From Caracas to the Cha-Cha-Cha: How Karen Hauer Became the Globe’s Accidental Therapist in Sequins

The name Karen Hauer is not, on first inspection, the sort that rattles the chandeliers at Davos, triggers emergency summits in Brussels, or causes a run on the yen. Yet if you lean in, the way a seasoned war correspondent leans in to a half-empty glass of raki, you’ll detect tremors that reach well beyond the parquet of Strictly Come Dancing.

In the United Kingdom—still clinging to its post-Brexit life raft made of blue passports and misplaced nostalgia—Ms Hauer is best known as the longest-serving professional dancer on the BBC’s sequin-drenched juggernaut. Eight series, one divorce (from a fellow dancer), and countless spray-tanned paso dobles later, she has become, in the British imagination, a sort of cultural Gibraltar: small, strategically irrelevant, but weirdly impossible to hand back.

Globally, that translates into soft power of the slipperiest variety. From Manila to Montevideo, viewers stream the show illegally, using VPNs named after lesser-known saints. They do not tune in for geopolitics; they tune in for the universal human urge to watch other humans risk public humiliation in spandex. Hauer, with her Venezuelan accent and German surname, is the perfect synecdoche for this borderless embarrassment economy. She is both outsider and insider, a living Schengen Area of ballroom—no visa required, rhythm optional.

Consider the wider choreography of our era: supply chains doing the tango with inflation, democracies stepping on their own toes, tech bros attempting the robot while the planet melts. Karen’s job is to remember the counts, smile through the chaos, and convince the audience that even if your partner is a retired MP with two left feet, the music eventually resolves. It is a metaphor so on-the-nose it could bleed: we are all improvising under studio lights, praying the judges (market analysts, voters, climate scientists) give us a 7 and not a 4.

In Venezuela, her birth country, economic collapse has turned the bolívar into confetti. State television once tried to co-opt her fame for propaganda—“Look, our ex-pat excels in capitalist pageantry!”—until they realized her choreography was unabashedly capitalist and only mildly Bolivarian. Now her Instagram stories circulate in Caracas like contraband, proof that somewhere, someone is still paid to worry about footwork instead of finding antibiotics.

Meanwhile, in Germany—where her surname originates and where “public dancing” is regulated with the same gravity as nuclear waste—newspapers treat her as a case study in post-national identity. “Venezuelan blood, Teutonic discipline, British television,” ran one Frankfurter Allgemeine headline, sounding almost disappointed she hasn’t applied for a European Health Insurance Card.

The Chinese streaming platform Bilibili edits her routines into ten-second GIFs captioned with motivational hanzi: “Precision is freedom.” Whether that’s a nod to strict tempo or a wink at authoritarian efficiency is left tastefully ambiguous.

And so we pirouette to the inevitable question: does any of this matter? In the grand ledger of human suffering, does it register that a woman born in the year of Chernobyl now teaches British celebrities to cha-cha-cha? Probably not. But remember: empires fall on smaller margins. The last Austro-Hungarian archduke was probably less historically significant than a TikTok dance challenge, yet here we are, still naming sandwiches after him.

Karen Hauer’s true international significance may lie precisely in how insignificant she is—proof that the world can still agree on one thing: watching the privileged attempt the rumba is cheaper than therapy and only slightly less effective. In that sense, she is the UN of sequins: a forum where grievances are aired, alliances forged, and everyone leaves pretending they scored a perfect 40.

So when the next financial crisis, war, or climate catastrophe sends us scrambling for meaning, do remember the dancer in the red fringe dress. She will still be counting beats, reminding us that someone, somewhere, is keeping time while the rest of us fumble for the off-switch. That is not salvation, but in 2024 it is, regrettably, close enough.