Oti Mabuse is the only person ever to win Strictly Come Dancing two years in a row, but the great unspoken rule about competitive television is that people don’t really care who wins. In fact, she was already the ballroom’s sweetheart for her samba with Hollyoaks’ Danny Mac in 2016 – a moment so exhilarating that people stood up to cheer when they were halfway through it.
“That was when it all started to change for me,” she says, fresh from a photoshoot, at a rooftop bar in west London. She has a ready, infectious smile that grows ever wider when she’s describing moments of great resolve in her life: when she told her mother, for instance, that she wasn’t going to finish her civil engineering degree in Pretoria, South Africa, but was instead moving to Germany for its competitive ballroom dancing scene; when she tries to persuade her husband, the dancer Marius Iepure, to do another maths quiz (she loves quizzes). Charm, charisma, razzle-dazzle, sure, she has all those things, but what also stands out is how hypnotically persuasive she is.
“That samba was really the first African dance that was ever on Strictly. Everyone thought they knew samba, they had seen everything, but this was something they had never seen. And they jumped out of their seats. If that’s not the point, what is? Afterwards, people would come up to us in Pret just to say ‘wow’.”
It is unsurprising to find her launching three projects at once: a tour of her own, I Am Here (this is a direct translation of her name, in Setswana); The Cher Show, a new musical, for which she is the choreographer (Arlene Phillips directs); and finally Romeo & Duet, an endearingly daffy TV dating format, where a single person stands on a balcony and a suitor has to woo them down with song.
I Am Here launches in Cardiff at the end of the month. It’s not unusual for the principals from Strictly to go on the road – it would be a waste of all that adulation not to – “but it’s not very common for a woman to do a solo,” she says. “Usually the girls work together.” It tells the story of her life, backwards, with a through line. “I want to recognise the people that have helped me on the way up. A lot of it, really, has been because women have given me the opportunity. I want to pay homage to them and say thank you, with dance.”
Mabuse’s father was a lawyer, often working pro bono, representing people during the bleakest days of apartheid. Her mother, a teacher, also had a formidable civic drive, pushing on after apartheid was overturned to secure equal rights for women. “Even after Nelson Mandela was president, we still had to march to get the right to vote. That’s what has made me who I am, that I come from a country of strong women.” But her mother also took the dancing extremely seriously. For years, she “kind of adopted” Mabuse’s dance partner, when they were both 10, “so that he would have the financial support and be able to make rehearsals. She always said: ‘I want more for my daughters because I know what they are worth.’ She fought for us a lot.”
The result is not just one nationally and internationally feted daughter – Oti, the youngest, won the South African championships eight times before she moved to Germany in 2012 – but another, Motsi Mabuse, the eldest, has been a judge on Strictly Coming Dancing since 2019, and is also extremely successful in Germany. The middle sister, Phemelo, apparently, was the best of all. “We’d prepare five dances – and she’d have 10. But she was almost too good, you know? It wasn’t a challenge.” Phemelo still lives in Pretoria, where she is the CEO of a Belgian company that makes wind farms.
They are pretty prodigious, in other words – like the Williams sisters of dance – and she says (of King Richard, the biopic about the tennis coach who brought his daughters up to be champions): “I saw that movie on a flight, and I told my parents, we need to watch this because I think we have to have a conversation. We call my mum King Richard.”
It all sounds so seamless, leaping from one competition victory to the next, one super talent in the family to the next, but there is a lot of sadness in the hinterland; not just Mabuse’s mother but her dance teacher, her grandmother, all poured their ambitions into the Mabuse sisters, having themselves been thwarted by racist oppression. They call South Africans born after 1994 the “born free generation” (Mabuse was actually born in 1990, and is now 31), because “we were the first generation that was able to just do whatever we wanted, without restriction. In a good way, we were quite naive. We’d go into situations without even thinking about it, without even thinking that we didn’t belong. Our ancestors look up to us now because we’re quite fearless. Can you even imagine my grandma getting on an aeroplane? So you take those advantages that your parents and educators didn’t have, and you want to fulfil them. Or just make them proud.”
Mabuse and her semi-adopted “brother” were dance partners between the ages of 10 and 20, and went through high school and the whole world of dance competitions together, but it came to an end when he wanted to join a show, and she wanted to carry on competing. The two worlds – perhaps superficially similar from the outside, full of sequins and phenomenal skills – couldn’t be more different. “They talk different languages,” says Mabuse. She loses the power of speech as she tries to imagine her career without the furnace of competitive spirit that took her to Germany.
Before she left, though, she had to get out of her civil engineering degree course: she started it under pressure from her mother to be sensible. “She always said: ‘If you don’t find a partner, if you’re tired of dancing, you need something to fall back on.’ When she could see that I couldn’t imagine getting tired of dancing, she was, like: ‘OK, what if you break your leg?’”
When she describes her degree subject, though, it’s with great civic seriousness and sense of purpose. “I love town and regional planning, but it was also to do something that would help other people. If you’re in South Africa, you want to start out by helping people who are living in poverty. You want to build actual houses, with running water, a shower – that’s what builds community.” The sensibility of the world in which she has built such success is always-be-smiling – which she has totally got the hang of – but she talks a lot about the poverty that the post-apartheid era hasn’t eradicated and her tone is not showbiz at all, it’s systematic and practical. She works with two orphanages and dreams of better plumbing. If she went back to civil engineering later in life, I wouldn’t be that surprised, even if her family would – she has been away 11 years, when she originally said six months.
When she arrived in Nuremberg, Motsi was already one of the judges on the German version of Strictly, which is called Let’s Dance. “We’re very competitive but never with each other. It’s a generational thing; she’s 10 years older than me, our experiences have been completely different. But also, in our culture, you have your family: the dad talks to the mom; the mom talks to the eldest sister and the eldest sister tells all the others. So she’s like a second mother; you would never compete with your mom.” Motsi was her coach for competitions, but Oti wasn’t interested in auditioning for Strictly. She went to Germany because they take dancing, above a certain level, extremely seriously – and will pay for accommodation and dance lessons, pay you to go and compete. “If you wanted to be a part of a country that really supports you, especially at international world championships, European and world class, Germany is one of the countries that you want to go to.”
She got into Let’s Dance by accident, but just before that met her husband, Marius. If you got into YouTube fitness during lockdown, you will have seen them doing dance tutorials for beginners, their improbable gorgeousness downplayed in onesies, so naturally graceful that you imagine even their arguments must look like a tango. She met him when both were auditioning for a partner, and their different ambitions hint at their complementary styles. He was quite big on German Strictly but is more interested in coaching and building up a teaching studio. And personally, “he’s very laid back. Everyone loves me because of him. I’m very out there, very loud. I’m also a control freak. He’s ambitious and strict with himself, but he’s very chill to live with.” They have one similarity that wouldn’t be obvious through a screen or on a double date, which is that Iepure, as a Romanian and eight years older, also grew up in a nation just emerging from a repressive regime, and: “If ever we’re talking about this or that experience in South Africa, he’s not shocked. He’s not saying: ‘Wow,’ he’s saying: ‘Yeah.’” They married in 2014, and moved to London the following year.
Before that, while she was just being “a supportive girlfriend”, hanging in the Let’s Dance queue with Marius and warming up with him – he was already one of the professional dancers on the show – she was spotted by producers. “They went to Motsi, said: ‘There’s a girl downstairs, shall we bring her up and see how good her German is?” By the time that season aired, in 2015, she had already won third place in World Cup Freestyle Latin in 2014, second place in the European Championship Latin in 2014 and first place in the German Championship, Freestyle Latin, so she had fulfilled her raison d’etre, and the reason she had moved to Europe in the first place – to compete.
Probably the greatest departure of her career is now, as she moves away from a lifetime of heats, points and prizes – she has been competing since she was five, and her first trophy was made from a Coca-Cola bottle – into more expressive and, from some angles, eccentric forms. Then there is the Romeo and Duet dating show, in which, for the first time, she is flying by the seat of her own personality. “I was really nervous,” she says, “because I realised that people know me for my dancing, and they love seeing me dance, and I appreciate that so much. I’ve always used my body to perform, but now it’s my voice, it’s my self – it’s allowing people to get to know me.”
A moment of uncertainty flickers across her face, but she is an expert self-soother. “It’s very lighthearted. Everyone loves love. We might have a bad time with it, but we still do it all over again.” But no individual trophy or opportunity or burst of fame can on its own distil what she considers her main achievement: “I think, to be honest, the real gift is that the life we live was my parents’ dream. It was always my mom’s dream to be able to say, ‘I’m going to leave the country and I’m going to go somewhere where I don’t know anyone, and I’m going to make something of myself.’”
• The Cher Show is on tour until 2023, cheronstage.com. Oti Mabuse’s UK tour of I Am Here starts on 28 April, otimabuse.com/tour. Romeo & Duet is on Saturdays at 7pm on ITV and ITV Hub
• This article was amended on 18 April 2022 because the last picture is of Oti Mabuse with skating professional Colin Grafton, not with her husband, Marius Iepure, as an earlier version said.
