Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer Amy Dowden has said tonight’s first live performance since her return to the series will be “beautiful for my family”.
The 34-year-old told the PA news agency her celebrity partner, JLS singer JB Gill, had made the 20th anniversary series of the BBC dancing show the “perfect comeback” after overcoming breast cancer.
She received her diagnosis in May 2023, when she found a lump the day before her honeymoon, and missed out on having a celebrity partner in that year’s series of Strictly.
Dowden announced in February that she would return to the show this year, after a mastectomy and chemotherapy left her with “no evidence of disease” following tests.
Speaking of her return to training and performing live, she told PA: “I’m absolutely loving it, JB’s been the perfect comeback for me.
“I’m just back in my happy place doing what I love most.
“I think it’s going to be just really lovely (today), because it’s going to be beautiful for my family, because they struggled just as much as I did having to watch me go through it.
“Last year’s Strictly was a tough watch for them, because it was a reminder of exactly what we were going through.
“It’s going to be one big celebration, this whole series for me.”
The Welsh dancer will perform the waltz to Leo Sayer’s When I Need You alongside celebrity partner Gill.
Gill told PA he felt the pair’s chemistry was “very strong”.
The 37-year-old said: “For me, I think it’s just trusting Amy, she’s the pro for a reason, I trust her judgment.
“We talk a lot, and I think our chemistry is very strong, even from the outset.
“So, you know, just trusting her decisions, and obviously we will come up with stuff together, and then once we’ve decided it, that’s it, and we go and execute that, so that’s my biggest focus in that respect.”
Gill said training had been “mind-blowing and eye-opening” as he had found ballroom dancing to be “completely alien” in comparison to the choreography he performed while dancing with JLS.
The Croydon-born singer said: “In the first few days, it was mind-blowing and eye-opening, because it was so completely alien.
“I went home to my wife (professional dancer Chloe Tangney) and just said, this is what I was doing, and going through the counts, and she was like ‘what on earth is that? It doesn’t even make any sense’.
“It took a while to sort of get into the swing of those sorts of things, but the body of course is going through lots of different things as well.
“It’s a waltz, so it’s not as impactful, should I say, as perhaps some other styles on the body.
“But you still feel it, there’s certain things, like when you’re holding your frame as well as your shoulders, your back, your neck even, because the positioning has got to be right if you’re doing it correctly, even your hands have got to stay close, so you’ve got tension in your hands as well.
“So all those sorts of things you don’t perhaps expect and (they’ve) sort of come out in the wash this last couple of weeks, but we’re in good shape.”
Week one of Strictly Come Dancing series 22 will air on BBC One and iPlayer at 7pm.
