Dancing Out of Darkness

by Kristina Rhianoff

  So we did what we had to do and it felt like we were selling our souls to the Devil. We knew that we were wasting a lot of money but we also accepted that in order to please those who ruled the world in our business, we had to be clever. So we decided that, OK, we would play by the rules but we also wanted to continue to work with Paul and not let our dancing suffer. But to be honest, the whole idea and reality of this was bringing us down as a couple. It broke our spirits and we were both unhappy and fighting loads with each other. That meant that we were still not seeing very good results at competitions because we weren’t connecting at all well and therefore we were not enjoying ourselves.

  While it’s not unusual for dancing partners to start dating, equally when the dance stops it’s not unusual for professional partners to split up. Suddenly there’s nothing to say to each other and Brian and I found ourselves in a similar position. Living in such a negative way, we broke each other’s spirits. We felt that we had made so many sacrifices to do things the right way yet we were still struggling.

  For us it was the beginning of the end, really.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dancing with the Stars? It will never work…

  Brian and I decided to start competing again. We were working with the judges, still working with Paul, and yet we still weren’t getting the marks we had hoped for. In fact, we were still being marked below couples that we knew were not as good as us and, while we understood that we weren’t going to get marked up straight away, it was hard. We started to fight a lot and, as I have said, we weren’t really connecting as a couple.

  Of course, every couple fights on the dance floor, whether in a relationship or not, but we were married by that time and living together. We got married in a very small and simple ceremony as we didn’t have a lot of money to spend on it. We weren’t having a great deal of time apart, it was very intense and it wasn’t a happy time in our dancing or relationship. Up until that point we were happy – we worked hard and it was tough but we were happy. Now I felt I needed to have my own space but because I didn’t have my own car, I had to rely on Brian or his family for lifts, so it didn’t ever really feel like I had time to breathe.

  And buying a car meant not buying a dress for the next competition or not being able to afford to pay for travel for a lesson with Paul, so this was always the choice and dancing came first.

  I was missing everyone at home, too, and I think Brian and I both started to feel that we wanted time away from each other. It was a vicious circle: we would compete, we would be upset with the result, and then we would start blaming each other. Of course it was very immature but we were only twenty-five years old at that time, we didn’t know how to deal with this pressure and stress and cracks formed in our relationship.

  The sad thing was we would fight while rehearsing and then we would fight when we came home and his parents would see us angry and upset. But then again that was another thing that annoyed me about the situation: Brian and his family were so close that there were no limits to what they talked about. For them it was all about communication – they would talk openly about everything. It was very hard as when we would argue in our room, for example, right away he would go out and be like, ‘Mum, Dad, we need your advice…’

  I would be really cross with him for that because I was embarrassed and I didn’t think they should be involved in our fights. And I didn’t want them to think I was ungrateful in any way. If Brian was unhappy it felt like it was all down to me and I was bringing unhappiness upon the whole family. But I was cross with Brian that we just couldn’t sort it out ourselves. I never had that level of support from a parent; instead I buried so many of my problems and dealt with everything on my own because that was how I was able to survive. But Brian wasn’t brought up to hide his feelings and I started resenting him for this. Of course, I now understand that is what family is for, to talk about things, but at the time it made me feel very uncomfortable and embarrassed.

  As we were still struggling in competitions we started thinking maybe we ought to look for another coach. Lessons with Paul were helpful but he was still competing himself and it was hard to find time to get together. So we decided to look closer to home and as luck would have it, there was another famous dancer and teacher, Louis van Amstel, who had just moved from Holland to Salt Lake City in the US. He was known for his eccentricity and his unique style while performing and we were really keen to meet him and see if he could help us in any way.

  So we arranged a lesson with Louis and it felt like he had breathed fresh air into our dancing again. He was a good coach and having retired only a couple of years ago, we felt he could really guide us on where to focus our energies. We would go to Salt Lake City and stay in his house and as we weren’t the only dancers there either, it made us feel better. And we weren’t the only ones struggling, which made us feel less isolated and negative about everything. With Louis’ guidance we started doing competitions again and even though the judges still weren’t marking us as high as we would have liked, I think there was a shift in how people were treating us. They began saying more positive things and I think the lessons with the judges did help as they appreciated that we were playing the game a little bit, too.

  We had a bit of hope again!

  While we were moving in the right direction for dancing, our relationship as a married couple was damaged, so in the end we just focused on being dance partners. We didn’t enjoy just being us – going for a walk, or going out to a restaurant or maybe talking about something else other than dancing – it was always dancing, dancing, dancing. We were a team, we would fight for each other, and if anyone said anything negative about me or Brian, we would stick up for each other, but there was no love as a man and woman between us any more.

  I did get a few people asking me why I was dancing with Brian and telling me that I could do so much better with this person or that person, but it was always a judge who would be trying to break us up. It is a cruel world in a sense and every coach wants to put a winning medal on their own chest saying, ‘Look, this is my couple, I have made these two champions.’ It gives them a status and then they get attention from other dancers who want to be taught by the best in the business, too.

  But I would never leave Brian: he and his family had changed my life, they gave me an opportunity and I couldn’t just leave him. But I can’t lie, it was preying on my mind, especially as our relationship wasn’t great and we were always fighting with each other. I am sure Brian felt the same. But we focused on our dancing and competing and slowly things did start to improve. Then something funny happened. I remember Louis ringing us when we were in LA. It was May 2005 and we were competing in one of the big events over there and he called while we were taking a stroll along Sunset Boulevard.

  ‘Listen, guys, I have just been asked to cast some dancers for a new show coming up on TV. It is a show about professionals dancing with celebrities. I have been asked to cast all the dancers and wondered if you would be interested in doing it.’

  Brian and I were intrigued but when we asked how much they were paying the dancers, it was something really low, like $500 a week. We would make that in a day teaching so that wasn’t an incentive at all! Louis did try and persuade us that it would be more about the exposure and he told us that he was going to be the main choreographer on the show, too, so we knew we could all work well together. But we had just started to climb up again in the competitions and we still had our dream to be champions and so we said no. Besides, why would we want to move to LA and work on a TV show that we didn’t even know would succeed?

  It was of course Dancing with the Stars. The show was brought to the States a year after it was broadcast here in Britain as Strictly Come Dancing. The TV network ABC bought the format and brought it to the States and the first season was terrible: the ratings were bad, the dancers weren’t getting good money and the celebrities weren’t that great either. So Brian and I were quite happy at the time that we had made the right decision
about the show and thankful we hadn’t said yes to Louis. I didn’t, in a million years, think it would go on to do so well!

  Louis said he understood and for him it was the perfect thing to do – they do two seasons a year in the States as the series runs are a lot shorter than ours. When the second season came around, ABC thought they should revamp the show and put more money into it to get better celebrities. And then it really hit the big time. All of a sudden the dancers became celebrities in their own right and they started appearing on Larry King Live and all the other big talk shows in America. We were hanging out with Louis a lot, too, and we also had a lot of friends who we knew from the competing circuit on the show. Louis once invited us to a big ABC party and we went with the dancers from Dancing with the Stars. It was very surreal as we saw lots of celebrities from all the big ABC shows on at that time, like the cast of Desperate Housewives and many other famous actors and actresses. And Brian and I thought to ourselves, maybe we shouldn’t have turned it down after all. The show was really positive for the whole ballroom dancing business – people were talking about dancing and watching the skill that was involved. It really boosted the whole sport and I remember when I first moved to America and told people I was a ballroom dancer, they didn’t have a clue what I meant. I think a lot of people thought it was like ballet!

  We knew we had made the right decision to turn it down, though, as we had invested so much in our dancing careers and we were so close to getting where we wanted to be in the competitions.

  After being crowned National Champions thirteen times, Bob and Julia announced their retirement in 2003. It was very sad in a way but it did mean the field was opened up a little bit more, too. Now there was a big question mark over our heads about whether we could win that title and we put pressure on ourselves to train harder than ever.

  There was one other couple that came into our divisions in competitions and we knew they held a great deal of influence over the judges and competition organisers. The male dancer owned and ran lots of dance studios around New York and was very well connected. He knew all the competition organisers and his studios were used by a lot of the dancers and teachers. Who were we compared to them? We were just a couple from Seattle, we didn’t have any influence; we just worked hard. We found out fairly early on that although Bob and Julia had retired, becoming champions was still out of our reach – in fact, we were told by the judges themselves we shouldn’t be too surprised or upset by this. The other couple had the upper hand in most of the competitions. It didn’t put us off, though: we knew we might not win anything but we hoped that people would still see that we were trying to be the best.

  It was naïve, I suppose – we had worked really hard and the reality was, we would never be champions. It had been six years since I had first moved to the States and we had invested a lot into our dancing and yes, however foolish it was, we did want to be the next champions. But there is always going to be politics, influence and bribery involved in the dance world and the realisation completely broke us. We were always just Brian and Kristina, the couple who wanted to dance, but it got to the point when we thought, why should we carry on? Especially as everyone was telling us, ‘Do your best, guys, but you’re not going to win.’

  Around this time I decided to buy a car. It was a very old and very cheap Toyota Corolla and I bought it from a friend of my best friend Alex in Seattle. I needed to be my own person and have that freedom, but it did affect my relationship with Brian as it meant that we were definitely spending more time apart. Alex was the one who gave me some good advice about this: ‘OK, you are both too young to be this unhappy. I know it’s all about dancing and working but you have to enjoy your life, too,’ she told me. And she was right, we were both young and we could be happy and I think I knew at that point that this was the end of us as a dancing couple. We were constantly fighting, we weren’t happy at home or on the dance floor any more as we knew it was never going to end the way we wanted it to – as champions.

  We still took part in competitions and we would hope that we would beat the other couple and, to be fair, we did get a lot of people who would come up to us afterwards and say, ‘You should have won!’ But we didn’t, we always came second. We would get the biggest standing ovations and we still didn’t win. That was a tough year as we felt that we were working so hard but it was all for nothing. I suppose reality hit us that we could continue as we were for years and years, put every penny we earned into dancing, carry on living with Brian’s parents and where would it get us? We could do that for the next ten years or so and still have nothing to show for it.

  After Bob and Julia retired we kept going for a year and made it to the Nationals in Miami in 2006. My mum had come over from Russia to support us and Brian’s parents were there too, so it felt like we had everyone we needed around us. In my heart, I knew this was going to be the last competition I danced in. Defeated, I felt it was time to let go of the dream. I remember speaking to my mum before the competition started and I confessed my decision.

  ‘In my heart of hearts, Mum, I can’t do this any more. I can’t do it to myself or to Brian any more. We make each other miserable, we have lost a little bit of ourselves in that race for first place and I don’t want to be unhappy any more and I don’t want him to be unhappy any more. Do you think I am making the right decision?’

  And she said to me, ‘Kristina, you are only twenty-seven years old, you can’t live your life like this – you’re basically not having a life! Besides competing, you are spending all the money you have on dancing and what do you have to show for it?’ And she was right: I didn’t have anything to my name apart from a broken old car, a few trophies and a couple of dance costumes. All of my pennies went towards the dance competitions and paying to make us the best dance couple ever.

  So it was at the Nationals that I made the decision this was to be my last dance professionally. I would focus on teaching and earning money that way, which would at least give me enough money to buy a house or an apartment or something.

  As it happened, the encouragement we received at the Nationals was overwhelming. Lots of people were coming up to us between the heats and saying, ‘If you don’t win tonight, it will be a tragedy because it is clearly your title.’

  We got to the final and we joined the five other finalists on the dance floor as the judges announced the runners-up. ‘In sixth place… In fifth place… In fourth place… In third place…’ And then it was just us and the other couple from New York again. It was a familiar sight, we were used to getting this far and feeling a tiny bit of hope… And then they announced us as the runners-up. Well, the whole room erupted, they went absolutely crazy; they were stomping and cheering and I told Brian not to move because I wanted to soak it all in, to savour every last clap. If this was going to be my last competition I wanted to enjoy this final show of admiration and I could see how much people really appreciated us. It was quite funny because when they announced the New York couple as the winners they did get some applause but it was nothing compared to the ovation that we received. And they did come up to us at the end and say, ‘Well, we know who people wanted to win. You are amazing guys and we are honoured to dance with you on the same floor.’ That was something special and it was kind of them to acknowledge us, but they were still the champions.

  At the after-party we had so many people saying, ‘You should have won, you should have won!’ And you know what? I couldn’t hear it any more; I was so over it. We flew back to Seattle and it was nice to take a bit of time out with my mum, who was staying in America for another couple of weeks. Normally we would take about three weeks off after the Nationals anyway so Brian had time to be with his mates and I had the chance to spend time with my mum and Alex.

  Mum flew back to Russia at the end of September and a week later we started getting calls from Louis, asking us when we wanted to fit in some dancing lessons to prepare for the Ohio State Ball, which was coming up in November. Because Louis had his other
commitments with Dancing with the Stars I think he wanted to get some dates sorted out. But instead of arranging everything, I didn’t get back to him straight away. Brian wanted to know what was going on and why I wasn’t arranging lessons with Louis so I told him it was now time to be honest with each other.

  ‘I just don’t see the point of this any more,’ I confessed. ‘Spending all my life and all my money on this. I don’t want to spend another five years being second to a couple who even acknowledge themselves that they shouldn’t be winning. I just don’t see the point. I’m sorry, Brian.’

  It was a heartbreaking conversation and although we had broken up personally a couple of years earlier, to face the prospect that we needed to split up completely was so, so hard. We both cried a lot and he ran out of my room but he couldn’t really argue back as he knew it was true: we were both unhappy and it had come to the point where one of us had to be the one to say enough is enough. Then I told him I was packing my bags and going to stay with Alex for a little bit – I had to do this for both of us. I told Brian that life was too short to make each other unhappy. What was the point of carrying on like this?

  But I was a lot tougher than Brian:his family were always there for him whereas I was used to making big decisions by myself and I think I was the stronger one of the couple. He tried to convince me that we should still compete together as we had people relying on us, but I was adamant that for once it was time to think about ourselves: ‘The big dancing machine will keep going without us,’ I said.