Dancing With the Stars pro Cheryl Burke is blogging exclusively with Us Weekly about her quest to take home the season 25 mirrorball trophy with partner Terrell Owens! Check back each week for her latest update on the competition.
I thought Terrell did an amazing job with the tango last week. He captured the moment and all the different moving parts. It’s a very hard dance considering the height difference, and he nailed all of his steps, but I understand what the judges meant when they said they want to see a little bit more when it comes to his dancing. Our scores weren’t as high as previous weeks, and I think Terrell was a little upset by that, but we survived a double elimination and are in the top 6!
It was a tough week because we also had the group dance too. I thought our group dance was the best we had done so far. It was a little bit messy, and we did have to add an extra rehearsal, but when it came to the dancing, I thought it was pretty clean.
I don’t think we deserved 8s, though. It’s a really hard song dancing to “Monster Mash,” and we were trying to do something different that hadn’t been done in 25 seasons. There were all these props moving at the same time as our dance, so I understand the judges’ comments, but we did the best we could and I thought overall it was good and clean. Learning two dances in one week was hard on everyone.
I had a feeling it might be a double elimination night, but I wasn’t sure because there wasn’t an announcement leading up to it. It just happened so it was a shock to everyone. Vanessa and Nikki were both were pretty high on leaderboard and if anything, Terrell had been on the bottom. I thought for sure it could have been us going home. I was shocked to see them go because they both have been very strong throughout the competition.
This week is trio week and we are dancing to “Slow Hands” by Niall Horan with one of my best friends, Kelly Monaco. Kelly and I became best friends after I started the show, so after the second season. She has been in my life for 12 years and we spend holidays together and my family loves her, so it’s really cool to do a trio with one of my best friends.
What’s really difficult about it though, there is even more of a height difference between her and Terrell. She is half my size, and Terrell and I already have a problem, so now he has two people that are not very tall and he has to do a trio rumba, which is the first time that’s ever been done on Dancing With the Stars in 25 seasons.
The way that the trio works is the celebrity has to be in the dance the whole time from beginning to end, which makes my job harder because I’m not teaching one person, I’m teaching two, and Kelly hasn’t done Dancing With the Stars since All-Star season.
It’s been very challenging for me and also very overwhelming, but I’m not too worried about Kelly. I’m worried about how Terrell is going to manhandle us, and our height and weight difference is also very challenging. It’s been difficult but fun because my best friend is in it. I was more worried that we weren’t going to be best friends afterward, but we are. She understands me. She gets me and we have a language where we just look at each other and we know what we are talking about so that helps. We also have our individual dance so we have two full dances this week.
For our individual dance, we are dancing the Charleston and it has a ‘20s speakeasy vibe to it. I keep telling Terrell after the quickstep and jive, you won’t have another fast dance, and then they totally bring this Charleston upon us, and this is the fastest dance so he has so much on his plate.
For this dance, we have the troupe with us and he’s jumping, dancing and sliding on a table. There’s so much happening in such a short amount of time to learn everything.
To be honest, I never thought we would make it to the top 6, especially because of our bumpy start. You really see improvement every week with him and I think Terrell is the definition of what Dancing With the Stars is all about: someone with no dance experience coming on and improving slowly and surely every week.
It’s scary going in to this week because there is a chance we are going home. Obviously we are at the bottom of the leaderboard, and we just have to keep our head up high and continue on. The show is unpredictable and you just never know what is going to happen.
