Choreographing a number in honor of Dancing With the Stars’ 20th anniversary was an order only Derek Hough could fill. Hough joined the ABC series as a professional dancer in 2007 before transitioning to host in 2020. The latest season of the reality competition series celebrated two decades on air with a birthday party-themed episode in which Hough was tasked with choreographing an opening number that would not only commemorate the show’s past but mark its future.
“It was really important to [embody] this idea of passing the torch from the pros that really began this all to this new cast of dancers,” says Hough of the performance, which was introduced by the original dancers from the show’s first season: Edyta Sliwinska, Ashly DelGrosso, Louis van Amstel, Jonathan Roberts, Charlotte Jorgensen and Alec Mazo.
The act was set to a remixed version of the show’s classic theme song, with varying sections performed in different dance styles. “The theme song is the one constant that’s been a throughline of all these seasons, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we dance to the theme song? But let’s mix it up and honor the different genres and styles that Dancing With the Stars showcases,’ ” Hough explains.
