Bruno Tonioli said prior dance training does not give Dancing With the Stars season 35 contestants an unfair edge, and he argued the opposite can happen. Speaking on Monday on Radio Andy on Sirius XM, he said the debate over dance backgrounds misses how narrow the show’s technique really is.
“It doesn't matter,” Tonioli said, adding that ballroom and Latin are “so specific” and “very specific disciplines.” He also said, “I will judge exactly what I see,” a line that puts the emphasis back on the live performance rather than a contestant’s résumé.
Julia Stiles and Jenna Dewan
The cast debate gathered pace after the season 35 lineup drop at the beginning of the month, when Julia Stiles, Jenna Dewan, and Harry Shum Jr. drew the most attention for prior dance experience. Jenna Dewan and Harry Shum Jr. were described as having significant prior dance experience, while Guillermo Rodriguez and Tatyana Ali were named as competitors without dance training.
That split is why the argument has stayed alive before the competition even starts. A lineup with both trained and untrained contestants naturally invites comparison, but Tonioli’s view is blunt: the training itself does not decide the result.
Ballroom and Latin discipline
Tonioli said ballet, hip-hop, modern, and other styles do not translate cleanly into the ballroom format. He said ballet training “actually doesn't help at all for Latin” because “Latin is all ground, using the foot in a completely different way,” and said other styles have “got nothing to do with ballroom.”
He went further, saying prior experience can become a disadvantage because “the posture, your frame, are so specific to ballroom” that it is “probably better to start from scratch.” That is the practical point for season 35: the show is not rewarding general dance polish so much as forcing contestants to relearn movement for a different discipline.
Judging season 35
Tonioli also said the judges are not grading résumés. “I am absolutely open-minded because everybody, as far as I'm concerned, as a judge, is the same,” he said, and he added that “we've had people that won and they've never, ever danced before.” He also noted that dancers have won in the past “not because they were dancers, because they worked as hard as anyone else.”
That is the useful takeaway for viewers watching the season 35 launch: the early controversy may shape the conversation, but it does not change the scoring logic Tonioli says he will use. Once the season begins, the real test will be whether the judges reward clean ballroom technique over background, and he has already signaled where he will stand.
