Cast of 'Dance Moms' reflect on life on the show ahead of reunion special
Ahead of Lifetime's new special, "Dance Moms: The Reunion," cast members of the hit reality series looked back at their lives on camera and as kids performing in the world of competitive dance.
Sitting down with "Good Morning America" in an interview aired on Monday, Kendall Vertes, Jojo Siwa, Kalani Hilliker, Chloe Lukasiak, Paige Hyland and Brooke Hyland reflected on their time filming "Dance Moms."
Brooke Hyland described her time on the show as "crazy," while her sister Paige Hyland said there were "a lot of good times and a lot of bad times."
"But I wouldn't change it for the world," she said.
For Siwa, she added, "The first word that comes up is legendary. I feel like everyone on here has had some sort of legendary experience with 'Dance Moms.'"
The show, which ran for eight seasons on Lifetime, was made up of young girls between the ages of 8 to 13.
Speaking to ABC News' Eva Pilgrim, Vertes said being in the public spotlight at that age brought on some viewer misconceptions.
"I think a lot of people, especially with me, they were like, 'You were such a brat on the show,'" she explained. "I was going through puberty on national television like of course I'm gonna get into an argument with my mom where I'm gonna cry if someone yells at me."
"People were also given the illusion that you saw everything that was going on," Siwa explained. "In reality, 'Dance Moms' filmed 60 hours a week and you saw 42 minutes."
The show also featured some heated arguments and showed tensions between the girls, their moms and the dance instructor, Abby Lee Miller.
Hilliker said when watching the scenes unfolding on screen, "In the moment, it sometimes is rough." But, "those fights never really left after," she added.
"We'd go to dinner and our moms would be like, 'By the way, we're not really mad at each other,'" Lukasiak recalled.
"Anything that happened with the moms never really affected how we were with each other," added Paige Hyland.
Paige Hyland said that when rewatching the situation involving her mom on the show, she said she realized that "every fight was her sticking up for us."
"If it was fighting for a school dance, or it was because Abby was so mean to us, or one mom wasn't being fair to the other," she explained. "I could only speak for us, but when I watched back clips, I would see she was fighting for a reason. It wasn't just because."
Noticeably absent from the interview was the girls' dance teacher and the woman who was at the center of much of the drama on the reality series, Miller.
Since starring on the show, Miller had experienced a rollercoaster of a journey including spending eight months in prison for bankruptcy fraud, being diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, and having to live life in a wheelchair after being paralyzed from the neck down.
Touching on the subject, Siwa said "Abby started at a 10 and ended at a 13.5."
"She didn't get easier as the show went on. She got harder," Siwa continued. "I feel like anyone that has been in and out of Abby's life knows that your relationship with her, no matter what it may be, each of us has a very different relationship with her but it is all a very unique relationship that only you and Abby have."
Hilliker shared Miller "was so much more than our dance teacher."
"She definitely taught me so many life lessons, the smallest thing, like when I do my eyeliner in the morning, I think of her," Paige Hyland said. "She'd say, 'Go out and in so you don't get wrinkles' so many things that I still take into my normal day."
Asked if any of them were still in touch with Miller, only Siwa and Hilliker revealed they did.
"I feel that especially after the reunion, talking about it and going through everything, seeing her, I could move on," Hilliker said.
The cast agreed the reunion offered much-needed clarity that felt like some type of therapy.
"I think we all got a lot of closure," Vertes said.
"We got to talk about things that were never talked about," Brooke Hyland added.
As for their lives, after the show ended, the women have each grown in their own direction and are living their lives on their own terms.
Earlier this month, Siwa released a music video for her new song, "Karma" which featured a new grown-up version that she's showing off to the world.
"I told everybody on my team like, 'Look, there's a line, we have to go past it,'" she told "GMA" of the new look. "My goal with this was, I didn't care if people liked it, I didn't care if people hated it. But I wanted people to turn their head at it and I wanted people to talk about it."
She continued, "I am an entertainer. I am an artist. I am not Celine Dion. I am not a Mariah Carey. I'll never have those vocal cords, considering that I only have one in here. … And whether people love or don't love 'Karma,' they sing it. They dance. It's in their heads, and at the end of the day, it worked."
Last year, Siwa and several of the original cast members of the show announced they would return to the screen for the reunion special, an event that took over a decade in the making.
While the women are still friends and supportive of each other, the reunion marked a special occasion for them as they have not been together at the same time since the show ended.
"Dance Moms: The Reunion" premieres May 1 on Lifetime.
