Rose Ayling-Ellis says her powerful silent dance on Strictly Come Dancing was a “special moment”.
The EastEnders actress joined professional partner Giovanni Pernice on ITV’s This Morning today following their latest routine on Saturday night.
It scored a near perfect 39 points from the judges with only Craig Revel Horwood holding out on awarding a ten.
Talking about the routine, Rose shared: “I think it was a special moment for me because a lot of the time, you always see a deaf person getting on well and doing what is normal, but you don’t see how much hard work goes behind it.
“I think the silent moment was to show, ‘This is what I do when I dance – this is the amount of work I do, but I still do it with a smile on my face.’ That’s my message and it’s a lot of what deaf people go through.”
Host Alison Hammond asked Giovanni if he had the ‘best dance partner’ with Giovanni replying: “00 per cent. I’m a professional dancer, I’ve been doing it for 23 years. Even 10 seconds of silence was so hard because in that 10 seconds, you have to think about your steps and you have to think about keeping the beat and I was like, ‘Now I understand what she goes through.’
“The 10 seconds was powerful, it was very, very, very good.”
Explaining how their partnership works, Rose revealed: “I count a lot in my head, it’s counting. And also it’s Giovanni with me. Really, I get my counting from him. So I keep in tune with Giovanni and if you keep doing it again, you let your muscle memory do it and then timing sort of does it in my body.”
Giovanni added: “Doing the dance, you can see she lip reads me too, so I give her the timing.
“When we do ballroom, we are connected, so it’s a bit easier. The Quick-Step is fast, but for the other dances, we lip read a lot and she’s working a lot on muscle memory – counting. She’s working harder than anyone else – even more than me sometimes.”
He added: “We tried secret taps, but it didn’t work,” with Rose explaining: “It’s too distracting because I’ve got so much going on in my head. If I’ve got too much information, it’s too much. I like to keep it simple.”
On working with Rose, Giovanni said: “It’s giving me a challenge as a teacher. I’ve been doing the show for a long time, but with Rose, I’m learning so much as a teacher, as a person. It’s a boost to get hopefully all the way to the final.”
Meanwhile Rose reacted to a VT of Oscar-winning child actress Maisie Sly, who is deaf, saying of Rose and Giovanni: “I really hope that they win because all hearing people will be gobsmacked that a deaf person has won.”
Rose reacted: “She’s lovely. As a child, I never had anything like that, so it’s really nice that deaf children can have someone to look up to. Also not just children, also the parents. My mum… when she found out I was deaf, she felt so alone. She felt she had no idea about deaf culture and deaf community…
“When I see someone like me on Strictly, it’s like, ‘Ah ok, she can do what she wants to do.” It’s society that makes it difficult being deaf…. there’s nothing wrong with being deaf, I have no problem with it. It’s society that makes it harder.”
Giovanni added: “Hopefully, with a role model like Rose [being] on the show, it will open more doors for everybody.”
This Morning airs weekdays from 10AM on ITV and ITV Hub
