Corbin Bleu And Karina Smirnoff Interviewed On Their Strategy Going Into The Finals Of Dancing With The Stars

OK! Magazine interviewed Corbin Bleu and Karina Smirnoff about the finale on Dancing With The Stars. Karina gives a few hints below of what their freestyle might be like and their strategy. Be sure to read the link for more!

OK!: How are you going to top yourselves after a season of amazing performances?

CB: You know what’s so cool is it’s the freestyle so there are no rules. It’s so awesome and I know she’s (Karina) gonna make me do some crazy stuff.

Karina Smirnoff: With the freestyle it’s the dance that counts the most. Usually the couple who wins the freestyle wins the season. You can either go big and turn the performance outside the box and bring the house down or you can go for more of a emotional connection—something that will make people relate to their deepest, darkest, lightest, brightest emotional journeys in their life. I almost think we’re going to have a combination of both.

OK!: He’s capable of everything, so how do you narrow down what to do?

KS: It’s all about strategy. You know what some couples are going to be best in and what some couples are going to probably stay away from so you have to incorporate something you know they probably won’t do as well as something they will do. And you’ve got to show your side of that reality, your own expression of the same thing.

And speaking of Karina, Backstage has a cool new interview posted with her about “transitioning to acting” and how she caught the bug when she helped with “Shall We Dance” (loved loved that movie!). Here is a take….

I’ve always loved to perform. I went to Fordham, the same school as Denzel Washington, where I studied economics and information systems. I took some acting classes because I thought it would be an easy credit. It frankly wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. My favorite exercise was when we would stand in two lines, and our professor would give us an emotional state, like ‘happy,’ and you would have to change your facial expression. He would give us a new one every 20 seconds. It sounds so silly, but when you realize what he was trying to do, you realize how brilliant that exercise was.

“Later I had the opportunity to be in the movie ‘Shall We Dance?.’ That introduced me to the way the whole movie business worked. At that point I started having the acting bug, but with competitions and pursuing a ballroom career and then starting ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ I didn’t know whether the bug was going to turn into reality.

“When I met Ralph Macchio on Season 12 of ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and listened to him talk about acting, I started dreaming and wanting to do that again. Ralph was inspired by a relationship to write a beautiful screenplay. Together with my manager, we decided to raise funds and turn it into a short film. I started taking acting classes, at Beverly Hills Playhouse and with Jeff Passero, and I started reading Stanislavsky (the dude is Russian, so at least we have that connection). My parents have always been huge in the arts, and whenever I would ask my mother what was a good book to read about artistic expression, she would tell me to read Stanislavsky.

“To me, dancing and acting have so many similarities in the way you express yourself. Real dancers, the ones that you watch and get lost in their movements, are the ones that don’t fake the emotion of the dance but become the emotion of the dance. With acting it’s the same thing.