Mabuse makes mark on UK’s dance show
• Strictly Come Dancing gives local lass a platform to achieve her lifelong ambition
On Sunday evenings, four-yearold Oti Mabuse would switch off the television, insisting that her family watch her perform the dance steps she had rehearsed all week.
Now, 22 years later, she is performing for a television audience of 11-million UK fans of Strictly Come Dancing.
Over the past month, the Strictly show has toured the UK and Mabuse has received thunderous applause from vast crowds. South Africans can share the excitement as the 14th season of Strictly Come Dancing is screened on BBC Lifestyle.
At a meeting Mabuse at a London hotel following shows at the Wembley and O2 arenas, there is no sign of the glitz and glamour that typifies the Strictly style. Casually dressed in ripped jeans and a Minnie Mouse sweater, Mabuse, 26, is warm and relaxed, with a ready laugh and a maturity and levelheadedness that belie her age.
She is modest about her recent success on Strictly, in which she and her dance partner, actor Danny Mac, reached the final round. Fans at the show described her as “captivating”, “transfixing” and “the best choreographer by far”. On stage, she radiates vitality and joy.
She attributes her success to her family, especially her mother and older sisters, whom she regards as her “inspiration”.
Mabuse’s mother was very keen that her three daughters learn to dance. There being no facilities in Mabopane, Pretoria in the 1990s, she set up her own dance school, where her children learnt Latin and ballroom. Mabuse went on to win the South African Latin American championship eight times.
Her mother, a schoolteacher, firmly believed in the importance of children having “goals, dreams, inspirations and aspirations”. Her daughters were expected to “work, not only on the mind, but on the body”.
Mabuse’s father, a high court judge, instilled in his daughters the importance of diligent focus on their goals. Parental support went beyond encouraging ambition and hard work.
To make it possible for the three sisters to compete in international dance competitions, “my mom used to do extra jobs to make enough money to bring us overseas”, says Mabuse.
She feels motivated by her mother’s expectations that she “always do the best. I love it, when somebody sees your potential and it’s your mother, you always want to make them proud because they see what you could be.”
When Mabuse graduated from Pretoria Girls High, her parents encouraged her to study further in case injury ended her dancing career. She chose civil engineering at Tshwane University of Technology and, while enjoying the intellectual challenge, her first day of fieldwork convinced her that being out in the sun on a building site in a hard hat and safety boots was not her passion.
Aged 20, she followed in sister Motsi’s footsteps and moved to Germany. There she met and married Marius Lepure, a Romanian professional dancer. She began to teach and appeared on the German show, Let’s Dance, before being selected for BBC’s Strictly.
Mabuse believes dancing is not taken seriously as a career in SA because “everybody can dance”. Conversely, Germany has a system under which dancers receive a salary, with their living and competition expenses paid for.
Despite establishing a successful career abroad, Mabuse often thinks about working back home. She would be delighted to participate in a South African dance show “as a choreographer, judge or producer”.
Having cha-cha-ed her way into the hearts of millions, Mabuse’s profile is rising. “Being the first South African on the UK’s Strictly is a privilege and an honour and I do know that there are kids who are watching me because a lot of children need someone to look up to,” she says.
In Glasgow, “there were little girls with black Barbies and they were like ‘this is you’”.
The one pressure she experiences “is knowing that what I do influences someone that I don’t know”. This relates not only to her private and public life, but extends to her choice of dress and even her hairstyle.
As a professional dancer on Strictly, Mabuse is simultaneously a choreographer, teacher, performer and psychologist, building confidence and calming the nerves of her dance partner.
While “really relaxed” after hours, she describes herself as “very serious and very strict” when working.
She and Mac rehearsed 13 hours a day during the Strictly season. She also has to build trust with her partner.
She recalls that one of her contact lenses cracked before she performed the Viennese waltz, which ends dramatically with Mabuse jumping from a height into Mac’s arms.
Being very short-sighted, she ran down the platform and leapt towards a blue figure, all she could see of her partner. She jumped slightly too far; Mac took a step back and caught her.
How did she find the courage to leap blindly towards an amateur dancer? “Well,” she quips, “he had never dropped me before.”
Mabuse’s favourite dance is the samba. Her spectacular choreography and electrifying performance won the dance a perfect score; one of the Strictly judges said “it would enter the history books”.
Taking the samba back to its African roots, Mabuse set it in the Congolese jungle.
“I wanted to bring Africa into the UK; I was so nervous because I didn’t know how people would respond,” she says. “I put a part of me in it.”
The foot stomping that greets the performance at the Wembley Arena could have raised the roof.
Deeply appreciative of the response to her work, Mabuse is grounded by the notion that “you keep moving and just create the next number”. She believes in the importance of patience, wanting young people to know that “I didn’t start at the top; I worked my way up”.
Exceptional devotion to perfecting her craft, combined with her natural gifts as a performer and choreographer, are pivotal to Mabuse’s success.
Even her name, Otlile, which she shortened to Oti when school friends struggled to pronounce it correctly, is prescient. In Tswana, Otlile means “she has arrived”.
MABUSE’S FAVOURITE DANCE IS THE SAMBA. HER CHOREOGRAPHY AND ELECTRIFYING PERFORMANCE WON A PERFECT SCORE