Chita Rivera grew as much as be a Broadway queen, however you’ll be able to’t pass over that she was a ballet child. Her coaching started after a botched leap at her household residence in Washington, D.C. Rivera — nonetheless Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero on the time — landed on the espresso desk. It shattered.
Her power wanted to be greater than merely contained; it wanted to discover a launch. It was her mom’s concept that the discharge may come within the type of dance, particularly ballet. She took Rivera to the Jones-Haywood Faculty of Ballet, the place she was launched to Doris Jones, the esteemed instructor who grew to become like a second mom. Jones, she wrote in her memoir, modified her life. “Are you keen to work arduous, Dolores?” Rivera recounted Jones asking her at that assembly. “More durable than you’ve ever labored earlier than?”
She was. And he or she did. Rivera, who died on Tuesday at 91, all the time thought-about herself extra a dancer than a musical-theater star. (She even known as her 2005 musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.”) “The pure inclination of dancers is to maintain to themselves,” she wrote. “It’s the work that issues.”
And a dancer isn’t happy. Broadway could also be the place Rivera flourished, however her foundational residence was ballet. She and one other Jones-Haywood scholar, Louis Johnson — who went on to have a spectacular profession as a choreographer and dancer — have been taken to New York for an audition on the Faculty of American Ballet. They each received scholarships.
The Faculty of American Ballet, fashioned by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1934, is the coaching floor of New York Metropolis Ballet. Rivera didn’t understand it on the time, however the man auditioning her was Balanchine himself. “One thing in regards to the teacher made me wish to please him,” she wrote.
At first becoming a member of Metropolis Ballet was her dream, however that modified when she grew to become conscious of Janet Collins, then the one Black instructor at Faculty of American Ballet. Her courses have been a mixture of fashionable dance, ballet and the strategy of the choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Rivera additionally began going to the Palladium Ballroom, the Midtown dance corridor, for its Latin Nights. Quickly she was, as she writes, “out on the dance flooring fusing my ballet coaching with the salsa, mambo and rumba steps I used to be studying.”
College students on the college didn’t aspire to Broadway: “We turned up our noses,” she wrote. However when phrase unfold that Collins was making her Broadway debut in a present staged by Agnes de Mille, Rivera’s thoughts began to shift.
Whereas she was drawn in one other route, her ballet coaching by no means left her physique. It made her one of the vital refined dancers in musical theater: A 1962 look on “The Ed Sullivan Present” demonstrates not simply the expressive agility of her flickering legs (and her flickering is extraordinary), but additionally a full-bodied dedication to transferring by means of a step reasonably than pausing able.
There’s nothing static about Rivera as a dancer, however she doesn’t blur any edges both. Her finesse comes within the gracious method she reveals each angle of her physique, the eye to épaulement — the carriage of the arms and shoulders — all of the whereas taking over house. Dancing massive and with intention. Air doesn’t escape her; she chases it down. You may hear Balanchine’s well-known dictum in her physique: “What are you saving it for?”
It wasn’t simply ballet coaching that set Rivera aside. Loads of dancers have that. It was the place she was educated. Rivera danced as if she knew that now was all there may be — one other Balanchine saying — a method of being that remained together with her for her total profession. Her physique might have left the ballet world, however ballet by no means left her physique. She saved nothing.
