At Monmouth Gymnastics and at the Karolyi Ranch, my teammates and I had a special common experience that brought us close together. It took me a while to realize that the girls in my gym were the only ones who could understand the kinds of challenges and stresses I faced, because they faced them, too. If I was having a hard day, they could relate without me having to say much. One day I just realized that they would likely be my closest friends throughout my career and probably throughout my life.
Friendships are built on understanding, and our common experiences provided that understanding. What makes our bond even stronger is that our common experiences aren’t all that common. We exist in a unique world—the world of competitive gymnastics. The way we pushed ourselves throughout our childhoods made our childhoods different than everyone else we know. I’ve already written a little bit about how special my friendship is with my teammate Jazmyn Foberg because of this understanding. We both had a lot of rough practices and meets together, so we always tried to help each other get through them emotionally and physically.
Seeing so many kids who love gymnastics show up at the tour made me realize how big the world of gymnastics is, but knowing so many amazing athletes and traveling with as many of them as I have during the tour also helped me realize how small a world it is, too. I hope the kids who came out to see the tour enjoyed our performances, and I especially hope that whether they go to the Olympics or not one day, they have the kinds of friendships with other gymnasts that I have enjoyed at every level!
DANCING ON AIR
CHAPTER 18
THIS WILL PROBABLY COME AS A BIG SURPRISE, but it’s my dad who’s most responsible for me joining the cast of Dancing with the Stars. My agent, Sheryl Shade, brought me the opportunity, and Aly’s, Nastia’s, and Shawn’s performances on the show attracted me to it as well—but it was my father who first put the idea in my head.
Out of everyone in my family, my dad is the biggest music lover of all. He and my mom are always dancing together at parties, and he jokes that my rhythm is so good because it runs in his family. About eight years ago, we all started watching DWTS together. At first, my dad wasn’t thrilled about joining us, because the show airs at the same time as Monday Night Football and he’s a huge football fan. But he always puts his kids first, so he gave it a try. Before long he was just as addicted as the rest of us. Then one evening when we were watching, he turned to me and said, “You know, sweetie, you’re going to be on that show someday, too.” I gave him a side eye and said, “Sure, Dad. Whatever you say.” But the seed of an idea had been planted. . . .
All those years later, when they asked me during the Olympics to be on the show, I was ecstatic. Of all the gymnastics events, floor is the only one where I’m able to dance and really let my personality shine. When you’re doing a bars or beam routine, you’re basically just showcasing skills; you can’t show much personality. And the audience isn’t even able to see how happy I am to be doing it. But during my floor exercise, I get to flaunt how joyful I am. I don’t ever feel like I have to hide anything from the judges or the crowd. That’s initially how I knew I could successfully make the leap from gymnastics to dance.
Aside from my early-childhood ballet class—where I was focused more on my late-afternoon snack than on technique—and the few ballet classes I took during National Team Training Camps in Texas, I’d never actually had any real dance experience. I quickly learned that my elite training was nothing compared to what I would go through while rehearsing for Dancing with the Stars! When you watch the show, it’s easy to see it as just two people gliding across the floor. Sometimes you might note that one dance is extremely powerful or that another is upbeat and a lot of fun—but besides that, you likely don’t see all the footwork and passion that goes into making it look easy, natural, elegant, and organic. It’s hard to get people to understand that it’s so much more difficult to do than it looks.
The first week I started rehearsals and had to learn a new dance, I found it mind-blowing. I only did well because I had such a generous dance partner. The day I met Val Chmerkovskiy was kind of funny. A lot of people think I live this sophisticated life because I’ve competed in international events and I’ve gone to the Olympics and I’ve toured all over the United States. But as many of you found out later on in the show when I told Val I’d never been to the prom, I really didn’t get to do a lot of things normal teens get to do. I had been so devoted to gymnastics for so long, there were a lot of “firsts” I missed out on. And that was really apparent the day Val walked into the gym where I was practicing for the Kellogg’s Tour. No one had told me yet who my dance partner would be. I think they wanted it to be a surprise.When he walked in, all I could think was, Oh my gosh, this is crazy. It’s already starting.
Almost immediately Val wanted to see what I could do, so he grabbed my hand and began dancing with me. I could barely concentrate on the dance, because here was this grown man touching my hand and swinging me around. It felt so weird—which I totally couldn’t say to him or to anyone else at the time. But one of the things Val emphasized with me throughout our time together is the value of feeling your emotions and communicating them. That was probably the single most important skill that came out of my experience on Dancing with the Stars. I struggled with communication a lot in the first few rehearsals, as we talked about in the video packages. I love to write and my family is big on talking things out with each other so we could remain close as a family, so I had actually imagined that I was a good communicator before all this. But there was a level of professional communication I hadn’t had a chance to fully develop. The way you work with your partner on DWTS is very different from the way you work with your coach in elite gymnastics. There’s an expression in gymnastics we all laugh at because it’s pretty close to the truth: “If your coach tells you to land on your neck, you land on your neck.” Of course, no coach will ever ask you to do that, but the saying means that the coach knows what’s best for you, and they will push you as hard as they have to in order to get the best results. Your job is to bend to what they’re asking you to do until you can do it over and over again and you can do it better than anyone else. By contrast, Val’s style of communication, and the style of communication between dance partners, is a real give-and-take. You have to tell the other person when something is off or else it will show in the final dance. It’s about being in sync with each other at all times. And you can’t be in sync if you don’t know what the other person is feeling emotionally and physically. So Val repeatedly encouraged me to tell him whenever I was uncomfortable with something. If I couldn’t get a step right or if I became frustrated with myself and didn’t share the reason, he would insist that I express what was going on inside my head. At which point I had a breakthrough: in dance you don’t just deal with it; you can actually address the challenge and either work through it together or change the steps to effectively reflect the emotion the dance requires.
Exercising my voice with Val was like training a muscle. But I’m happy to say that we worked on it and I was much better by the end of the season! Just spending time together and getting to know each other really helped.
Because I was on the Kellogg’s Tour at the same time I was on DWTS, I would travel to each city by bus with my teammates, and Val would fly to the city where I was performing each week to meet me. The day I arrived in a new city I would have off from DWTS practice because traveling is exhausting and I usually had to perform gymnastics that same night. The next morning Val and I would rehearse, and later that night I would perform gymnastics again. Sometimes he flew back to LA and I would meet him there later, while other times I flew with him. During those flights we got to know each other better, but it was funny how our conversations would always drift back to our routine.
To be a good communicator you also have to be a good observer, and Val really has that skill. One day, when we were in Seattle, we ended practice early and left the dance studio. He took me to this famous open-air fi
sh market called Pike Place. When you buy fish there, the vendors throw it up in the air before they wrap it and they play all these games the way old-time fishmongers did. It’s very entertaining. We also walked through a produce market where we bought fresh fruit, and then we walked through this cute neighborhood. I was so moved that he took the time to do that, because he could obviously see that I didn’t get to go out often. It was just nice to be able to walk around freely. I’ve spent so much of my life in a gym, even my parents had to make sure that I got out for a concert, some ice cream, some retail therapy with my sister, or a hangout with my brother at the local Wawa. I’m happy Val had the same urge to make time for a break. I’m not sure if he knows how much it meant to me to get away from everything and go exploring for a change. It was so thoughtful of him—I’m definitely going to remember that.
TRIPLE 10s
CHAPTER 19
ONE SIGN I WAS IMPROVING MY COMMUNICATION skills was that Val and I joked around with each other a lot more as the season progressed. Another sign was that I was dancing better than I ever had before, thanks to him.
One of the highlights of being on Dancing with the Stars was earning a perfect 10 on Val’s and my jazz performance to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” It was great for all the obvious reasons: getting that kind of score meant that I was doing a lot of things right and that I was not only beginning to master the techniques of the dance, I was reflecting the heart of the dance, too.
Val always says that the steps are secondary: the real success of a dance is how you make people feel when they watch you. So getting perfect 10s across the board was super satisfying, because it meant I had stirred some real and vibrant emotions in the audience. As the title suggests, the song is about the way someone makes you feel, so my whole goal that week was to make the audience really feel something. Succeeding at that was a real breakthrough for me.
It may sound surprising, but dance is as much about acting as it is about rhythm and physical agility. In every dance we were telling a story, and whatever character I played had to help drive that story emotionally. I already loved acting, but I realized that in order to improve my dancing, I also had to improve my acting.
It was easy enough for me to get into character during the first few weeks. For the cha-cha I hooked into how much both music and dance are a part of my Latin heritage, and I let that inspire my character. In the next week, we danced the jive, which is very fast and playful. I had to get into a very different mind-set, but because we used the theme from Duck Tales, I thought about how animation works and I made all my character choices very big. I almost couldn’t believe it when Julianne Hough called me Disney’s Beyoncé.
But rehearsals the next week weren’t as magical for me. I struggled with the acting element of the tango. Val kept trying to get me to feel what the character in that dance would feel so that my character could connect better with his character. The problem was that I’ve never had a boyfriend, so I’ve never experienced a breakup, either. It’s frustrating to have to channel feelings you’ve never had, so I realized I had to focus on acting them more than channeling them. To help me out, Val kept trying to think of movies that could trigger the feeling of loss my character was supposed to feel. He talked about The Notebook, which helped a little, but then he made me laugh when he suggested that I think about how the dad in Finding Nemo must have felt when he lost his son—I got it on some level, but I’ve also never been a parent!
As I told Ellen DeGeneres when we were on her show, it was a lightbulb moment right before we went onstage that night that kind of saved me. To help me at least make the right gesture during the tango, I dramatized smelling a quesadilla. All in one connected sequence, I threw my head and right shoulder back, closed my eyes, and drew a deep breath as a smile crossed my face. Anyone would have thought I was thinking about my star-crossed lover, but I was really anticipating taking a bite of one of my favorite foods. Hey, whatever works!
The very next week when I was learning the steps to the jazz dance and I found that it was easier channeling the emotion of my character than getting all the steps down, I felt a real sense of accomplishment. The perfect 10s were confirmation that I’d gotten over that acting hurdle I’d found so tough the week before.
There were other weeks when I had to try to imagine certain experiences rather than channel them, but by then Val and I were communicating so well that it was way easier. The particular week that comes to mind was when the dances were inspired by different decades. Our dance that time was set in the 1960s, well before I was born, so Val and I didn’t dance at all during the first rehearsal. Instead we researched all the things that happened to make the sixties so rebellious. And when Val discovered that I had never been to the prom because I was homeschooled, he also helped create that experience for me. Instead of trying to draw from experiences I hadn’t had yet, I was learning how to make imagined experiences more real to me. I was getting a dancing, acting, and life lesson all at one time!
I learn by watching, so I was always engrossed when the other couples danced. They all had their inspired moments, but one couple I consistently enjoyed was James Hinchcliffe and Sharna Burgess. I think it was because James really did make acting such a seamless part of his performance. The same week I did the prom dance, I was in awe as I watched him and Sharna do the jitterbug. I loved every facial expression and body gesture he made. Following his characters’ stories was always so much fun.
In addition to learning the acting aspect of dance, I also had to learn to process the judges’ critiques in a meaningful way. The tricky thing about the show is that you move on to a new style of dance every week, so it can be difficult to show them that you understood and applied their comments from the previous week. We would put so much effort into our dances that the moment I stood next to cohost Tom Bergeron to hear the judges’ feedback was always nerve-racking. My heart would pound so loudly every time, I was sure the mic would pick it up! During the first week when I danced the cha-cha, I was happy judge Carrie Ann Inaba sensed I was hungering to learn ballroom dancing. I didn’t want to squander the opportunity to learn from Val and the judges by relying only on my gymnastics background, so it was good that my eagerness showed. Then judge Julianne Hough gave me specific advice. I had seen her dance on the show before, so I knew what she said in terms of technique would help. She was pleased with my arm and leg action, but both she and judge Bruno Tonioli thought I needed to work on loosening up my hips.
I laughed to myself because there had been many times before a gymnastics competition when I heard, “Oh no, she can’t move her hips like that.” Then I would have to go back and change up my routine so it was tamer. Now I was hearing the complete opposite. I had to move my hips more! Honestly, at first it was uncomfortable, because I’d put my hips away for so long. After that, I worked hard to keep my dance performances free of the parts of my gymnastics training that didn’t belong. That was definitely the case when I danced the tango. Because my connection to my partner had to be evident during that dance, I had to make sure no one could detect that in gymnastics I always danced solo!
There was one time, however, that I wished my gymnastics story had been better understood and that the feedback from the judges had been different. It was the week after we had scored triple 10s with our jazz dance, so the pressure was on to outdo ourselves. To make matters more complicated, we were dancing the paso doble. My first reaction was the paso what? I had never heard of it before. My feet were tired from wearing heels, and even icing my toes the way Shawn and Nastia had suggested wasn’t helping with the soreness.
The paso doble, as it turned out, was a very intense dance. I had to get in touch with feelings from some of the most serious events in my life for my character to convey the right emotions. So I focused on all the trials I’d had in the gym when I was fighting my way back from injury in the two years leading up to the Olympics. The dance began with me alone in a tight box. It was supposed
to evoke the claustrophobic feelings I’d felt during that rough period: I could never take time off, and even if my family went on vacation, I couldn’t go with them because I had to train. The box symbolized how lonely it had been at times, but in the end I pushed through the walls and exploded onto the floor. It was a metaphor for the way I felt about my return from Rio and being on Dancing with the Stars; it reflected how much I was enjoying myself and how liberated I was feeling because of dance. So when the judges didn’t think it was a necessary part of the dance, I silently disagreed. They explained how the paso doble is about having a connection with your partner. For this reason, they thought starting off by myself was contrary to the distinct style of the dance. But I felt that the dance we did showed a deep connection between our characters. My character had to have a breakthrough before she could unite with Val’s character, and when she did, that breakthrough made their connection that much more powerful. The next day I came into rehearsal with Val and said, “What did they mean, we needed more connection? I thought we had a lot of connection!” He just laughed and said he thought the dance had been perfect even if the judges didn’t think so. He told me not only that it was amazing but also that he was very proud of me. Honestly, it meant more to me that Val was proud than another round of straight 10s would have. I was on the show to grow and learn, and I felt that was exactly what I was doing. I was glad Val saw that growth, too.
We worked even harder in the weeks that followed. I took a break from the gymnastics tour because I really wanted to look like a professional as we continued to compete. Val is a phenomenal dancer, but he sees being a teacher as more valuable. His students are his legacy. He always says he wants to be sure that I can do everything he teaches me after he’s gone from the classroom. I was speechless on Halloween night when he got so emotional. I think he knew I wanted to be the best student. I got emotional, too, when he told cohost Erin Andrews, “My inspiration is to be able to pass my blessings on forward, and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to inspire young talent like Laurie.” And then he added, “In the process, maybe she can change the world.”
I Got This Page 9