Dance show
“Let’s Dance” finale: Can Kelly be crowned again?
The favorites: Gabriel Kelly and Malika Dzumaev. Photo
© Thomas Banneyer/dpa
From waltz and rumba to contemporary – barefoot, of course: For months, the “Let’s Dance” celebrities have been trying to convince the audience and the jury. A well-known family could triumph again in the final.
The current season of the show has been running since February – and the 22-year-old danced his way to first place in the very first episode. “It wasn’t artificial. The movement was very natural,” judge Joachim Llambi said at the time – a kind of royal anointing in the strict juror’s coordinate system. Now, three months later, the chances are good that Gabriel Kelly will triumph in the final this Friday (8.15 p.m., RTL). No one would be surprised.
Kelly, son of musician Angelo Kelly (The Kelly Family) and a musician himself, is considered, together with his dance partner Malika Dzumaev, to be a hot contender for the title of “Dancing Star”, which is awarded to the winners of the RTL dance festival. His performances have been too confident so far, and too little seems to be able to unsettle him even slightly.
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone stood out from the dancing mass of “Let’s Dance” celebrities over a longer distance. In the previous season, it was very similar with Anna Ermakova, daughter of tennis star Boris Becker.
The competition is waiting for mistakes
But since dancing is not a car race and the right foot has to land on the right spot, the competition still thinks it has a chance. Especially since they are not exactly without ambition. On the one hand, sports presenter Jana Wosnitza (30) and her dance partner Vadim Garbuzov will try to dance past Kelly in the final. In the past few weeks, she has continued to improve – and she knows a lot about sports competitions because of her job alone.
On the other side lurks choreographer Detlef Soost, who was once known as Mr. “Pam, Pam, Pam!”, a motivator and a great supporter of discipline in the casting show “Popstars”. He entered the competition with a certain level of uncertainty, as some viewers assumed that a choreographer would surely also be able to dance the cha-cha-cha, waltz and rumba quite well.
Soost himself had tried to dampen such expectations: he was a hip-hop dancer, which was something completely different (“It’s like saying: Sido is a great rapper, so he must be able to sing an aria in the opera,” quote from RTL). Nevertheless, he showed strong performances together with his dance partner Ekaterina “Ekat” Leonova.
A season with failures and an excursion
For RTL, the finale marks the high point of the 17th season of the successful format, which is known in many countries as its own version. During the course of the series, there were exits for health reasons (Tony Bauer, Mark Keller). RTL and the production company also ventured out on a trip. For the quarter-finals, the “Let’s Dance” entourage moved from the usual TV studio in Cologne-Ossendorf to the so-called Musical Dome near the banks of the Rhine in Cologne. There, they danced in the setting of the musical “Moulin Rouge!”, which revolves around a legendary French nightclub. It was the first time that “Let’s Dance” left the studio in its 18-year history.
If Gabriel Kelly does win in the end, he would be continuing a family tradition. His aunt Maite Kelly has already won “Let’s Dance” once – in 2011.