The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Pythagoras helped me to win Strictly’
Dancer Oti Mabuse tells Julia Llewellyn Smith about her greatest asset – a degree in civil engineering
Is there anything Oti Mabuse can’t do? The reigning queen of Saturday night television, she has shimmied seamlessly from Strictly Come Dancing – which she won in December as the professional partner of Kelvin “snake-hips” Fletcher – to reprise her “captain” role in the second series of The Greatest Dancer. To the show, in which dancers of every age and style compete for a £50,000 prize, Mabuse brings the kind of warmth and energy that appeals to viewers and galvanises contestants: one of her acts, 14-year-old Ellie Fergusson, triumphed in the first series.
Last year Mabuse, 29, also received rave reviews for her choreography of the jazz-age stage musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, and has appeared as a guest host on The One Show and Loose Women, and on Celebrity Gogglebox. And let’s not forget that she speaks six languages and has a degree in civil engineering. Although Mabuse showed an early flair for dance while growing up in Pretoria – she was crowned South African Latin American Champion eight times – her
“highly academic” teacher mother (her father’s a magistrate) insisted she complete a degree, in order to have a qualification to fall back on.
In fact, Mabuse tells me now, that scientific grounding is one of the secrets of her success. “Newton’s laws, Pythagoras’s theorems, all help so much with dancing,” she says. “I’d use all these maths and physics examples with Kelvin and he understood straight away. But I don’t think I’m going to go back to engineering now.” Certainly, there’s a sense that the BBC is moulding Mabuse into its next reality break-out star, in the vein of former Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.
Another of Mabuse’s secrets is good old-fashioned graft. Though Strictly viewers were awestruck by former Emmerdale actor Fletcher’s natural ability (he’d never danced before), she’s adamant it was sheer hard work that earned them the Glitterball. “On semi-finals week we were rehearsing from 7am until 10pm. I wouldn’t even allow conversations. Kelvin’d be like, ‘Are you not talking to me?’ and I’d say, ‘No!’”
Just weeks previously, Mabuse – who joined Strictly in 2015, and reached the 2016 final with Danny Mac – had feared she wouldn’t be competing at all, after her initial partner, Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing, withdrew with a foot injury. On hearing the news, Mabuse burst into tears and took to her bed for the day.
“I wasn’t so much upset about losing that partner,” she says, “but losing the one thing I love so much – dancing.”
Within a week, producers had signed up super-sub Fletcher. “I was immediately, ‘Are you ready? Let’s go.’ ” says Mabuse. “Kelvin was trying to ask me questions and I was like, ‘No, no questions! Let’s dance.’”
The pair topped the leaderboard from week one with their astonishing samba, yet they were never complacent, as other talented dancers, such as DJ Dev Griffin, were booted from the show early. “Seeing people with such incredible potential leave definitely kept us on our toes,” says Mabuse, “you just could never relax.”
Some claimed to see a racist agenda at work, noting that several of the series’ early casualties were black. “I won though,” Mabuse says. “So that’s obviously not true.”
An added frisson came from the fact that Strictly’s newest judge, replacing Darcey Bussell, was Mabuse’s sister Motsi, nine years her senior. It was reported that the two refused to speak to each other during the run, to avoid accusations of nepotism. “We weren’t not speaking, there was just no time for one-to-ones,” says Mabuse. “In the week, I was in Manchester [rehearsing] and Motsi lives in Germany. But we’d have a drink together with everyone else after the show.”
Did it feel awkward to win in her sister’s first year? “No! Motsi’s scores were on a par with the other judges and anyway their scores are just there as guides, they had no bearing on the [deciding] public vote.”
How did she feel about Motsi’s reaction – “That’s my sister, stop it!” she cried – after she and Fletcher danced a rumba that fellow judge Craig Revel Horwood
‘In South Africa, women just are really voluptuous; I’m nothing special there’
described as “filth”.
“Oh gosh,” she says, “I was just standing there expecting either ‘Well done’ or ‘Here’s how you can improve’, so I did not know how to react!”
So steamy was the dance that social media was soon ablaze with rumours that the notorious relationship-breaking “Curse of Strictly” had struck again, gossip that was refuelled last week when it was reported that the pair had been spotted “gallivanting” in a London bar until 3am, after which Fletcher’s wife unfollowed him on Instagram. “There’s nothing there, it was acting through dance,” Mabuse says firmly. In fact, there has never been so much as a whiff of scandal attached to her name.
“That’s because my husband is my everything, my rock” she says. He is German-Romanian Marius Iepure, 37, whom she married six years ago, having met him when, aged 19, she travelled to Germany (where dancers earn good salaries from competing for clubs or provinces) to “scout” for a future dance partner. Lepure agreed to wait six months for her to graduate and return to him. “We became a couple not long after that.” Having collected a host of trophies together and alone completed two seasons of Let’s Dance, the
Teutonic Strictly, Mabuse was headhunted for the British version, where she was so warmly welcomed she decided to move to London for good.
“People here are polite, they’re inclusive, there is this fight here to make everyone feel represented. I felt, ‘This is the country I want to live in.’ Now I call it home.”
As soon as The Greatest Dancer ends, Mabuse is heading off to South Africa to film a BBC documentary. “I want to show people my country through my eyes: that it’s not actually poverty and crime, it’s beauty and intelligence and technology.”
Her future plans also include launching a lingerie line for women such as herself – Strictly’s costumiers have to design special underwear for her 28GG bust – and the equally well-endowed Motsi.
“In South Africa, women just are really voluptuous; I’m nothing special there but when I came to England everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, they are quite a size!’ It used to make me feel really bad.”
She briefly considered breast reduction surgery but decided against it because of the recovery time it would entail. Now she receives many letters from teenagers in the same situation. “Their teachers have told them to get a reduction because they don’t traditionally look like dancers, even though it has no bearing on their technique. I’d love to create bras for them.”
With so many plans and the Glitterball ticked off, does Mabuse actually want to return to Strictly in the autumn? “I don’t know if I’ll be back, you have to be invited,” she says disingenuously.
Something tells me that, if they’re asking, she’s dancing.
The Greatest Dancer is on BBC One on Saturday at 6.45pm