Pooja, Colette, and Kristijan’s Nemesis Triangle Heats Up Dancing Queens
Dancing Queens' Colette Marotto finds her voice — and closure — after being "partner dumped" by Kristijan Burazer for Pooja Mehta, leading to some uncomfortable but cathartic run-ins.
Dancing well is the best revenge — at least, for Dancing Queens’ Colette Marotto, anyway.
Colette has been nursing her wounds after getting “partner dumped” by Kristijan Burazer for most of the season, but a recent second-place finish at a New Orleans ballroom dance competition with her new partner, Oleksiy “Alex” Pigotskyy, who she’s dubbed “the best-looking thing to come out of the Ukraine," has given the Arizona mom some much-needed confidence.
It was actually enough to finally confront her dance floor nemesis, Pooja Mehta, who Kristijan chose to partner with in the Latin dance category over her in the Pro-Am competition circuit.
“I was replaced. I want to know why,” Colette said before waltzing into Pooja’s beauty business, armed with iced coffee drinks, in what she played off as nothing more than a casual, friendly visit.
“Colette, what are you doing here?” a surprised Pooja asked.
“I just, I heard you had this business and I was around the corner and I thought I would stop in,” Colette replied.
The painfully awkward exchange that followed wasn’t the only drama to heat up off the dance floor.
Colette also ran into her former partner and his wife the night before a big competition in Atlanta, although Kristijan failed to even acknowledge his one-time partner of two years, digging himself an even deeper hole in Colette’s mind.
“I feel really bad for Colette. She’s between her old pro, her new pro. I can’t describe it. It’s really awkward,” fellow amateur dancer Sabrina Strasser later said of the tense drinks session amongst the competitors and fellow Dancing Queens cast members.
How Did the Feud Between Colette and Pooja Begin?
The roots of the drama can be traced back to Pooja’s decision to switch from the American Rhythm dance category to Latin, placing her in the same competitive category as Colette.
Kristijan felt he could no longer dance with both women and had to choose who to move forward with, announcing his decision to walk away from Colette in a text message.
“It’s been really difficult splitting my competitive time between you and Pooja. I’ve been thinking it over and I feel like I need to stop with one of you now that you compete in the same category,” he texted. “I feel like Pooja would just quit completely if she is not dancing with me, and that would be such a shame since she has worked so hard. I hate having to do this and I hope you understand I’m always here if you need anything.”
Colette Finds a New Partner
Colette confessed she “cried for like two weeks” after receiving the note, comparing the heartbreaking experience to getting a divorce, before pivoting to dancing with Alex.
The new partnership got off to a rough start, however. Colette and Alex failed to make the finals at the Tri-State DanceSport Championships, leading Sabrina to conclude the pair looked “rusty” on the dance floor.
But redemption would come at the next competition in New Orleans, where Colette and Alex faced off for the first time against Pooja and Kristijan. Colette and Alex came in second place, just behind Sabrina, while Pooja and Kristijan landed in a disappointing last place.
“Take that, Kristijan, I don’t need you,” Colette quipped after her successful outing.
Colette Confronts Pooja
While still riding high from the victory, Colette dropped into Pooja’s Scottsdale-based business Makiaj Beauty, carrying coffee and looking for answers.
“I’m a little caught off guard to see Colette in my building,” Pooja would later admit. “It’s not that we are so close that she would just stop by unannounced. It was a little unexpected.”
As the two women awkwardly sat across from each other, Colette tried to ease into the conversation by asking Pooja about her business.
“OK, so you do weddings?” she asked.
“We do beauty and we do bridal hair and makeup and then we sell a bunch of products,” Pooja said.
Notably, the one thing Makiaj Beauty didn’t sell was moisturizer — the product Colette said she had come in to buy.
With the small talk out of the way, Colette then dove into the heart of the conflict between the women.
Throughout Pooja’s five-year run in Rhythm, Kristijan had served as her partner and also danced for years with her mother and sister. Yet, when she made the move to Latin, she had no experience in the category while Colette had been competing in Latin with Kristijan for two years.
“I feel like it was an intense two years because I’m always so — I have such bad stage fright. So he was really good in that way which is different because now I’m dancing with like a Ukrainian-trained person who's like, ‘You’ll be fine, just do your job,'” Colette told her.
While Colette acknowledged that Pooja’s prior run in Rhythm had been with Kristijan she made sure to add that “I don’t think you had him for Latin and I think that was his first love.”
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Colette has long contended that she believes she had seniority in her partnership with Kristijan.
“The standard in ballroom is that the person who’s been there longer has seniority and I had seniority in this case,” she would later explain. “Pooja dug her heels in. She was going to have my spot with no compromise and he had to choose.”
Pooja caught Colette’s not-so-subtle hints that she wanted a deeper explanation for what happened with the pairings and offered her take.
“I think for me, to switch styles from Rhythm to Latin, I really wanted somebody who, like, understood and knew my rhythm dancing,” she told her. “Once I like find somebody then I stick with them because I like — I develop, like, this deeper relationship with them in a way where there’s so much more than just teaching me dance, you know?”
Colette wasn’t willing to let her off the hook so easily and brought up how difficult the whole thing had been for her.
“I’m not used to changing partners and some people can get weird about that,” she said.
“Of course, relationships end, other relationships start,” Pooja replied.
After both women confirmed they’d be competing against each other again in Atlanta, they ended their chat with a hug.
Are Colette and Pooja Now Friends?
For Colette, at least, the uncomfortable conversation provided some closure.
“Now that we’ve been able to sit and chat I can see that she’s not an adversary on or off the dance floor. We’re friends,” she said on Dancing Queens, before quickly revising, “No, we can be friendly just like anybody else.”
While Pooja admitted the conservation felt a bit like “middle school when it like two girls both like the same boy,” she later told her sister Meera she felt the tension between the women had been resolved.
“I felt like she was kind of fishing for something and trying to find out some information, but I mean, I gave her all the information I knew,” she said.
Where Do Colette and Kristijan Stand?
The two women may have reached a peace of sorts, but tension was still visibly high between Colette and Kristijan when they ran into each other while some of the women were enjoying a little social time with their partners at the hotel bar in Atlanta the night before a competition.
Colette’s deer in the headlights look confirmed the unexpected run-in was anything but easy for her.
“F-ck my life,” she’d later say of her thoughts at the time.
The night only got more awkward when Gaëlle Benchetrit, who sat at one end of the bar, probed Kristijan, who sat at the other end, about his long-standing partnership with Pooja’s family while a visibly stressed Colette sat between them.
“So you are the partner for the whole family?” Gaëlle asked. “The two sisters and the mom. It’s not too much? You're fine?”
“You get used to it,” Kristijan responded.
Although sitting just feet from Colette, and at one point standing directly behind her, he never directly acknowledged her.
“Normally, if you’re in the same little social circle you try to at least be nice and Kristijan can’t even say hello to me and that sort of lets me know that our relationship was purely transactional,” Colette later reflected.
The bitter realization ultimately helped her move on.
“I don’t want to waste anymore time on Kristijan,” she said. “I just want to dance.”
