East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Sharon Knolle
Photos By Giuliano Bekor

(Watch behind the cover shoot with Carrie Ann Inaba. Click Here. ) 

“This is my favorite season of ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” raves judge Carrie Ann Inaba. “The cast is so dynamic. They’re so diverse. I think there’s somebody that everyone can relate to. It’s very unpredictable who’s going to win.”

Watching the Honolulu-born Inaba critique one of the celebrity’s routines on “Dancing With the Stars,” you‘d never guess that this poised, professional dancer and choreographer finds delivering her verdicts almost as nerve-wracking as the celebrities who are on the receiving end of them.

“Everybody else is scripted,” she says. “The dancers know their choreography. The hosts know their lines. I have just a few seconds to figure out what I’m going to say, how I’m going to say it and give a number score to what I just saw.”

She thinks people often know what she’s going to say anyway. “My face shows everything,” Inaba says, including her honest reaction to a bad performance. “I’m not putting on a face for TV. It’s a reality show, and I believe in being the most real I can be. It’s not easy, because sometimes I want to go for the quick laugh or I want to go for entertainment, but I don’t feel that’s what I was hired to do.” 

Before each show, Inaba says she reads “four judgments” to remind herself what’s at stake. “For us, it’s a few hours of programming, but for these people it’s the rest of their lives, so I think it’s really important not to crush someone’s self-esteem.” She adds that it takes former contestants a year to forgive her, saying that some contestants quote past critiques back to her, word for word. “They remember better than I do! So I know it affects them.”

But her anxiety about public speaking goes much deeper. “People don’t know this about me, but when I was born, I didn’t have a voice,” she says, illustrating by speaking in a robotic rasp. “I went to a voice therapist to learn how to use my vocal chords. So speaking is a huge mountain for me to climb.” Inaba then laughs, adding that she’d rather “do an interpretive dance,” than give a score and a critique. “I’m much more tuned in to my body than I am having to speak through my mind.”

She’ll be on more solid footing, however, on her new reality show, “Dance Wars,” scheduled to premiere in January, which pits a team of dancers she puts together against a rival team choreographed by fellow “Stars” judge Bruno Tonioli. “People are going to vote for whether they like Bruno’s team or my team each week. And if they don’t like my team, then I’ll have to cut somebody, and same with Bruno. But it’s really just a wonderful excuse to put more production numbers on the air.”

She admits that the competition angle makes her a little nervous. “I don’t really like to compete. In my normal life, if there’s a situation where I’m going to compete with somebody, I usually back away. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how I cope with it!” But a little healthy competition won’t scare her away from getting back to her love of performing and choreographing. “I can’t wait to get back in the studio. I need that. I miss it. I think it’s important to balance out what I’m doing judging-wise with actually being in the studio.”

Inaba credits the immense popularity of “Dancing With the Stars” for making choreographers be a little more honest and with getting ballroom dance to “loosen up” a little. “The ballroom dance world and the commercial dance world are colliding. It’s forcing choreographers to actually learn the proper steps. And I think the ballroom world is softening the stringent lines of what is correct and incorrect and realizing that entertainment is also quite important.”

That kind of collision happens every day in Inaba’s personal life with boyfriend Artem Chigvintsev, a dancer from Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.”

“We’re complete opposites,” she laughs. “He’s a ballroom dancer and he’s Russian and very strict. My attitude is, ‘It can be anything you want, it’s all about expression,’ but he’s like, ‘No, it’s not. You will rumba walk for five more hours!’ He works with me on ballroom stuff and I work with him on the commercial dance stuff.”

The two bought a house in the Los Angeles area last March, which Inaba describes as “traditional, but very modern and Zen, so it’s just like me. It’s a whole complementary contradiction.”

The pair’s different approaches to life also carries over to decorating. “We are opposite in pretty much everything. Like when we pick up a piece of furniture to move it, he actually goes one way and I go the other way! It’s the funniest thing. It’s really good because we’re constantly being challenged, our ideals, by each other, in a very loving way.”

On the subject of possible wedding plans, Inaba says, “Who knows? Life just kind of takes you where you go. I follow along. I try not to make any plans. I’ve learned that the hard way. You make plans and you just hit a wall.”

Plans or not, Inaba’s path has led to success. And even though she will turn 40 this January, slowing down is not an option. “I haven’t had a day off in a month,” she says, and she’s not really complaining. She does an intense Tae-Bo-like kickboxing workout called “Drenched" every day and firmly believes, "Once a dancer, always a dancer.” 

“I have to be physical,” she says, “Most people have focused on their mind as knowing more, but I believe in body knowledge. I believe your cells have imbedded in them, like a seed does when it grows, all the stuff you need to know. Your mind is just one part of your body.”

Go Behind the Scenes with Carrie Ann (click the image)

She admits this can lead to overthinking at times. “I know this is so dorky, but when I walk by plants, and if I break a branch off by mistake, I get really upset. I’ve injured something! And I think that comes from the way I was raised in Hawaii. In Hawaii, it is a cultural collision of sorts, and it’s very East meets West.”

Inaba, who is of Japanese, Chinese and Irish descent, lived in Japan for two years in the ‘80s, where she became a well-known pop singer, so she feels much closer to her Japanese roots than her Chinese ones. “Eventually I would love to go to China and tap into that, because I think there’s something magical there,” she says.

In the United States, Inaba says her ethnic background takes on even another meaning, one of significance to the Asian American community. Ever since her days as a fly girl on "In Living Color,” she has realized that being on TV made her an Asian role model.

"I would get a lot of fan mail from Asian families saying thank you so much for giving my daughter a different thing to aspire to, rather than a teacher or a doctor. I’ve been very aware of that from the time I was very young." She calls that constant sense of responsibility her "backpack." "I don’t have a lot of power, but I work in a medium that has a lot of power. Every time I open my mouth, I know that it affects somebody else, somewhere."

Inaba also knows it is important to loosen the straps on her “backpack” from time to time and just indulge in life. Just as the “Dancing” stars recently admitted to scarfing down sugar and candy backstage before a performance, Inaba believes in rewarding herself. “Honestly, my favorite food is nachos with jalapenos and bad cheese from 7-11,” she laughs. “If I had a rough show, I would go home in my ballgown, and I would go into a 7-11 across the street and just squirt, squirt, squirt and eat it all up! It’s my favorite thing to do.”

Now that she’s working on two shows, however, her hectic schedule doesn’t allow for as many late-night convenience store jaunts. Plus, she says she’s recently realized the importance of healthy eating. “I have to be much more careful about getting nutritional value from what I eat so that I'm replenishing my body. As a dancer, I never thought about eating for energy; it was always eating to maintain a certain weight. It wasn’t a healthy outlook.”

But America’s appetite for dance itself is quite healthy. And Inaba believes that part of the reason “Dancing With the Stars” is so popular right now is because there’s a war going on. “The last time that we saw something like this was when the MGM musical was huge and we were at war. I think that people, when they turn on the TV, really enjoy just not thinking so much. People want to feel good and music and dance make you feel good.”

For Inaba and a lot of the viewing public, it’s not only a show about dancing. “Dancing is just the backdrop,” she says. “It’s about these celebrities becoming vulnerable and trying new things and watching these stars do what I think is very inspirational for a lot of people.”

Inaba’s own role in the show’s success is no small undertaking. Her honest critiques have often led her to being pegged as the “Simon Cowell” of the show, to the point where complete strangers accuse her of being too mean. “I feel trapped a little bit in that when I’m out in public, I have to be a certain persona because people expect it of me,” she laments. “But when work is over, I’m a total goofball.”

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