‘Legends of the Dance Floor’, featuring former Strictly stars, is on its way to Cambridge
The Legends of the Dance Floor show will be coming to the Cambridge Corn Exchange tomorrow (Tuesday, 15 October).
All of the performers have fond memories of their time on Strictly. They are Pasha Kovalev, Vincent Simone, Ian Waite, Brendan Cole and James Jordan, and they will be dancing for your delight but also sharing anecdotes in a show directed and choregraphed by Scott Coldwell.
Back in 2022, Pasha appeared on a UK tour of Here Come the Boys, alongside Graziano di Prima, Aljaz Skorjanec, the late Robin Windsor and Karim Zeroual.
“I knew the power of having five professional male dancers performing together,” he says. So, it took very little persuasion to get him involved in this new show.
The Legends line-up have remained firm friends from their time on Strictly. At 44, Pasha, who regards Latin dance as his speciality (despite his Russian heritage), is the baby of the group.
Even so, he freely admits it’s harder to maintain a peak of fitness when you reach your 40s.
“In your 20s and 30s, you’re obviously more flexible,” he says, “I pay much more attention now to both my exercise and eating regimes.
“A two-hour live show can be pretty brutal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely looking forward to it. But I know it’s going to hurt.”
Apart from picking up the prized glitterball with his celebrity partner, the late Caroline Flack, in 2014, Pasha has good reason to be grateful to Strictly.
It’s where he met and fell in love with his now-wife, Countdown maths whizz, Rachel Riley. And there’s no question, he says, that she’ll be bringing their two daughters, Maven, four, and two-year-old Noa to watch him dance.
Vincent Simone, 45, entered the nation’s sitting rooms via Strictly in 2006 and remained with the show for seven years.
He knows well, he says, that the vast majority of the TV audience is female. “So, the idea of putting five well-known male dancers on the same stage – professionals who made the show what it is now – was always going to be a good one.”
Ian Waite danced on Strictly for seven years, until 2009, and then spent the next decade appearing with Claudia Winkleman followed by Zoe Ball on the spin-off show, It Takes Two.
He also got together with Vincent for a tour, The Ballroom Boys, to which they invited Brendan Cole.
New Zealand-born Brendan Cole, 48, has every reason to be grateful to Strictly. He joined the show for its very first series in 2004, winning the glitterball that year with his celebrity partner, Natasha Kaplinsky, and stayed until 2017.
He’s worked with the other four Legends professionals so he was quickly on board when producer Steven Howard first put the proposition to him. “I’m looking forward to it enormously,” he says. “I’m almost anticipating a riot because of the energy we’ll all bring to the stage.”
In 2018, while rehearsing for their stage show with Ola, his wife and professional dance partner, James Jordan, 46, injured himself and ended up with a double hernia.
“I honestly thought that was it in terms of touring,” he admits.
But when he and Ola were approached with the offer of the Legends tour, he found it irresistible.
“I knew the others well and I liked the idea of sharing the load,” he says, “but we couldn’t quite see how we could make it work with our four-year-old daughter, Ella, just starting proper school.”
The dilemma was only resolved when Steven Howard suggested that just one of them should take part in the tour.
“Ola immediately said it should be me, as much as she would have loved being involved, because she was the one who wanted to settle Ella in her new school.”
And from there consolidated the idea of the five legends all being male.
Since he accepted the invitation to dance on the Legends tour, James has been back in the gym five or six times a week.
“The other four have had their own tours which has kept them pretty fit,” he notes, “but I’m now in good shape because I was so nervous of going back on tour.
“I don’t want to go out there and be the weak link. I want to be as good as I was on Strictly. My main emotion, though, is excitement about being back on stage with my friends in front of a live audience.
“It doesn’t get better than that.”
Legends of the Dance Floor will be on at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Tuesday, 15 October. Tickets, priced £48 or £58, are available from cornex.co.uk.