Sadie Robertson of the Duck Dynasty clan revealed in an interview that pressure from her dance partner to perform a sexy rumba on Dancing With the Stars caused her a great deal of stress, but she is pleased with the outcome.
“I guess you all could tell that last week was pretty hard for me,” Robertson said in an interview for tvguide.com. “It was really stressful, and I wasn’t getting the dance down, and Mark [Ballas] had been telling me all week, ‘You’re not going to get good scores because you’re not doing a sexy rumba and that’s what they want to see.'”
Although the two butted heads, 17-year-old Robertson, a strong Christian, held her ground:
“I was like, that’s OK, because I would rather get a bad score from the judges than know in my heart that I did something that I’m not comfortable with. So, when we went out there and we did it, after the dance, I was so nervous because I just knew I was going to get ripped to shreds by the judges.”
But that’s not what happened. Robertson said she was pleasantly surprised to receive a score of 35 out of 40 from the judges. She said she was able to reach an accommodation with dance partner Mark Ballas by wearing a modest costume and keeping sexy moves out of the dance routine.
“So when they were so respectful of the dance and they loved it and appreciated me standing up for what I believed in, I just kind of felt like God blessed me with the judges liking the dance,” Robertson told tvguide.com. “It just paid off to do the right thing, and it just made me really emotional to finally get the hardest dance so far, in my opinion, out of the way and just be done with it. It felt really good.”
Robertson also told the interviewer that she is making a conscious effort to come out from behind the shadow of her famous family.
“For my whole life I’ve kind of been shadowing what my family says,” Robertson said. “They’ll say something about my faith, and I agree. But now, it’s time for me to say, ‘This is who I am as well.’ I’m not hiding behind my family anymore. I’m sharing my faith by myself, which has helped me to be more bold and more confident saying things. It’s the same God; it’s the same faith. It’s just my opportunity to share it in my words. And I have enjoyed it. It’s been good for me and I’ve grown a lot from it.”
