Dance Moms: Is it reality?

Many young girls and people around the country have enjoyed the American reality television series, Dance Moms. 7 seasons, following early careers of girls in dancing, with an intense dance teacher, are sometimes questionable. Is it a reality? Or are blood, sweat, and tears, just for show?

Plot

Dance Moms, is a popular Lifetime reality television show, first airing on July 13, 2011, by Collins Avenue Productions. The show is set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following Abby Lee Miller, an ecstatic dance teacher. Miller devotes her entire life to teaching dance within younger girls, and is very popular in the dance world. With many talented girls and their outspoken mothers, the show is filled with instances of drama, favoritism, arguments, and many dance competitions.

The girls on the show, Maddie and Mackenzie Ziegler, Chloe Lukasiak, Nia Sioux, Kalani Hilliker, Kendall Vertes and more, grow up in the competitive dance world. Abby Lee Miller, pushes her students to the extreme. Through many wins infamous dance competitions, disputes, and tension with other studios, and overall arguments within their own company, the Abby Lee Dance Company has grown to be one of the most popular reality TV shows in the country.

The girls travel all over the country for dance competitions, have practice many times throughout the week, and sometimes face enrolling in home school instruction. Each week on the show, the girls are on a pyramid; to see who performs the best in the past week, and who receives a solo for the incoming week.

What makes the show so popular though, would have to be the strong argumentative vibe. Within the dance studio is strong competition between the girls for favoritism, and the disputes between angry mothers. Many acts of violence, and screaming matches have been seen in many episodes, especially when tensions rise with Miller.

Is it real?

But such a question comes up, regarding the reality of the show. Is it all a script? This is a controversial issue, especially after Abby Lee Miller has many accounts of fraud. To many, it is hard to believe that some of the dramatized arguments between Miller and her students, and the mothers in the stands, are all true.

Maddie Ziegler, Miller’s star student, has made her way into the industry of music, dancing and even acting. Using the stardom she has faced from Dance Moms, she has established herself into a new form of business. Ziegler answers to if Dance Moms is really true to what is on TV. “It’s hard to do a reality show when there’s so much crying and drama. The producers set it up to make us all yell at each other,” Maddie told USA Today”. Maddie also mentions many accounts of producers instigating the mothers on the show, to cause a fuss.

But despite intense scenes that may be staged by producers, Maddie comments that the stress revolving around competitions is 100% true. “It is really real. We do have a really crazy competition life,” she continued in her interview with Life and Style Magazine. The girls truly face exhausting competitions, where they perform their best, while competing within their own dance studio.

Overall, Maddie and other girls on the show admit to truly being best friends. The girls on the show, have grown up together, many starting at even age 6. They continue to spend lots of time together, from filming, to traveling to competitions, to hanging out behind the scenes. Even though some scenes may have a script or exaggeration for viewers entertainment, there are more relatively real parts of the show.