Ryan Lochte Previews His Rumba And The Team Dance For Dancing With The Stars
Ryan Lochte previews his two dances tonight at Yahoo. He’s relating to his 90’s dance. See why below and more….
This week we’re dancing the rumba to the song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith. We have the Nineties as our decade. I was happy to get that decade because I was born in the ’80s and I grew up listening to ’90s music, so I can relate to it better than a decade like the Fifties or something that I really have no clue about.
It’s not really that hard dancing to Aerosmith. With Cheryl handling all of the choreography, she definitely puts in the moves that I’ve done before and can translate it to where it fits me perfectly.
The most challenging part of the rumba is doing all of the transitions and those little details because there aren’t that many steps. It’s a slower version of the cha-cha, basically. So just being able to make those transitions really crisp and making sure it looks like one long routine, one long step, instead of a bunch of still moments, has been my biggest challenge. We also have a team dance, and it’s really hard learning two dances in one week. I’ve been struggling with just doing one dance a week, but now I have to learn two, so I have to put more focus and dedication into this week.
The theme for the team dance — with James Hinchcliffe and Sharna Burgess, Calvin Johnson and Lindsay Arnold, and Maureen McCormick and Artem Chigvintsev — is The Past, and we’re doing the Viennese waltz. We’re all doing the same dance style, but kind of in our own routine. The “past” song we’re doing, “The Skye Boat Song” by Raya Yarbrough, is a really slow song, so I think the pros picked the Viennese waltz to be the best fit for us. For the group routine, the pros choreograph the dance for all of us but then we break off and Cheryl and I do our own individual dance.
To read even more, see Yahoo.
ETA: Cheryl Burke has written a blog this week too. She writes of Ryan’s challenges and their team dance. Here is more from People….
Working as a team has been great. Having Artem in the rehearsal room has been a big help because Ryan can see a professional dancer do the moves — that makes a big difference.
But Team Future is going to be tough competition. They have Laurie Hernandez and Val Chmerkovskiy and Terra Jolé and Sasha Farber, who have all been doing great, Jana Kramer and Gleb Savchenko, who are coming off a perfect score last week, and Marilu Henner and Derek Hough. I think Derek has only lost, like, one team challenge ever! And to be honest, looking at social media, people are automatically thinking Team Future is going to win because they have an upbeat song.
I thought “Team Past” would mean getting to do an upbeat dance to an MC Hammer song or something, but our song is actually pretty slow, so we’re incorporating a Renaissance theme that I think fans — and judge Len Goodman — are really going to appreciate.
This is the first time in Team Dance history that we’ve been given a slow romantic song to compete with so I think the audience it going to be pleasantly surprised because our dance will remind people of the way it used to be, the loyal fans will love it and the new fans of the show will be in awe.
I feel good about our routines this week, but Ryan always starts to get nervous at Sunday camera blocking rehearsals where people are watching us for the first time.
He’ll get tense in his shoulders and I have to tell him, “We’ve been in the bottom so many weeks, so just go out there and have fun. What do you have to lose? Absolutely nothing.” He’s only competing against himself and he continues to improve, so I’m proud of him.
To read her full blog, see People.
Its “a slower version of the cha-cha” and “there arent that many steps”? WTH. I really need to not read what these contestants say because really they have no idea about the actual dances, all they know is what their partner is teaching them which is usually maybe 1/3 of the actual dance and 2/3 of made up filler/poses that has nothing to do with the actual dance. Sigh. You’d think I would have learned by now. :/
Forgot to end my previous comment on a positive note by saying that I am super happy that Cheryl is back and that I love to see her dancing again (even though I am rooting for Calvin and James, not Ryan).
Errr, rumba actually IS a slowed down version of the cha-cha, without the syncopations – you can literally slow down any cha-cha and get a rumba, and speed up any rumba and get a cha-cha…which is why so many figures are so similar. Ryan’s not just talking out of his ass here…
Well I am willing to concede that I’m probably just a clueless social dancer who only takes private lessons in standard and only does rhythm socially, but to my simple brain they are two separate dances with two totally different feels. When I dance them they feel so different that I dont even notice the similarities. Plus, the syncopations are what make it cha cha, and if you take them out then how is it the same dance? I dont know, I think it just made me cringe how he worded it, because he made it sound like they were identical and that if you knew one you knew the other. I’m probably just over-sensitive to what he says because for some reason I just can’t make myself like him. As for the other quote I mentioned, it just bugged me because if it were me I wouldn’t have flat out said that I didn’t have that many steps to do in my dance.
From a music theory perspective, both dances are done in 4/4 time – cha-cha is usually counted 2-3-4-and-1, with the last two beats broken up (the syncopation); rumba is counted 2-3-4-hold-1 (rather than throwing in another step, you just hold). A lot of the figures are nearly identical, just done with different timing – a rumba fan to hockey stick and a cha-cha fan to hockey stick is literally the same set of steps with the same footwork, just with slightly different timing to account for the syncopation. Yes, they have a different “feel”, but if you’re actually paying attention, you should notice a similarity between the figures, and over time you should recognize the rhythm similarities. When I started dancing Latin 13 years ago, literally all I did for about the first 3 months was rumba & cha-cha, and many dance teachers take the same strategy with their students – why? Because the figures are so similar that it’s not nearly as overwhelming to learn both of them at the same time, and it gives you a good foundation to get into dances with trickier timing later on. Cheryl, like most dance teachers, probably told Ryan that rumba & cha-cha were similar because it made it a lot less daunting for him to learn.
That makes sense. Curious…does that hold true in both international latin and american rhythm? I’ve never done latin. Thanks for the info! 🙂