Stars onstage: Dancers from ABC’s 'Dancing With the Stars' bring the show to Memphis, Little Rock

Sasha Farber proposed to Emma Slater during an October broadcast of Dancing With the Stars shown in this photo released by ABC.
Sasha Farber proposed to Emma Slater during an October broadcast of Dancing With the Stars shown in this photo released by ABC.

Emma Slater has had little time to bask in her victory before taking her dance shoes on the road.

Slater and NFL player Rashad Jennings took home the coveted Mirror Ball in May as winners of Dancing With the Stars Season 24. Their winning number was a cha-cha/tango, part of a 24-hour fusion challenge.

Jennings, released by the New York Giants in February, is still between teams. Slater, meanwhile, is part of the cast of the "Dancing With the Stars: Live! -- Hot Summer Nights" tour, coming Thursday to Memphis' Orpheum Theatre and July 18 to Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall.

Also slated to appear (cast subject to change): Season 24 professional ballroom and Latin dancers Lindsay Arnold, Sharna Burgess, Artem Chigvintsev, Sasha Farber (Slater's fiance, they got engaged on the air in October), Keo Motsepe, Gleb Savchenko, Alan Bersten, Hayley Erbert and Britt Stewart. Season 24 celebrity contestant Heather Morris, from the cast of TV's Glee, joined the tour Monday in Nashville.

The tour's choreographer and creative director is four-time Emmy nominee Mandy Moore, perhaps best known as the choreographer of the hit film La La Land.

Slater says Morris will be involved in five numbers, including a tango. Her own role in the live show, meanwhile, "will be the same as everybody else." The show will be in four parts, she says -- a love section, Americana, a summer Latin-inspired section and movie section "in which we dance to music from the movies." It won't, however, include anything from La La Land, which was part of a previous tour.

Slater explains how the TV show works: "Basically the 12 or 13 professional dancers, male and female, are paired with celebrities from all walks of life -- you might have a talk-show host, an American football player, an actress, a news reader.

"They [each] get paired with one of the professional dancers and they spend weeks and weeks with us; there's one dance per week, and the audience and judges cast their votes who gets to continue and which couple to eliminate." Three or four couples make the finals; the winner gets to take home the Mirror Ball.

The celebrities learn as many as 15 dances or more, and "each dance is a new story, a new journey," Slater explains. "Different outfits, different feelings, different music, and we get to be creative as professional dancers because we get to choose costumes, sets, and sometimes the music. All of it is choreographed by us." Touring, she says, "is what we do between seasons."

"We're all Latin and ballroom dancers; I trained the most in Latin dancing," she says. The difference: "In ballroom, two people are close together and we can't break that hold. The Latin dancing is a little more free, a little more sexy. My favorite dance is probably rumba."

The rumba, she says, is probably the only dance she didn't do with her Season 17 celebrity partner, comedian-actor Bill Engvall. They got to the finals but were eliminated on the first night. ("I adore Bill," she says. "I still keep in contact with him. I think he's one of the best people in the world.")

That was the closest she got to victory before this year. For Season 18, she was paired with actor Billy Dee Williams, but his back injury led to them withdrawing from the competition in week three. She and race-car driver Michael Waltrip finished in seventh place in Season 19; she and singer Redfoo were eliminated in the second week of Season 20; she and internet star Hayes Grier were cut on week seven of Season 21. After sitting out Season 22, she and former Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry were eliminated in the third week of Season 23.

She and fiance Farber, who got to the semifinals this season, do a Viennese waltz onstage "that's dedicated to the moment we got engaged," she says. "It's a tune called 'Perfect.'" Not something by Johann Strauss? No, she says, "not as classical as that."

"We dance to very popular music that people will recognize and clap hands to."

Slater started dancing at age 5 when she joined a local stage school in her hometown of Tamworth, England. In 2005, at 16, she toured as part of the the cast of Simply Ballroom in the United Kingdom (including a run on London's West End), the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, where she also appeared on a show called Strictly Come Dancing.

After winning the U.K. and British Youth Latin American Championships with her then partner, she then performed in four other West End shows, including Dirty Dancing. In 2007, she played one of Sophie's (Amanda Seyfried) friends in the film Mamma Mia! and also sang on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack.

She joined the Tony-nominated Burn the Floor for its Broadway debut and was part of the cast for the show's 2010 world tour.

A lot of the dancers could pass for fitness models, but Slater says getting nondance related exercise "depends on each person."

"The dancing definitely keeps us fit," she says. "I like to go to the gym; I don't go every day. Quite a few of us, some of the girls love to go to yoga. All the boys generally go to the gym and exercise heavy.

"Ballroom dancing exercises a lot of muscles that we wouldn't use if we weren't dancing. We have strong parts of our bodies that become strong because of the type of dance we do. Part of it is that it's repetitive, doing them over and over again. Other exercises wouldn't hit them."

The news release stresses that the cast is subject to change, if, say, a cast member gets injured and can't perform.

"Everybody is solid and sound right now, but injuries do happen, and you just have to go through the proper steps that you look after yourself," Slater says. "There's an ice bath every night that you can pop your legs into, which really helps with knees and ankles and hips," the joints that feel the impact the most.

Otherwise, she says, the routine is probably good advice for anybody, including nondancers: "Drink plenty of water and make sure that you rest enough."

Style on 07/11/2017

Dancing With the Stars: Live! Hot Summer Nights

• 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Orpheum Theatre, 203 S. Main St., Memphis.

Tickets: $49.50-$75, VIP $195-$525 (includes premium tickets, meet and greet opportunities with the cast, exclusive merchandise and photo opportunities)

(901) 525-3000

orpheum-memphis.com

• 8 p.m. July 18, Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway, Little Rock. Tickets: $42-$72 (plus fees), VIP packages $192-$522 plus fees.

(800) 745-3000

ticketmaster.com; dwtstour.com; VIP packages: VIPNation.com

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Season 24 professional dancers from Dancing With the Stars take the best of ballroom and Latin dance on tour.

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“Dancing With the Stars: Live! Hot Summer Nights” tour will be at Memphis’ Orpheum Theatre Thursday and Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall on July 18.

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Emma Slater and her celebrity partner, Rashad Jennings, won Dancing With the Stars’ Season 24 Mirrorball Trophy.

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Dancing With the Stars professional dancers perform ballroom dances in formal wear to “very popular music that people will recognize and clap their hands to,” says Season 24 winner Emma Slater.

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