DWTS Corbin Bleu On The Paso Doble: “The gloves come off and I get to be raw, intense and fiery!”

Corbin Bleu has written a new blog at Access Hollywood today gearing us up for he and Karina Smrinoff’s Paso Doble. Watch out! He’s going shirtless and all gloves are off. More below and at the link!!

With this week 4 Paso Doble, the gloves come off and I get to be raw, intense and fiery!

At first, we were given “In The Hall of the Mountain King” as our song. Both Karina and I felt it was not a strong choice for the characters we wanted to portray in our Paso and it leaned towards comical. Karina then found this amazing song that has a beautiful Spanish guitar sound with castanets and continual changing rhythms. I love it!

So because of the song change, we didn’t have music to work with on Day 1, and every minute of rehearsal time counts when you only have a week. Karina used that time to start teaching me basic Paso positioning and a move called a twist turn, which I quickly found out is one of the hardest moves in ballroom! It requires perfect framing that changes positions as you and your partner rotate around the floor never letting go of each other’s hands.

It definitely took several days to become comfortable with it. As she continued choreographing and I continued developing my character, we realized the music at times becomes almost impossible to find the down beat. We had to take a lot of time just sitting and listening to the song to get it engrained in our bodies. As I listened to it, I thought it would be cool if in this dance we were in a fight. As always, Karina ran with it and turned it into an incredible piece! There’s even a moment where she slaps me in the dance! At first, we were just faking it, but I told her she should really do it to play up the anger. As intense as she is, she’s still a sweetheart and it took her a while to come to terms with actually striking me. She eventually got over it though and in the heat of the moment I think it makes for great theatre!

This dance will also be the first time I’m going shirtless!