‘We grew up among drugs and violence. Dance kept us focused': Oti Mabuse on Strictly, survival and self-belief

The Guardian

17-03-2025

In news that should gladden the nation, Oti Mabuse – beloved dancer, grafter and bringer of joy – has just become a British citizen. My own feeling is that Mabuse should have received instant citizenship along with her national treasure status, thanks to her work on Strictly Come Dancing, on which she competed for seven years. At least, thanks to the Life in the UK test, she knows all about our mountains, parliaments and islands, she says with a laugh.
No time to celebrate – Mabuse is in the middle of preparing for her new dance tour, Viva Carnival, which opens this summer. Her previous show, I Am Here, 'was very personal, about South Africa and growing up, and everything that happened there, and the reasons why I am the way I am. I wanted a slight continuation of that – not where I come from, but where I would love to go.' She loves travelling, she says, and connecting with people, and she wanted to explore the world's festivals, from Brazil's carnival to Glastonbury. The idea was 'to kind of create my own dance carnival'.
For the past three weeks, Mabuse has been back in the gym for two hours a day, 'getting the knees not to crack, and getting that flexibility where I would love it to be, creating stamina and strength to be able to dance a two-hour show every night'. Then she's in the dance studio for another three hours. 'So it is full-on,' says Mabuse, with some understatement when we meet in a central London hotel bar during a rare window in her schedule.
Just 16 months ago, Mabuse gave birth to her daughter, 10 weeks early. The baby was in neonatal intensive care for six weeks, and Mabuse had to overcome sepsis and gestational diabetes. In the past year, she has somehow still found the time to reprise her role as a judge on ITV's skating show Dancing on Ice, appear on I'm a Celebrity and write her first romance novel.. And now there's this new tour, which she is creating with her husband, the dancer Marius Iepure. They run a dance studio and have toured together before. Working with him is 'so much fun,' she says. They can irritate each other in their married life, like any couple, but 'when we dance, it's magic'.
Having a baby, she says, has made her more motivated than ever, 'because I want to create something that she could look back at and watch mommy and daddy on stage'. Her body is not the same – she is less flexible and not as strong as she was – but that's only because she stopped for a while. She'll get it all back, she says.
I always think that for athletes, and I include dancers, something as big as pregnancy, or even just ageing (Mabuse is 34) and the physical changes it brings, must bring a sense of loss or grief – but it's not really like that for her, she says. She was always very critical of her body. She pulls out her phone and finds a picture, taken around 10 years ago, that a friend sent her recently. 'I remember being on this shoot and feeling like I was overweight. I was so stressed about what I looked like and feeling like it wasn't thin enough.' She was tiny but she never thought that was good enough. 'Now I look at my body, although a completely different size, as a tool of strength.'
There are still times she catches herself being self-critical, often when she's teaching in her studio. 'But now, I think because I've created a whole human being, I can look at my daughter and I go, my body is amazing, and what it produced is incredible. The confidence that I have in my body now has totally increased. I have to love my body, and it's the only one that I have, and unlearn all these toxic things that I learned from a young age because of the world that I grew up in.'
It was inevitable that Mabuse, who grew up in Pretoria, would become a dancer. Both her older sisters danced – the eldest, Motsi, is a Latin dance champion and judge on Strictly Come Dancing – and their mother, a teacher, also ran dance classes. 'I don't think I had a choice,' says Mabuse, who started when she was around four. 'It was in our family from long before I was born, and I think South Africa as a culture, we're quite a vibrant, dancing country. We dance all the time.'
There was also a serious reason for her mother's interest in dance. Mabuse was two when her older brother, Neo, died by suicide, aged 18. 'I think it formulated my mom's way of parenting,' says Mabuse. 'That's why she put us in dancing, in this world where we would be focused, and we would not have outside influences. We grew up in an area that was full of drugs and violence, so she gave us dance to keep us focused.' Mabuse thinks dance also allowed them to express their grief, 'to be kids and to feel happy. I think, as a family, that's why we would deeply need to dance.'
As a child, she would compete, which brought her to Blackpool for competitions, which she loved. Her memories seem to revolve mainly around food – fish and chips, pick'n'mix, and 'lots of sandwiches. You guys love sandwiches,' she says, a little bemused. Was she always competitive and determined? 'Oh my God, my first partner will tell you. I was just like: 'You're not practising hard enough. I want to win. We can do this. Let's go!''
Mabuse says that comes from her parents. 'They both had to come out of really bad situations, from poor South Africa, and you have to be determined to make it, you have to be ambitious.' Her mother was a teacher, and her father was a lawyer and is now a high court judge. 'He decided to study law because of the injustice and because more people needed defence, and they need to know their rights,' she says of the apartheid era in which he fought to train and work, and of the inequality of South Africa today.
Her parents weren't wealthy by white South African standards, but their education meant they were in situations – in schools, or invited to social gatherings – where they would often be the only Black family. Mabuse remembers just joining in with the other children, but 'you can feel that something is going on with the adults in the room. My dad wanted us to be in these spaces because he wanted to let us know, as three young girls, that we belong in South Africa, in all spaces, and all spaces are free. So we grew up with this mentality of, 'Of course I'm here – why wouldn't I be?' But also being used to being the only Black person in that space and having to be confident.'
As an adult, she says, 'I think I'm comfortable in spaces where people don't look like me.' Both she and Motsi later moved to Germany to dance.
Mabuse was three when Nelson Mandela became president. She says she didn't grow up with a feeling of pressure that she had to make the most of her dreams because the older women in her family weren't able to. That might have been the case for Motsi, who is 10 years older, she says. But watching Motsi pursue her love of dance was inspirational, and fuelled Mabuse's determination and the entrepreneurialism she thinks her own generation identified with. 'Create your own businesses, your own opportunities, your own dance schools, your own dance competitions. It was, just, think of other ways. We were let free.'
Mabuse's parents, though, were not too pleased when she abandoned her engineering degree to dance professionally. When Mabuse's mother saw her in the Australian jungle in last year's I'm a Celebrity, 'she was like, 'Did you train as an engineer to do this?'' Mabuse laughs. 'And then at the end, she was like, 'I'm proud of you. You've done so well.''
Mabuse loved dance, but it was tough. In ballroom, the people who were winning the competitions and getting to compete abroad, she says, 'were not of African descent, so they did not have the hips, the belly, the bums and the curves. What we saw was people who didn't look like us, but had a certain shape, and they were doing well.' It was something she had been aware of, at first subconsciously, since she was four. 'Every dancer will tell you that they have such a bad relationship with their body and how they see themselves.'
The people she looked up to, 'the people who win, they look this way, this size, this hair. And when you sign contracts as a professional dancer, whether you're dancing in a theatre or on a [cruise] ship, you get weighed. You get told that if you look a certain way, you dance better. If you weigh a certain amount, you're not heavy to lift. No one ever told me I was fat – everyone was like, 'You're amazing' – but I didn't believe that. I think that came from my own insecurity, and growing up and seeing people being smaller than me.'
Her mother made her eat, she says. 'You grow up in this dance world where you need to look a certain way, but if you're African and you're tiny, people think there's something wrong with you. My mom was like, 'I'm not going to be going to the family meeting and have people think there's something wrong with my child.' So we ate – and I love food.' But she tried to stay slim with a lot of training, and 'stupid yo-yo diets'. She remembers training while wearing special plastic trousers, in the belief she could sweat herself smaller. 'Now, when I look back at it, I'm just like, that was crazy.'
Mabuse only really started being kinder to herself since the birth of her daughter. 'I had to relearn that relationship [with my body], because she watches and hears everything that I say. She's going to hear that and talk about her body that way. I'm still learning, and I'm still trying to get to a point where I look at myself and I go, 'Good girl! You've done really well, you're amazing.''
Surely Mabuse – twice Strictly champion, inspirer of generations of children, speaker of six languages and (almost) an engineering graduate – deserves to say that to herself every day? 'I think everyone deserves to say that. I wonder, why don't we as women? Then, if you do think that you're amazing, it's like, oh my gosh, you think so highly of yourself. You're seen as overconfident or egoistic.'
Mabuse became South African dance champion eight times, and after moving in 2012 to Germany, where ballroom is taken seriously, and looking for a new dance partner, she met Iepure and they married in 2014. The following year, Mabuse appeared on the German version of Strictly, and on the UK original. She won in 2019 with actor Kelvin Fletcher, and again the following year with comedian Bill Bailey. Mabuse's energy, joy and work ethic made her a fan favourite (she left after the 2021 series, and I don't think it's been the same without her). She says early on that many women told her, ''If I had seen a woman like you, who was your colour or had your [body] or your hair, I probably would have never stopped dancing.' I think Strictly brought me to that audience that had never seen anyone who looked like me. People felt OK in being themselves, because they saw that.'
She realised, she says, that on such a mainstream show, 'I represent not just women, or Black women, I represent African women, and I represent African women who come over from Africa to Europe.'
She loved her time on the show – she still works behind the scenes on choreography for it – but over the past year, Strictly has been rocked by allegations of bullying. Although she doesn't know about the individual dancers involved, she says that if there is pressure on the pros, it's not created by the producers. 'It's something that comes from us, and that's something that we have to own up to.'
In her experience, Mabuse says, she was reminded that it was ultimately an entertainment show 'and your job is to give joy to people. Anything else, I think would be a personal desire, and how you work is how you work, and also how you've been brought up.'
Mabuse certainly put pressure on herself. Last year, she told the podcast We Need to Talk that at one point in one series, when she was paired with a celebrity who 'I just couldn't get to love the job as much as I wanted,' her husband found her on the floor of the shower, fully clothed, in tears because of the stress.
She always wanted to do well on Strictly, she says. 'I had a lot on my shoulders, like I said. I don't just represent myself – I stand for something as well, in terms of who is watching me and what it implies.' She wouldn't have taken her dance partners to the finals without motivating herself to put the work in. 'I needed the, 'Oti, maybe you're not pushing yourself hard enough. You've got to push yourself a little harder.' When I pushed myself the hardest, I won twice.'
Dance has given her everything – a life, a family. It makes her happy. 'It's a dopamine hit, it takes away the negative feelings, any frustrations that you're feeling.' In the moment when she's dancing, whether in a studio or on stage, with her husband or working out a little TikTok routine, 'anything that is wrong with the world does not exist'.
Oti Mabuse – Viva Carnival UK tour starts on 12 June