinded by the opportunity to play at romance in order to achieve the goal I wanted, which was holding up a Mirrorball trophy at the end of the season. I fell into the trap of letting relationship melodrama get in the way of me sticking to the script, which was to focus on dance. I let the line get blurred. I didn’t separate the personal from the work.
The reason I came to look at Season 19 as disappointing wasn’t a result of the content or not winning, but that what appeared to matter was the romance, not the performances. I wound up feeling empty about the effort I had put in, creating the experience and crafting an environment to help the two of us to succeed.
I have always enjoyed a great performance, and obviously I can’t have a performance without my partner. Janel reciprocated every effort that I made. But at the end of the season she seemed to be more concerned about our personal relationship than excited about the great dances we had created, the flashes of artistic lightning that we had managed to catch in a bottle. For me, the heart of the show was always the dance.
Ballroom is intimate enough, so I don’t need to have sex with my partner to dance the way I do. When I dance, I’m in the moment, and in that moment, I’m in love. The person I’m dancing with is the most important person in my life.
For the moment.
Because of that, because I pack into every routine as much passion, nuance, and commitment as I possibly can, the audience inevitably feels the intimacy. For a man to approach a woman in the way I do when I perform, it’s almost inevitable that people conclude we’re fucking in real life, since the only time two people come together with such high volume of passion and comfort and turmoil is if they are in a physical relationship.
A good dancer can display a wide variety of emotions. I don’t have to be intimate with a person to create a passionate performance. In fact, being intimate, actually being sexually involved off the dance floor, can wind up being counterproductive. When you long for intimacy, yearn for it, but never consummate, dance becomes an exercise in catharsis.
Complicating matters is the fact that there are usually other people involved. My significant other needs to understand the process, and I need to work extra hard to make sure that she knows that she’s still number one. I have to communicate the truth to her, assure her every day of the week. No, I’m not interested in her like that. No, really, I’m not—I’m only interested in you that way. I’m only loving on you. Dance is emotionally so powerful, with such weight beyond even its essential physicality, that there is no way to prevent conflicted feelings.
That holds true for me, too. For example, I’m now in a relationship with an incredible dancer, an incredible talent, just an incredible young woman. I’m so lucky to have her. But she’s like me in a female body, and that scares the fuck out of me. Every time she performs, a s
mall voice inside me wonders, Am I going to lose her?
Finding myself in this situation has made me a better, more conscious person. What attracts me to her—her name is Jenna Johnson, by the way—is also what makes me insecure and jealous. I’m an artist, and I do the same thing she does all the time, and to her credit she sticks by me without fail. Lately I’ve felt occasional twinges of jealousy, not because I don’t trust her, or because I fear that she’s not coming home to me, but because she might share a very special moment with somebody else, and I want all her special moments to be with me. I want to be the only special moment she has, especially on such a high level of emotional tension, and especially when it comes to intimacy.
The Capezio is now on the other foot. Seeing her dance with a male partner, I have to consider what happens when I perform and Jenna watches. The only solution that I can come up with is to employ reason. Think it through. Understand that what happens on the dance floor stays on the dance floor. Reason has to play a bigger role in my emotional makeup, because life is not as simple as it used to be, and love is not either.
My girl can get very jealous, but she’s a lot better about it than I am. Jenna loves me more than she’s jealous, way more. So maybe reason isn’t the driving force, maybe it’s simply pure, unconditional love. She challenges me to rise to that same level.
Watching her dance with another man, I have to be willing to say, This is Jenna’s moment, and I need to celebrate that because I love her. That’s how I’ll know I’ve found the person I want to be with, when we can celebrate those moments together. At those times, I can almost feel our connection growing stronger. When it comes to love, you’ve got to dance in the big picture as well as the small. Sometimes it’s your moment, and you’ve got to love that, and sometimes it’s her moment, and you’ve got to love that, too.
It’s the nature of alphas, especially creative alphas, to generate overwhelming degrees of passion when creating or performing. Passion is part of creativity, more addictive than any drug in the world. It’s a hard job. You have to dig deep down. It’s like coal mining for the soul. The history of artists and their significant others is often not a pretty one. Check out Picasso’s biography, for example, or the life story of almost any one of the greats.
I’m in love with love. I’m in love with being in love. And I’m also in love with being an artist. Every day is a tightrope act to make sure those two loves don’t send me tumbling off into space.
Hollywood loves romance, and in Season 19 the romantic melodrama overshadowed all the good performances Janel and I were racking up. Our efforts on the dance floor were getting blown away by the soap opera swirl that seemed to be all the viewers wanted to talk about.
I told myself enough was enough. Never again would I be weak-minded, never again would I allow a romance that wasn’t entirely there to inflame the imaginations of millions of viewers, never again would I neglect to stand up for my craft. From that point forward, I would strictly separate the personal and the professional.
I’ve always liked a line from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Dancer and dance—they’re all wrapped up in each other, right? You can’t separate them. But going forward after Season 19, I swore that everything would be about the dance, and that I’d let the dancer take care of herself.
ON A BRIGHT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DAY IN SPRING 2015, I WAS about to roll into a first-meeting shoot for Season 20 at Rockwell Theater. I had been to the venue before, to attend a tribute program called “For the Record” about the film director Baz Luhrmann. The piece was a musical that featured songs from his movies. Of his work, the film that hit closest to home for me was Luhrmann’s first, Strictly Ballroom, a broad comic portrait of the competitive dance scene in the director’s native Australia. But I loved his Moulin Rouge, too.
For Season 20’s meet-your-partner segment, the Dancing with the Stars producers wanted me to drive up to the theater. To capture the moment, they put a field producer with a camera in the car with me.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” the producer asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
When we pulled up to the Rockwell, another segment producer met me at the door.
“Do you want to maybe come in with flowers?” he asked, offering me a dozen red roses.
“No, I don’t want to come in with flowers,” I said, annoyed at the offer.
I learned the hard way that giving flowers casually was a kind of behavior that did not translate well on Dancing with the Stars or on American television in general, much less in day-to-day life. You have to understand that in Ukraine presenting flowers to people was a very common practice. On a first date, or meeting the teacher at school, or going on a vacation—any occasion called for a big bouquet. Men in Eastern Europe gave flowers to women all the time, a gesture of respect first, romance second. In the West it was much more about romantic flirtation.
The fans of Dancing with the Stars always liked to mix in a little bit of The Bachelor into the show, playing up the relationship dramas between the dancers. Were the dance partners an item? Had love bloomed on the set? Since I’d been caught in that web before, I swore to myself that the new season would be different.
In the past I had been a willing participant in the whole playboy business. I did the media appearances and had the sex symbol conversation. Repeatedly. To some degree I gave in to it, but it was depressing to me that my aesthetic might somehow be linked to a kind of pretty-boy reputation that would overshadow everything else that I was. Besides, the credit for my physical self is all due to my parents, who gave me my genes. Being a sex symbol isn’t even close to what I really hold dear—my thought processes, my ability to speak, reason, learn, create, dance, work, practice.
Listen, I enjoy feeling good and looking good. I like the energy that it gives a person. But I’ve learned that if you feel sexy and confident and strong, the way you look doesn’t really matter. Your energy is what makes you interesting. The rest is just window dressing.
I hear the comments. “Look at this stud, I mean, he is on point!” Do you think I wake up on point? No, I wake up with the same eye garbage and the same morning breath that stinks like shit. I wish my six-pack had magically developed during the night, but just like everybody else, I have to do the stomach crunches to make it happen.
You think I work this hard just to be another pretty face? No. First and foremost I need to be in shape, physically strong, to continue to create on a high level. Looking good is completely secondary to the primary focus, which is health, and the ability to be an artist as long as I can. The paintbrush is my body, and I have to take care of it.
That’s why I chose not to present my new partner with flowers, because I just didn’t want to head down that road. Previously, my status as some sort of hottie had been pushed front and center, and my personal relationship with partners somehow became more important than the work. I entered into the new season on the lookout for anything that would veer toward romantic melodrama and distract from the immediate business at hand.
Outside the Rockwell that day, I tried to get my opinion across to the segment producer. “Don’t you think the soap opera is kind of shallow and getting old? I’ve had all that up to here last year. I’ve learned my lesson. It’s not happening again.”
Needless to say, he reacted with surprise. The kind of reaction I was giving him wasn’t even on his radar. How could I not be interested in playing the game?
I headed into the theater’s green room. The production crew hadn’t seen me in a few months, and they erupted in “Hi!” and “How are you?” There was a lot of embracing, a lot of Hollywood style “air hugging,” the kind that left plenty of open space in between the huggers. By contrast, we Russians went in for the whole-body clinch.
The producer guided me over to a young woman with long brown hair and large brown eyes who stood s
hyly off to the side. I recognized Rumer Willis, and could not help reacting with astonishment that she was present as a Season 20 contestant.
“Really?” I blurted out.
It didn’t seem to fit. Dancing with the Stars was great, and being involved in the show changed my life. But I have to admit that the program was always associated somewhat with a certain kind of audience, with stronger viewership numbers in the rural areas and the suburbs, rather than the “cool” urban neighborhoods.
Like a lot of stereotypes, that reputation didn’t always hold true. I know some legendary rappers who love the show. Bun B, whom I met through the popular radio show Sway in the Morning, and A$AP Rocky both told me they watched it all the time. “That’s a big show, bro,” Rocky said, a comment that gave me the same flash of pride I had getting applause as Potsie in grade school.
But in general Dancing with the Stars was supposed to represent the opposite end of the spectrum from cool. Meanwhile, here was Rumer Willis, Bruce and Demi’s daughter, one of the coolest girls I knew in all the world, putting herself forward to participate. I had met Rumer at the Rockwell the previous year, when she and Janel performed onstage in the Luhrmann tribute.
I tried to imagine her life, growing up fast amid the swirl of movie-star celebrity. She was not only born at one of her father’s film-set locations, but her mom had arranged to videotape her birth, so she had come into the world already onstage, on camera.
We didn’t exactly hang out together, but at the Luhrmann tribute and later, when she visited the Dancing with the Stars set, I got to know Rumer some. I remember thinking that children of stars must have a difficult path to walk. They didn’t ask to be thrust into a world where paparazzi flashes were always going off like firecrackers every time they stepped out of their front doors. Life in the limelight couldn’t help but put someone off balance, and the track record of celebrity offspring demonstrated that.
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