20 Super Juicy "Dance Moms" Secrets That'll Change How You See The Show (2024)

Chloe Lukasiak dropped a video on her channel called "10 Dance Moms Secrets," and in it she gets real AF about her experience on the show. One surprising fact: That is reportedly took about 2 hours to film the regular "pyramid" segment at the beginning of each episode. "Imagine standing there for 2 hours listening to your dance teacher talk, and more of the time she's telling 5 out of 6 children how horrible they are," Chloe says in the video. Yikes.

Apparently, down the road from the ALDC was a doctor's office, which production rented out for all of their needs during filming. "That's where our tutoring room was, that's where a lot of the crew's offices were, that's where the interview rooms were, that's where we ate lunch all the time," Chloe says in the video.

In her video, Chloe says that she got kicked out of the dance studio at the beginning of season 4 of Dance Moms. The reason: She says she wouldn't sign a contract that tried to control things like her weight and appearance. "A few of the reasons why me and my mom wouldn't sign was because it said things like you couldn't gain or lose 5 to 10 pounds, something like that. You couldn't do anything to your hair... She also wanted 10% of the money I made. That's when the real issues started happening."

Payton Ackerman (who you will recognize from a few episodes) dropped a YouTube video where she got super real about her time on Dance Moms. Payton claims that the show was edited to make her and her mom look like villains, and fans of the show took note. "It got to the point where I was getting death threats. People were calling my home phone in the middle of the night. People were showing up to our front door," she says in the video.

According to Payton, "reality television isn't scripted, but it's not reality." She went on in her YouTube video: "Things are set up. They never hand you a script, but all I can tell you is that they set up situations that might have not actually happened, which causes a reaction to something that happened that wouldn't have if they didn't set it up."

Nia Sioux recently took to her YouTube channel to talk about all things Dance Moms. In her video entitled "Dance Moms Secrets Revealed," she says: "It was only supposed to be for 6 weeks and 6 episodes, so we never really thought anything of it. Obviously it turned into much more than that."

In a video on JoJo's YouTube channel, she talks about what their average day looked like while filming. To start, a bunch of the girls would carpool with one of the moms to get to their school in the morning. "We do school from 8 o'clock to 11 o'clock... so then we eat lunch until about noon. Then at noon we go to set that's right across the street from the school that we go to and the set is obviously Abbey's studio. We go from about 1 to 4 or 5 and then we continue to dance all night," she said.

"We shared a school teacher across many grade levels," Nia said on her channel. "It's really funny. We all just shared this one tutor for 7 years. I mean we're all in different grades." Nia attended a traditional school until the 7th grade, and they she opted into homeschooling.

In an interview with Australia daytime show Studio 10, Jill Vertes (Kendall's mom) got real about Abbey's behavior on and off camera. "People think that it's gotta be for the cameras, and it's not," she said. "It's really who she is." She went on, pointing to the dancers and saying,"You can all attest that she would be worse when the cameras were off because she really doesn't want everybody to hate her."

"The number 22 was the lucky number for our studio, so if your dance was number 22 then that was really good," Nia said in her video. "Another thing was we have our handshake that we would do. We call it 5-6-7-8. And then also if we jinxed ourselves before we went onstage we had to knock on wood."

Yes, you had to audition to get onto the show. "It was basically a casting call with interviews and then you had to send in a video of yourself dancing," says Nia.

A lot of fans wonder: Is Abby Lee Miller actually mean? Or did she just ham it up to make for good TV? While no one knows this answer for sure (except for Abby herself), Nia says that "what you see is what you get." She continues: "There were some things that they couldn't air actually because they were a little hard."

"Once we would perform for the judges, so that was the time that they would actually judge you," Nia says. "And then the second time was kind of like the do-over so that they could got the shots for the camera so that they can play the whole solo instead of just snippets and they can get different angles."

"If it wasn't like that in normal life then the show wouldn't have even picked our studio in the first place," says Nia.

In an interview with People, Maddie Ziegler admitted that she'd never seen a full Dance Moms episode. “We lived through it, so I don’t feel like we have to watch it, and it was just so much drama that I don’t want to see it again,” Ziegler says. “I learned a lot of lessons. I had the craziest time when I was with her and on that team." She also talked about the show's more negative side effects. "I was stressed at 11 years old, which shouldn’t happen," she says.

"We started the dance on Wednesday. We would finish it either Thursday or Friday, and we would compete Saturday," according to Nia.

In an interview, Jojo Siwa revealed that Cathy was actually the first person to make the show (before Maddie or even Abby Lee Miller). Watch the full interview here.

During a tour for The Irreplaceables, the dance moms themselves set the record straight. According to Jill, Christie, and Kira, Abby was hardly ever at the studio. "The way they edited the show, it looks like Abby's always there," Kira says. "We would sit for hours waiting for her to come out to do pyramid," says Jill.

According to Christie, the moms in season one barely made any money off of the show. During a q & a, Christie says she made $600 off of season one. "And the kids didn't get a paycheck," Jill says. "We got one paycheck and we had to split it."

Chloe Lukasiak sat down with Seventeen to talk about the show's final season. When asked if it was weird to be back on camera again, she says: "The weird thing was that it wasn't weird even though for two years I learned how to live without the cameras around." She adds: "I was thrilled to be dancing with my friends again. I competed for a year without them, but it wasn't the same."