‘Dancing With the Stars’ tour visits Orleans Arena on Sunday

First step: competition.

Next step: camaraderie.

Next stop: Orleans Arena, where NFL running back Rashad Jennings, who won Season 24 with partner Emma Slater, will join the ABC show’s dance professionals for the “Dancing With the Stars: Live!” tour Sunday.

Subtitled “Hot Summer Nights,” the dance extravaganza showcases a variety of routines — and the spirit energizing the dancers, who have been traveling by bus to 43 cities on their current tour.

After Sunday’s Las Vegas performance, the “DWTS” road show has just a week to go; it began June 16 in Atlantic City and ends Aug. 13 in Fresno, California. (Their cast’s penultimate destination: Reno.)

Not only is bus travel “way more convenient,” it’s “really fun, actually,” says Slater in a telephone interview from Omaha, Nebraska.

“We get on the bus after the show and the adrenaline is still going,” she notes. “We eat dinner together — we’re constantly surrounded by each other.”

That in turn fosters a collective spirit, one where “you get to know everyone on a much more casual basis.”

Being together also builds team spirit, Slater adds.

“There are no celebrities,” she says. “You have to be a team.”

That teamwork extends from group numbers — such as the jive classic “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which features almost a dozen dancers — to the winning Jennings-Slater partnership.

The two will dance four routines during the “DWTS” show — including Slater’s favorite, the “high-energy” freestyle number danced to “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars. “It’s what we won the show with.”

The winning duo’s other numbers include a Viennese waltz to an Ed Sheeran song and a paso doble danced to the dramatic “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

During the “DWTS” tour, Jennings has “gotten a lot more comfortable with all his dance moves,” Slater comments. Choreographer Mandy Moore “didn’t dumb down the choreography for him. He’s having to keep up like a proper pro — because he is one.”

Among the other “DWTS” dancers on the tour: fellow Season 24 cast members Lindsay Arnold, Alan Bersten, Sharna Burgess, Artem Chigvintsev, Hayley Erbert, Sasha Farber (who happens to be Slater’s fiance), Keo Motsepe, Gleb Savchencho and Britt Stewart.

Overall, the tour presents more than 30 numbers divided into two acts — and four sections.

The first act kicks off with a “summer fun” theme, Slater notes, followed by an “Americana” sequence that includes “a little military” salute. In the second act: dances with links to movies and routines devoted to “different types of love.”

Over the course of the show, Slater has “about 18” costume changes — including dresses with stones that “weigh a ton” and her favorite, a gold gown she wears dancing the cha-cha with Jennings to Mars’ “24K Magic.”

Throughout the tour, large — and loud — crowds greet the performers, Slater says.

Their enthusiasm reflects the show’s ongoing appeal, she comments, attributing “DWTS’ ” longevity (it’s been an ABC fixture since 2005) to “the competitive element.”

Along with “a colorful, vibrant cast of celebrities,” from actors to athletes, the show takes those celebrities out of “their normal realm,” she explains. “They’re out of their comfort zone. Some are amazing — and some are amazingly bad.”

After all, dancing — and the timing that makes it possible — is “like a second language,” Slater says. “It doesn’t come as easy to some.”

Except, perhaps, the cast of “Dancing With the Stars: Live!”

Contact Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.