‘DWTS’: ‘Bachelorette’ Kaitlyn Bristowe Returns to Ballroom Floor Following Ankle Injury

Dancing with the Stars is back for a second week, and while so many of our favorite celebrity faces brought their A-game, one almost didn’t perform. Former Bachelorette star, Kaitlyn Bristowe, was able to grace the ballroom dance floor but only after she suffered an ankle injury. Dancing to Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” she and partner Artem Chigvintsev gracefully danced infront of the judges and viewers and made it look flawless with a total score of 22 from the judges.

New host Tyra Banks strutted her stuff to kick off the night, and fans loved everything about it. While no one was eliminated during Week 1, everyone knew going in that on week two that would be a different story. While Skai Jackson came in first place last week, due to a mishap during her performance on week two, she only racked in 15 points total from judges Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli. Because there’s no live audience in the studio, Inaba told PopCulture.com exclusively that everyone had to bring a little something extra to make up for the lack of audience presence.

“It took a lot more energy from each one of us to sustain the energy in the ballroom without an audience,” Inaba detailed. “But with the cast and their costumes and the music and the lights and the dancing and the energy that everybody brought — because I do think that everybody knew they had to step it [up] […] and they did — I’m really proud that we all did such a good job in creating the energy that’s over there. We want everyone to be able to have two hours where they forget about what’s happening in the world right now and just be entertained and laugh with us and from at home like they always do and get mad at me for calling lifts, as they always do,” she joked.

It seems as though everyone did bring more energy, stepping up their dances with extra flair. Inaba revealed that she was shocked dancers Nev Schulman and Justina Machado did as well as they did because she wasn’t expecting that from them, especially during week one.

“There’s a lot of good people, so I think this season, because there’s also not an audience in the room, that it’s going to also be a more competitive season because it’s really now just the dancers performing for the judges. There’s no one to distract them from what we’re saying. Usually, the audience is booing against us, so you have all this energy going one way and what we say maybe doesn’t have as much weight to the performers. Whereas this year, I feel that the connection is going to be stronger, which will make for a more intense competition.”