“Livin’ on the Dance Floor,” Dying in My Soul
Ever since I first saw the hit Lifetime reality series, Dance Moms, it has been a guilty pleasure, and, frankly, a bit of an obsession of mine. I was instantly a big fan of the premise, as the show follows a group of young dancers as they grow in their dance skills and compete all over the country with their competition team. The ‘Moms’ part of Dance Moms has always been of less than zero interest to me, with the fights among the parents and with dance coach, Abby Lee Miller, feeling at best unnecessary, and at worst: forced and staged. No, what made me come back to the show, week after week, was the dancing and seeing this group of kids pull together every week to perform new choreography and continually develop into amazing dancers.
Season eight has just finished airing, and it would be an understatement to say that the series has undergone some changes. Filmed almost two years after the end of season seven, the eighth season of Dance Moms finds Abby after having been incarcerated for bankruptcy and fraud, plus, shortly after her release, battling spine cancer that has left her wheelchair-bound. With the original members of the Abby Lee Dance Company (ALDC) now having outgrown dance competitions (and having pretty much entirely severed ties with Abby), Abby is faced with the challenge of building a brand new competition team comprised of dancers from all over the country. The season is, like the seasons before it, full of drama among Abby, the parents, and even the kids, as they compete week-to-week in order to prove that Abby is still the master dance teacher that she always was.
To be honest, it was extremely difficult for me to feel much excitement when season eight was announced. My interest has always been in the original group of girls, and, in later seasons of the show, I begrudgingly accepted the dancers that were added to the ALDC from around the country, who were trained at entirely different studios. Aside from two dancers who were quickly added to create a ‘mini’ team in season six (🙄), the entire dance company for season eight was comprised of new dancers. The fact that this was a group of individuals rather than a true team was a big issue for me. Nevertheless, I desperately missed the show, and so I dutifully watched every episode as they aired.
I’m not going to really say anything about the moms, except that I couldn’t stand a single one of them and every single word out of their mouths was utter nonsense. I apologize if you watch the show for the titular characters. They’re just really not interesting to me, even as mindless entertainment. As for the kids, I was not nearly as attached to a single one as I was to Maddie, Chloe, Mackenzie, or any of the other original girls. Of course, there were a few exceptional dancers: Brady’s leaps defied gravity, Savannah executed the most controlled turns that I had ever seen, and Lilly’s facial expressions have immensely improved since her mini days, possibly even surpassing Maddie’s skills. As for the choreography, ninety percent of it is pretty forgettable. Most of the dances were based upon movies, which automatically makes them seem tacky. Other dances utilized ridiculous gimmicks like dancing with water, or chalk on stage, where the editing showed the dances in slow-motion, so the audience could appreciate the ‘effect,’ while missing half of the actual choreography. While a few of the routines were impressive, the only one that truly stood out to me was Lilly’s solo, “Straight Escape,” in which she performs an entire contemporary routine, tricks and all, with her arms in a straight jacket. While her technique in the solo was excellent enough to earn a perfect score from the judges, Lilly’s facial expressions were what really made the dance spectacular. They showed a work of true genius from a nine-year-old. I urge everyone to take a look at the solo, which can be found in its entirety on YouTube.
Even with as little patience as I have for the moms’ drama in the show, the element that I truly detested in season eight was, and one that I had never really seen in the previous seasons of Dance Moms: the kids were depicted as a bunch of obnoxious, entitled brats. Every single dancer, with the exception of ‘quiet girl’ Hannah, had a moment where they dramatically victimized themselves, made comments about other dancers, or even became aggressive with their teammates. While in previous seasons the editors used tricks to manipulate the audience to view the dancers in a specific way, they never so plainly pitted a dancer against another dancer, or a dancer against the mothers. Even in the Chloe-Maddie rivalry, which the producers clung to throughout the first several seasons of the show, the mothers were the ones creating the drama. Though such rivalries were central to the show, the dancers were always portrayed as being beyond such nonsense; they were there to dance with their friends. The children would certainly be around a lot of fighting, but the kids would almost never be directly involved in the ‘mama drama.’ It is obvious that with season eight that the dancers have been asked to state their opinions about what was going on with the mothers in interviews. So much so, that the production team was clearly inserting the children far too frequently into the staged drama. While you can certainly hold the dance mothers accountable for what they say on camera (because even if it is manipulated by production, they are aware that they are on the show to create drama), I find it repugnant that they would use the children in the same way. This makes me even less interested to return to watch Dance Moms for a ninth season.
You can see season eight, along with every season of Dance Moms, on the Lifetime app by signing in with your cable provider, or by signing up for Hulu’s live TV subscription add-on.
What do you think of season eight? What are your opinions on the dancers, the moms, and/or Abby? Do you miss the old team as much as I do? Let me know in the comments below!
Copyright © 2019 Bailey Lizotte
