He knew I was right, but I still felt terrible. I needed to get out of the house as I couldn’t look Kathy and Ron in the eye and I was so pleased that I could escape to Alex’s place. So I packed my stuff and I left, leaving a letter for Kathy. Yes, it was a cowardly thing to do, but I didn’t feel strong enough to have a conversation with her or Ron. I knew if I did, they would try and convince us to stay together. And I probably would have given in as they meant so much to me. I knew I would have felt pressured to somehow make it work just for them. So I wrote a letter to Kathy, explaining why I couldn’t talk to them about it: I had made a decision and now I needed to be on my own for a little bit as I didn’t want to be confused or influenced by anyone else.
But it was hard and I was crying my eyes out while I was writing this. I wanted them to know how much I treasured them as they had taken me in as part of their family for the past six years. In a way, my grief over leaving Brian and the family wasn’t really about the dancing; in my heart I had realised that it wasn’t working for a while. I was more upset to think that I was leaving them, and all the things I loved about them. It felt like I was losing something that I had yearned for so much in my life: a family. But in a way I was using them too, to keep up a pretence of something that just wasn’t working. And it wasn’t right. I gave it my best shot, no one could argue with that, but I couldn’t do it any longer.
The next few days were awful. I spent a lot of my time crying and I felt like I did all those years ago when I was twelve years old and had to leave my grandparents’ flat.
I was alone again.
CHAPTER 14
Once a dancer, always a dancer…
Alex was very supportive and kind but it was a tough few months for me after walking out on Brian and his family. I had filed for divorce and it was done quickly a few months later. I started to question whether I had done the right thing: I felt like a failure for not having made it work dancing with Brian and we had lost a lot of work as I had to cancel engagements and shows that he and I had been booked on as a couple. There were still a few people whom I could teach, so I tried to concentrate on them. I wasn’t interested in competing any more, although when word got round that Brian and I had split up, I had a lot of calls from potential partners, asking me to join them. But I would never do that to Brian. And I certainly didn’t want to compete in the same division, American Rhythm, with anyone else because he and I had got so far in that category and it wouldn’t feel right dancing with someone else.
I remember getting a phone call from one of our teachers with whom we occasionally took lessons. He told me about a guy who was looking for a partner just to do shows with, not to compete with. The shows were mostly in Asia and Japan and basically that meant travelling to dance schools to perform in their summer or Christmas balls, or if they were putting on an event and they needed a few couples to keep the audience entertained. Michael, the dancer in question, had been retired for four years but he had heard I was now solo and he wanted to meet me. It seemed like a good idea as I didn’t want to compete either, and just doing the shows would give me a little income too, which would help.
In his amateur days Michael had been a world champion and then he turned professional and was ranked third or fourth in the world in the International Professional Latin division, the style I danced a lot back in Russia. He was an incredible dancer, it was my dream to dance with someone like him – he was the level of Paul Killick. To be honest, I couldn’t believe he wanted to try-out with me. Michael had a lot of followers in Japan and ballroom dancing was quite big in Asia on the whole; it was a very big part of their culture. Why was that? I think it was partly because they would suppress their emotions in day-to-day life so dance was a way they could express themselves openly.
In a way it was strange for me to think I could be going back to Japan – it was where I was competing as a teenager. I didn’t actually think the partnership with Michael would work out as I knew there were lots of other girls who wanted to dance with him, but I thought to myself, why not? I’ll have a go. So the coach that contacted me organised a try-out and I went to meet him. In fact, we had crossed paths before at the bigger competitions and although we were in different divisions we had quite a few mutual friends on the circuit, so he knew of me. We had a try-out and we found that we really liked dancing together – which for me was like a dream come true!
I was very different from his previous dancer, a lot more showcase, a lot more emotional on the dance floor and a lot more theatrical. That was perfect for Michael as the shows were about just that – putting on a great show. It was funny, he told me later, he had convinced himself that he just wanted to retire and do a bit of judging and teaching and didn’t think anything would come from meeting me – he just thought it would be good to see if there was any show spirit left in him. But once we started to dance he knew show dancing still excited him and he was very enthusiastic about it all again.
At the time, he was thirty-four years old and I was twenty-seven and we decided just to go for it. He had lined up a couple of weeks of shows in Japan and he told me, ‘Let’s have a go and see what happens.’ So we put a few routines together and I was learning a lot from him, plus I was dancing a style I had been dancing in Russia, so in a way it was like I was going back to my roots. We visited Japan several times and I enjoyed dancing with him so much. They loved Michael and he had a very loyal fan base, which meant I received a warm welcome as his partner, too.
We went there for Christmas at first. I had split up with Brian only a few months earlier, so we didn’t have long to put our show together but I absolutely loved it. Of course there was a lot of pressure, too: I was going on the floor with one of the best dancers in the world and nobody knew who I was, so I had to make sure I stood out. But I did say to myself I just needed to relax and enjoy it, think about the little bit of money I could make and then see where it took me.
It turned out that I ended up working for a couple of years with Michael because we established a good name for ourselves in Japan as a very entertaining couple – our shows were quite unusual and very theatrical and people loved them. I enjoyed creative choreography and we produced a really good showcase. We started getting booked all over the world – Japan, Taiwan, Argentina, South Africa – we were all over the place! I think it must have been about a year into our performing as a couple when we both started to get the buzz to compete again. Certainly, I think Michael was beginning to think in the back of his mind, ‘OK, what if?’ It’s that fire inside of you, it doesn’t ever go, and I was eager, too – we were popular as a couple, we were dancing well together, maybe we should.
So we entered a few little competitions in America, nothing that put too much pressure on us, and we did well; it made us feel good. And then we ended up competing in the biggest competition in the world, The British Open Championships at The Blackpool Winter Gardens. Everyone in our world knows that the British Championships is the biggest competition in our business. It is open to the world, which means anyone can compete and anyone can come – it’s a big international competition. I had competed there with Brian and had studied a style called Theatre Art, which is like a showcase with lots of lifts and tricks and a lot like Cirque du Soleil – it’s called ‘showcase’ or ‘theatre art’ division. Brian and I did this for a couple of years and we got an invite to represent America in this style in Blackpool in 2004 and came second, which was amazing.
My whole association with Blackpool was quite special and competing there with Brian was a great honour, so I thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to compete at an international level here with Michael?’ We were dancing well together and we both felt hungry for competing again, me especially. I felt that I still had a lot to give and, as I was dancing with one of the best dancers in the world, I’m not afraid to admit that the competitive edge did come out in me again. So we made the decision to go and it was an interesting year as there were a lot of couples like us who had split up,
gone off and done their own thing with other partners and now decided to come back and compete again.
When you go to a big competition like that with a new partner you have to start at the very beginning again, which means you have to work your way through heats. I think we danced in five heats before reaching the semi-final and because of the number of couples you have to do all your dances in each heat. So you have to be so fit, physically, as all the dances are high speed or very intense and each dance is two and a half minutes long. Then you have a twenty-minute break before you go to the next heat. It’s very full-on and if you progress through the competition, you make it to the semi-final but you are so exhausted! At that stage you have to be able to dance your absolute best so you can’t be tired. You see couples who give it their all in the first couple of heats and who are physically strong but by the third or fourth round they start falling apart as they haven’t worked on their endurance; the quality of the dancing completely falls apart.
I learnt a lot from Michael during that time, your adrenaline gets you through a lot and Blackpool is an amazing place. And when you are being judged by the best of the best in your sport, there is no way you can back off or feel tired, you just have to deliver. In the end we made it to the semi-finals. We danced with the top twelve in the world in the professional division and that feeling of competing with the cream of the crop was incredible. There was no feeling of tiredness, I just felt so happy that we had made it to the semi-finals. That was good enough for me but not for Michael: he was used to competing in finals and having been in the top three in the world before he retired, it wasn’t a good result for him. Everyone said it was quite an achievement to get that far with me – a girl that no one really knew – especially as we hadn’t been competing in any small competitions in the UK, so there wasn’t really a chance for people to warm to us. It was an amazing result but it was hard for Michael and I understood that. It didn’t make him happy. He had that competing bug again and wanted to do well and while for me it was all exciting and new, I think he regretted coming back and not doing as well as he had done previously.
Immediately after Blackpool we went back to America to rehearse for some more shows in Japan and that trip was hard for us as mentally we were in different places. I felt ecstatic to have reached the top twelve in the world whereas he was disappointed and perhaps kicking himself for daring to compete again.
It wasn’t hard to see that this partnership wasn’t going to get us anywhere – I couldn’t force him to compete and I didn’t want to go to Japan any more and spend months just dancing in shows, so I actually said to him it was time for us to go our separate ways. I had had the best deal out of our partnership as I had learnt so much from him and he made me the dancer I am now. In those two years I made massive leaps in my level of dancing and technique; I had danced and competed with the best of the best in the world. Other than Blackpool, the highlight of my time was the summer of 2007 when Prince Mikasa of Japan asked us to perform for him at his Summer Ball in Tokyo. It was incredible and I was so very grateful for that experience with Michael. I knew I was lucky that he chose me to dance with him in the shows. And after two years of travelling all over the world taking part in the shows, we both felt it was time to settle down. I wanted to go back to America and organise my life, and he wanted to go home to South Africa. We parted as friends.
So I went back to the States with a mind to get my judging licence and then continue to teach and judge competitions. By then I was twenty-nine years old and I thought I had made more of a name for myself. OK, so maybe I was just one of a long line of girls who had danced with Michael, but it was a fantastic chapter in my life and it felt like the right ending to my experience as a competitor. I moved from Alex’s home in Seattle to LA as Dancing with the Stars was getting bigger and more popular. It made sense to be nearby, where I might be able to pick up work either teaching or judging. I took my judging exams and got my licence to judge but I still felt a little bit at a standstill: I could judge when I was sixty-nine, but I was only twenty-nine… Was I giving up too early?
Then Louis van Amstel came back into my life. He rang me and said, ‘I’ve heard you’ve split up with Michael. I have some news – Dancing with the Stars are putting together a live tour around the country, a winter tour and a summer tour. I am a choreographer on the tour and I need company dancers to take part alongside the other professionals and celebrities. I need two boys and two girls and I wondered if you would like to be one of the girls?’
He went on to explain that I would get a decent pay. I would travel around the US for about two months at a time and it would give me a bit of insider experience to see if I would ever want to be on the show. That is what a lot of people in my industry now wanted to do, to get on Dancing with the Stars, and Louis said it would help give me an idea about how I felt about the TV world.
So I rented a little place in LA and I asked my mum to come and live with me. I was lonely and the lifestyle of a dancer means you never really settle, as quite often you are travelling all over the place. And I did think it would be nice to have Mum around and we could live together for a while. I also needed her support – I wanted to come home and find my mum there. So she rented out our flat in Vladivostok for six months, packed her bags and came over to live with me.
I went on the Dancing with the Stars tour and it was a great experience. I learnt a lot about the world of TV and I knew a lot of the professional dancers as I had seen them only a few years ago competing on the circuit. I remember saying to Louis that I couldn’t believe how much they had changed, though – TV seemed to have affected them. Most of them were OK with me, but they were constantly craving attention and wanting to be famous, which made them a little wary of new dancers coming into their world and possibly taking any attention away from them.
But I didn’t really find it appealing at all, the fame – it seemed to be a very weird world. I saw the show as a way of making money out of something I loved to do so I could support my family. There were a couple of girls on the show who had been on it for a few years and they were getting a lot of attention because one was always splitting up with her boyfriend and then getting back together, while the other one had had a big row with her celebrity and his family and it was in the press so much at the time. It seemed horrific to me. I couldn’t believe that they could be happy living their lives with the paparazzi chasing them the whole time and wanting to know all about their private lives. Little did I realise the press attention I myself would be dealing with just a few years later.
The tour was fun, though – I was dancing again and I really enjoyed it. And the funniest thing was that the opening night was in Seattle of all places! Over the past couple of years I had started to reconnect with Brian’s parents. I knew that I wasn’t ever really going to have a particularly good relationship with Brian again as he would be dating someone else and I didn’t want to be the annoying one popping up from the past. But for me it was so important to try and reconnect with his family – I wanted them to understand how much I loved them as my second family. At Christmastime I would send them presents and after visiting Japan with Michael, I invited them all out to dinner and we had a good chat and a good time together. I think they understood why I had done what I did, but I wanted them to realise just how much they meant to me.
Time is a great healer and when I started to dance with Michael I heard that Brian had found another dance partner, too, so I felt life had moved forward for both of us. The whole family had had time to move on; they understood that whatever happened between Brian and me, life goes on. They didn’t make me feel bad for leaving and I will always be grateful for that. So I kept in contact and when I moved to LA and heard the opening night was in Seattle, I invited them to come and watch me in the show. Brian didn’t come – for whatever reason – but I was grateful that Kathy, Ron and Sean came and we went out for dinner afterwards. I think they were proud of me. They had given me that chance, in bringing me to
America, and now they were watching me in the Dancing with the Stars tour and I was so pleased that we had managed to repair our relationship.
It was a long tour around the States; we performed in every city possible. We started at the beginning of December 2007, and we were only allowed a few days off at Christmas and New Year. One of the celebrities on the tour was Wayne Newton, also nicknamed ‘Mr Las Vegas’, who was quite a famous guy in America. A fantastic singer and entertainer, for over thirty years he had a one-man show in Vegas. The night before New Year’s Eve we had a tour show in Vegas and then, as we had a couple of days off before leaving Nevada, he invited the whole cast to come and celebrate New Year’s Eve and enjoy a big lunch and a horse parade at his ranch, just outside Vegas. The place was huge and he had lots of horses and horse-riding stables.
It was pretty incredible to be in his house as it was filled with all this amazing artwork and memorabilia, like signed photos of him and Elvis Presley. It was absolutely fascinating! He had a little girl, Lauren, and she and his wife Kathleen would come to the shows to see us, too. His wife once asked if I would give Lauren a couple of dance lessons – she loved watching us all dancing. So I taught her a couple of steps from one of the dances and Lauren’s mum was really touched that I had taken the time to give her daughter a lesson. She gave me more of a personal tour of the ranch and talked to me about what it meant to be in the celebrity environment. I was talking to them like they were a normal family but Wayne was such a mega, mega star and it did make me think, ‘Wow, what a fantastic place this show-business world is!’ I loved the idea of it all, and it made me realise at that point that taking part in the main show, Dancing with the Stars, was something I now wanted to do.
Dancing Out of Darkness Page 11