Episode 164: Janette Manrara
Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor
Kat Rulach
4.8 • 527 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Janette Manrara is a dancer and choreographer who we first got to know as one of the professional dancers in the UK on Strictly Come Dancing, and who now presents its sister show ‘It Takes Two’.
Janette is married to fellow dancer Aljaz Skorjanec and together they have a 2 year old Lyra.
Janette and I talked about her start in life as daughter of a young Cuban immigrant couple in Miami, and about her first job in a bank before she took a risk to pursue her dreams as a dancer.
Janette told me that the enforced career break that Covid brought, made her realise she did want to be a mum. She also shared that she believes her time performing on stage and TV makes her a better mum to Lyra because she is fulfilled, and in a 'complete flow state' when she’s performing. I know that feeling well myself!
Spinning Plates is presented by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, produced by Claire Jones and post-production by Richard Jones.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Sophia Lusbexter and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work. |
| 0:14.1 | I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself. |
| 0:21.6 | Being a mother can be the most amazing thing, it can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. |
| 0:27.6 | I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. |
| 0:31.6 | Welcome to spinning plates. |
| 0:33.6 | Howdy, greetings from Oslo. I am on date. Oh, this will be 13. No, hold on. 11 of 13. |
| 0:46.3 | Just finishing up our weekend in Scandinavia. It's been so nice. Copenhagen on Friday, Stockholm last night. |
| 0:58.0 | And today we're in Oslo. And actually the forecast here was pretty bad today. |
| 1:02.0 | And I've been wandering around for a good hour and a half and it's only just started raining. |
| 1:07.0 | So thank you Oslo for holding off that little bit longer. |
| 1:12.9 | If I sound a bit bunged up, it's because I've had really crappy cold this week. |
| 1:18.6 | But it doesn't matter. |
| 1:20.2 | I don't really talk about it because colds aren't very disco, sparkly, are they? |
| 1:26.8 | They're pretty crummy. But what's amazing is that when I'm on stage, |
| 1:31.6 | I completely forget about it. So all day I've been feeling a bit like, you know, that feeling, |
| 1:37.4 | just a little bit rubbish version of myself, a bit gross. And then I get on stage and it's like, |
| 1:47.7 | oh, feel all good again. So thanks, if you've been coming. You've actually been cheering me up every day. And it's nice to know that |
| 1:52.7 | you can always weave its magic like that. And actually, I've definitely turned a tie with |
| 1:57.1 | that today I'm feeling much better than I was for the last couple of days. Anyway, that is boring. Who cares about that? |
| 2:02.6 | It's been so nice to wander around these cities. |
| 2:06.6 | Gosh, I love, I mean, in Denmark I was like, I could have definitely been born Danish and been really happy about it. |
| 2:13.6 | It's just so nice. |
... |
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