All about: Shirley Ballas - Dance Saturday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
For today's post, in continuation with my All about:____ series, I'll be talking about the well-known ballroom and Latin dancer, Shirley Ballas!
I was always sceptical about who would be best suited to replace the previous head judge of Strictly Come Dancing, Len Goodman, and when they announced in 2017 that it was Shirley Ballas, I didn't really know who she was at first. However, I remember my dad walking into the living room when she was introduced to Strictly and he said "oh my God, is that Shirley Ballas?" so I kind of gathered that she was a real star of her time.
BBC Strictly Come Dancing
As part of one of my Blogmas posts for 2018 (you can read the post here), I wrote about my dance icons of the year and alongside Maddie Ziegler and Claudia Dean, I also included Shirley Ballas because my mum came into the room one day and said "you have to watch Shirley and her partner Corky dancing, it's amazing!" And after watching a couple of the videos, I now understood why she was nicknamed The Qeen of Latin because she and her partner practically commanded the stage.
Swango1cars
Shirley Ballas was born on the 6th September, 1960, in Wallasey, England. She is an English ballroom dancer, dance teacher, and dance adjudicator, who specialises in the International Latin division as she has won many world championships in the Latin style (hence her nickname, The Queen of Latin).
At the age of 7, she began dancing and also began performing competitively in the following years. This allowed her, at the age of 15, to move to North Yorkshire, where she partnered the British Ballroom Champion, Nigel Tiffany. However, after two years of dancing together, the partners split after Nina Hunt, Shirley's dance teacher, convinced her to audition to partner with ballroom dancer, Sammy Stopford.
When Shirley was just 18 years old, she and Sammy got married but their relationship ended after just 5 years. Despite this, the two did win many ballroom and Latin dance competitions as a dance couple, including winning Professional Latin at Blackpool Dance Festival in 1983.
Shirley later married her second professional dance partner, Corky Ballas, in the mid 1980s. The couple scored highly in the Professional Latin at Blackpool Dance Festival in 1995 and 1996.
They later moved to Houston Texas to continue out their competitive dance careers in America and in 1986, the pair welcomed their only child, Mark Ballas, who is now also a professional ballroom dancer. Corky and Shirley later divorced in 2007, however.
In 1996, Shirley stopped competing as a professional ballroom and Latin dancer and began coaching and judging in the ballroom and Latin American style. She helped bring many dancers like Derek Hough, to stardom through her training.
Since then, she has appeared on many amazing TV shows like Dancing With The Stars in America and she became head judge on Strictly Come Dancing, in the UK. On Strictly, she is known for her attention to detail in both ballroom and Latin and she shows great enthusiasm when the celebrities dance one of her favourite styles, the rumba!
What I like most about Shirley is her presence on stage. She is known as The Queen of Latin because she adds character to her dancing and she is so brilliant at what she does. Although ballroom and Latin is a style that is typically considered with old people, amazing dancers like Shirley Ballas, show us just how much we still love the style nowadays.
As a ballroom and Latin dancer myself, I really look up to people like Shirley because they really bring this particular style of dance to life and they really show the discipline that is involved with ballroom and Latin since its also in the dancesport category.
Have you heard of Shirley Ballas? Do you think there will be another series on Strictly Come Dancing this year? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!
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See you next time,
Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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