Jenna Dewan Tatum
OF “WORLD OF DANCE” ON NBC
Oh yeah. There were some dance styles that I’ve never even heard of. There was something called cabaret ballroom, which is ballroom dancing but it involves a lot of partnering, and it’s a bunch of lifts and it’s core strength in a way that I’ve never done . ... It’s really intense, and some of the lifts they were doing seemed very dangerous. And so I was learning a lot from them and I thought, “Wow, the amount of trust they have to have between the two of them to do that style of dance, I’ve never experienced that.” As much as I was mentoring and helping and hosting the show, I was learning from these dancers. There was also a group from Colombia that does insane salsa and they do some lifts and some technical moves in their dance that blew me away. What were some of the riskier moves that you saw? The death-defying lifts I saw, some of them I would almost want to hide under someone because I just couldn’t believe how the near-misses that I saw, that was so perfectly choreographed that they knew they could handle, but us watching it went, “Uhhhh!” You know, we would just grab our faces and be like, “Oh, please make this lift.” ... There was also a B-boy group that does this one particular move where he jumps over the entire group in one flip and I thought, “How did that go in rehearsal?” Because if you just one time don’t get the right running start (laughs), you’re landing on one or two people. That to me was pretty amazing. I’ve never seen someone jump over 15 people. There was a lot of that going on.