A veteran of *NSync, Lance Bass knew how to bust a move. He just wasn't quite sure if he could cut a rug.
The 29-year-old singer appeared last season on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," and the tangos, foxtrots and sambas he had to perform on the show were far different from anything he had done in his boy band days.
"I've been choreographed before, but I think in a way it hurt me," he said in a telephone interview. "We had hip-hop training (in *NSync), and it was the opposite of what I had to learn for ballroom. With hip-hop it's very loose, very freestyle, very low. With ballroom it's all about your lines, your posture, it's something I really had to work on."
Though he didn't walk away with the mirrored ball trophy, he and dance partner Lacey Schwimmer finished third.
On Tuesday, Lance and Lacey, along with fellow 2008 competitors Olympic gold medalist Maurice Greene, Grammy Award-winning singer Toni Braxton, "Hannah Montana" star Cody Linley and Marlee Matlin, a 2007 competitor and Oscar-winning actress, will waltz into Greensboro Coliseum as part of the "Dancing With the Stars" tour.
Also appearing will be 10 professional dancers from the show, including Season 7 winner Derek Hough, Season 6 winner Mark Ballas and Seasons 2 and 3 winner Cheryl Burke.
The ABC series, which debuted in 2005 and will be in its eighth season this year, pairs about a dozen celebrities with professional partners and follows them as they try to learn the finer points of ballroom dancing. Actors, musicians, athletes and an assortment of other notable personalities, such as entrepreneur Mark Cuban and talk-show host Jerry Springer, have taken part. They are assessed by a panel of three judges, who give them a score of 1 to 10. Fans also vote for their favorites. Each week the duo with the lowest combined judges' score and fan vote gets kicked off.
Bass was approached by producers last spring about appearing on the show. He said he was a bit hesitant at first, but with some encouragement from fellow 'NSync member Joey Fatone (who finished second on the show's fourth season), he decided to give it a try.
"It's scary to put yourself in front of millions of people on live television, doing something you're not that great at," he said. "But Joey told me what to expect, how many hours I needed to put in... But I didn't think we'd make it that far, not at all. The judges didn't think Lacey and I's style was very traditional. So every week we stayed on was a bonus."
A native of Laurel, Miss., Bass joined *NSYNC in 1995 and performed with the group until it went on hiatus in 2002. He made headlines in 2006 by announcing he was gay. In an ironic twist, one of the songs he danced to on "Dancing With The Stars" was Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl."
"The producers picked that one," he said with a chuckle.
The biggest challenge for him, Bass said, was the time constraints.
"You had five days to really learn a whole new dance in a style that you may not have done before," he said. "But there are also a lot of similar dances. And the more dances I learned, the easier it became to learn a future dance, because I became used to some of the same holds."
For others, especially those with no dance experience whatsoever, just staying coordinated can be difficult, Burke said.
"It's not just learning the steps," she said. "But you have to learn how to move your arms with your steps, and stand up straight and put all of that together. It takes a lot of effort... Some people struggle with things more than others, but you have to try to find your partner's assets so that you can really show them off."
Burke, who danced with Greene last season, says the participants get many bumps and bruises along the way, but for the most part have a good time.
"What you're doing is creating a dancer in a short amount of time," the 24-year-old Northern California native said in a telephone interview. "And when you last long, and start to see them (the celebrities) change and develop into dancers -- that's an amazing process to be part of."
The dance partners meet, on camera, for the first time about a month before the show starts. Burke said the dancers ask the celebrities how seriously they want to take the competition and how many hours they want to put in. Typically, she said, they train for four hours everyday at the beginning, moving up to eight hours toward the end of the competition -- provided they make it that far.
Athletes have done especially well on the show, winning three times -- four if you count race car driver Helio Castroneves who won season five. Burke and Greene finished fifth this season out of 13, and retired NFL defensive tackle Warren Sapp finished second behind Hough and model Brooke Burke (no relation to Cheryl).
"I think athletes have kind of an advantage when it comes to training, just because they're used to being coached, they're used to the rigorous schedule," said Cheryl, who also danced with retired NFL running back and season three champ Emmitt Smith . "If I say we need to do something for seven hours, they go for seven hours. And if they don't do something perfect, they're going to stay until they do get it perfect."
Still, Burke said even the best competitors on the show shouldn't give up their day jobs.
"Oh, they have lots of work," she said about the possibility of any of the celebrities trying to compete on the professional dance circuit. "I don't think they would do that great. I've been doing this for about 20 years, and that's about how long it would take them."
Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com.
