The Dancing mothers Once the performers left their moves on the dance floor, now they’re leaving their emotions out there on a reunion stage.
Lifetime has hired the OG reality stars – except Nia Sioux, Maddie Ziegler And Mackenzie Ziegler – to return to a special meeting and revisit their collective Dancing mothers Tenure.
“I kind of blocked it out, put it out of my head. So I thought, ‘Okay, I need to go back and think about it and talk about it.'” Do I really want to do that?'” Brooke Hyland told exclusively Us weekly before the Lifetime premiere. “But I thought, ‘It’s going to be healing, it’s going to be therapeutic.’ We should do it.’ And Chloe [Lukasiak] I said this yesterday, but if we didn’t go, people would still only talk about us. So we can at least be there to speak for ourselves and express our opinions about how we felt and why we did what we did in those moments.”
Brooke and her sister, Paige Hyland, two of the original actors were there Dancing motherswhich aired between 2011 and 2017. The show followed the Junior Elite competition team – also made up of Maddie, Mackenzie, Nia and Chloe Abby Lee Milleris the dance company of the same name in Pittsburgh. Brooke, now 26, and Paige, now 23, left the team back in 2014 Kendall Vertes, Hilliker County And JoJo Siwa finally took their place in the squad.
According to Kalani, 23, Lifetime tried several times to rally the troops to a meeting without success.
“They just reached out to us and asked, ‘Would you be interested?’ And I feel like now is a good time because we’re all a lot older and grown up and we can all talk like adults,” Kendall, 21, added. “So I think if it wasn’t now, it probably never would have happened, just because our lives are getting busier, and so luckily it worked out.”
Kendall further noted that they relived many traumatic show moments during the reunion special.
“Much [the] Memories that I’ve locked away because a lot of them are trauma or something I don’t want to talk about,” said Kendall, who joined the show during its second season. “That’s what I think [was] the hardest part. We can all say that it was physically and mentally exhausting after filming. I mean, as much fun as we had, it was obviously really hard to look back on your own childhood and say, ‘Wow, that wasn’t a normal childhood.'”
Who is at the top of the pyramid? JoJo Siwa, Maddie Ziegler and more brought “Dance Moms” into the spotlight — and their parents weren’t afraid to stir up drama. The Lifetime reality series premiered in 2011 and followed the Abby Lee Dance Company’s Junior Elite competition team as they rehearsed and performed rigorous new routines […]
Meanwhile, Brooke and Paige didn’t always agree to return for the reunion after their season four exit.
“We never had a voice on the show,” Paige explained. “I feel like it was necessary to be able to say what we want and show the world who we are now, because if we hadn’t done that, they would have made their own narrative about us.”
The Dancing mothers The girls were accompanied at the reunion by their respective mothers: Kelly Hyland, Jill Vertes, Kira Girard, Christi Lukasiak And Jessalyn Siwa. The reunion was a rare opportunity for all the girls and their parents to come together. (Dance teacher Abby Lee, meanwhile, was not featured in the TV special.)
“We stay in touch through our group chat,” Brooke explained Us. “We send videos here and there, but it’s difficult. We all live in different cities and all have very different and busy lives. We try to meet up when we are together or in the same city, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen often. But we still talk behind the scenes.”
Dance Moms: The Reunion Premieres on Lifetime Wednesday, May 1 at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Aileen Bergin