‘Dancing With The Stars’ Pro Cheryl Burke Pitches Idea For Virtual Season 29 With At-Home Celebs

Cheryl Burke says there’s no reason another season of Dancing with the Stars can’t happen this fall. The popular pro dancer, who won two mirrorball trophies on the ABC celebrity ballroom competition, offered up several ideas for how the show could go on despite the coronavirus pandemic — and how Dancing fans can stay entertained until things are back to normal.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Burke, who married actor Matthew Lawrence last May, said she has “no idea” about the status of the 29th season of Dancing with the Stars, which would usually air live starting in September. Burke said she’d give up her birthday and wedding anniversary celebrations for the chance to dance on DWTS later this year. But she also had some ideas for a “creative way” to do things, should it become necessary amid the health pandemic.

“Everyone is really into taking 15-minute classes,” Burke said. “If [the show can’t return], we’ve got to do it [virtually]. We’ve got to do it like this. At the end of the day, I can teach Matt how to dance. I think it’d be really cool to teach your loved one at home how to dance. It could be a different type of experience, but I think we kind of have to go with the flow when it comes to changing.”

Burke’s idea is interesting and sounds doable, but it would limit which pros would be able to participate in an at-home season. While Burke is married to a non-dancer, other pros — including Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, Jenna Johnson and Val Chmerkovskiy, and Emma Slater and Sasha Farber — are already dancing couples, so there would be no need to teach one another. Other DWTS pros would have to be quarantined with a partner or family member who can’t dance in order to compete on a virtual edition of the show.

In the ET interview, Burke added that she would love to see full seasons of Dancing With the Stars reruns in the meantime as a way to refresh fans on how the show has evolved over 15 years and 28 seasons.

“Like, gosh, my first season was 14 years ago, so I think people need a good ol’ recap,” she said. “You could go through a whole throwback basically. You would just play an episode every day up until this is over.”

In the past, Burke has been vocal about her feelings on Dancing With the Stars producers’ over-involvement in the creative aspects of the show. Her “virtual” DWTS idea would certainly limit how much involvement producers would have.

Burke won back-to-back mirrorball trophies in the early days of Dancing with the Stars. In 2006, back when the show aired both a spring and fall cycle, the popular dancer landed in first place with Drew Lachey for Season 2 and Emmitt Smith for Season 3.