Over the years, “Dancing With the Stars” fans have fallen in love with the stunning performance, elaborate costumes, and every small piece that works to create the show. Professional dancer Jenna Johnson recently admitted that any number of things can go wrong, but the performance must continue.
Quick Thinking Saved Jenna Johnson’s Tour Performance
As Jenna Johnson prepares for the upcoming DWTS season, she’s reflecting on a few performances that almost went awry.
“This actually just happened on the ‘Dancing With the Stars’ tour, and it’s one of those moments of ‘the show must go on,'” the 32-year-old shared with Parade.
She explained that she had a one-minute quick change. She was going from a dress into a zip-up corset, but the zipper snapped in half with less than a minute before her next performance.
“There’s no way of fixing it and I have like 30 seconds to figure out what’s going to happen and then I need to be on camera,” Jenna continued. “And our wardrobe [person] was like, ‘Let me just hook and eye it, and pray it stays.'”
“So we do a hook and eye on top and it is fully wide open in the back and I ran and was in the wing and ready for my camera shot and I did the rest of my duet with Val hanging, literally, by a little clasp. But somehow it stayed on, and that’s that,” she concluded.
Thankfully, Jenna and her husband Val communicate effectively, even without spoken words.
“The whole thing was this cinematic camera duet that we had camera with us onstage while we were dancing the whole time, very close-up and so I’m trying to be a ventriloquist and tell him [without lips moving], ‘My top is broken.’ He’s like, ‘Oh.’ And then he finally saw it and is like, ‘Okay, so maybe go gentler today,'” the dancer recalled.
The Season 33 Champion Talks Balancing Work and Family
Being full-time performers and raising a toddler can be a tremendous amount of work. But Val Chmerkovskiy and Jenna Johnson are making it work.
“This is just part of our life and we both agree we are both passionate about our work and our jobs and we’ve been able to do it with a lot of help, whether family or nannies or assistants or whatever it’s been we have a community that really helps take care of us,” the professional dancer revealed.
“So I think that’s why prioritizing both our health and our household, what we feed each other, how we take care of each other, having everybody on the same wavelength, okay, this is how we’re going to approach raising Rome, just means the world to me. We couldn’t do it alone. It really does take a village for both of us to be able to do what we love to do and to do it at the highest level,” Jenna shared.
Jenna Johnson and Val Chmerkovskiy return to the ballroom when “Dancing With the Stars” season 35 begins at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, September 15 on ABC.
