When Ms. Cyrus’s album “Can’t Be Tamed” came out in 2010, it was far from a critical success. The years that followed were tumultuous and didn’t always foretell the Grammy-winning artist she would later go on to become. It’s a notoriously tricky transition that has ensnared plenty of young people — Britney Spears, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, to name a few.
Now a familiar trope in the pop-culture canon, this shift can feel stilted when it’s happening in real time. That may be unavoidable.
“You don’t need to pretend that there’s this organic or authentic self that is somehow out there,” said Carolyn Chernoff, a sociologist who once taught a class at Skidmore College entirely on the subject of Ms. Cyrus. “It’s all this performance to manufacture a Miley moment. Of course, it’s manufactured, calculated.”
At Studio Siwa, Ms. Siwa’s personal rehearsal space in Burbank, Calif., the young singer, wearing loose black sweatpants and a pile of chain necklaces, offered a brief tour. A glittery red, white and blue piano sits in one corner of the space, but it’s fake, a leftover stage prop. In a makeshift archive in a backroom, there are other largely untouched things. Shelves reaching to the ceiling are filled with Siwa-branded dolls, pillows and headphones. Racks of old costumes line the perimeter.
“We would zip-tie it,” Ms. Siwa said, pulling out a hefty, bedazzled bow headpiece from one of her tour costumes and flipping it over to reveal dirt and sweat stains. It hurt her scalp “so bad, but in the best way possible,” she added. “Wouldn’t change it for anything.”
She speaks with the same unflinching positivity about her time on “Dance Moms,” though viewers of the show might have a grimmer recollection of Ms. Siwa’s time onscreen. In Ms. Siwa’s first appearance, her dance teacher, Abby Lee Miller, called her “obnoxious.”