The ankle monitor finally had its moment to shine.
In the opening seconds of Anna Delvey’s debut on “Dancing With the Stars” on Tuesday night, the cameras pulled in tight on the tracking device strapped to her ankle. Normally a staid black box, the monitor had clearly been through the show’s wardrobe department and was encrusted with a rainbow mix of crystals that perfectly matched Ms. Delvey’s fringed dress.
Ms. Delvey, of course, is the former fake heiress whose legal name is Anna Sorokin. She served almost four years in prison after being convicted of stealing more than $200,000 from multiple businesses, and was then arrested by U.S. immigration authorities for overstaying her visa and put on house arrest (hence the ankle monitor).
She is also the latest in a long line of contestants on the dance show who were seemingly picked for the controversy they were likely to inspire.
The focus on Ms. Delvey’s ankle monitor helped her lackluster performance stand out on social media among more ambitious routines from contestants like the actress Chandler Kinney and the former N.B.A. star Dwight Howard. Ms. Delvey and her partner, Ezra Sosa, ultimately landed in the bottom-third of the pack.
But if Ms. Delvey was happy about having been allowed to travel to Los Angeles for the show, you wouldn’t know it from her cha-cha. Her notable lack of enthusiasm could be her biggest issue as she tries to avoid the early exit that befell other polarizing competitors over the years, like Tucker Carlson, Paula Deen and Tonya Harding.
Mr. Sosa, a professional dancer who is getting his first chance on the show as a full-time partner of a contestant, discussed the unique challenge he has with Ms. Delvey in an interview with Joe Vulpis of the “Lightweights Podcast.”
“To get you to smile is the hardest thing for me to do,” Mr. Sosa said, referring to a conversation with Ms. Delvey during a rehearsal. “So you need to be smiling for four hours straight of rehearsal so you can consistently smile for one minute of our dance.”
Telling a woman to smile is typically a loaded request, but the suggestion is more common in the world of performance.
“Dancing is so joyous and it’s so silly,” said Alec Cohen, a choreographer and dance teacher who has worked with the singer Chrissy Chlapecka and the drag performer Luxx Noir London. “If you can access the humor and the laughter behind it, then maybe a genuine moment of expression will just naturally appear. It’s about repetition and practice.”
Mr. Cohen said the key to a good performance is getting out of your own head.
“When I was a professional dancer auditioning for things, if my brain was winning with all of the negative critiques,” he said, “I would just cover my mouth and say out loud, ‘I’ve got this, I know this, I know this.’ Hearing the affirmation out loud is really helpful.”
Another technique that Mr. Cohen recommends is pretending to be someone else — which historically has not been a problem for Ms. Delvey.
“I like to tell nonprofessional dancers to imagine a person and setting that’s really far away from yourself,” he said. “For example, I like to say, I’m Mary-Louise Parker in ‘Weeds.’ Because I kind of can be frenetic and she’s, like, so provocative, sensual and grounded. It’s a really good thing for me to get in the headspace.”
“We all have the same impostor syndrome,” he added. “So I imagine it would be helpful for Anna Delvey to pretend that she’s Rihanna.”
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