pt at large

Chita Rivera: A Dancer's Life

Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Written by Terrence McNally, with original songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
The Colonial Theater, Boston, MA
May 1 - May 6, 2007

She’s 74 years old, for god’s sake. Seventy-four. And when her name is Chita Rivera, she can fill up a theater on the recognition of her name alone. Standing at five feet four inches on great gams, she’s one of the rare legends who knows how to trade on her fame without losing her dignity. Her feet don’t move like Latin lightning any more but she has stage presence, enormous poise, a surprisingly rich alto singing voice, and a terrific storyteller’s sense of timing.

Photo: http://www.thedancerslife.com/downloads.php#

 All of which she puts together in this national tour show, “Chita Rivera: the Dancer’s Life” - the story of her life, a history that practically defines musical theater in the last half of the twentieth century. She’s had her feet bandaged by George Balanchine, been taught to sing by Leonard Bernstein, and danced with the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century - Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. You don’t have to be a dance junkie to have heard of musicals like West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Rivera starred in twenty-five musicals in over fifty years.

The 2002 “Kennedy Honors” award to Rivera is the springboard writer Terence McNally used to propel the show and allow Rivera to look back on her career. Her stage arc may be in eclipse but her spark, well, that’s another matter. Sitting on a chair stage center, Rivera opens the show reminiscing about being raised in Washington, D.C. as a first generation Puerto Rican American. It’s not long before she’s dancing on a table on the set behind her (her mother sent Rivera to ballet school not long after she broke the family table while dancing on it).

Rivera and her company of eight top tier dancers stunningly executed two dozen song and dance routines that reprised her roles on Broadway. Rivera has lived musical theater from the TV Ed Sullivan Show to the post AIDS world.

Photo from http://www.chitarivera.com/productions/dancerslife.htm

The secret is that Chita has learned to do more with less. A sideways glance, a lowering of the voice, a well timed swivel of the hips, an sporadic burst of fancy footwork, and an occasional high kick to the rafters, remind us she’s still on fire. What keeps the show balanced is Rivera’s willingness to complement, not compete with, the extraordinary dancers in her troupe. They clearly adore her.

“Looking back doesn’t have to be painful,” she says at the top of the show. Rivera certainly had her share of pain - shattered leg in an auto accident, denied movie roles for dance roles she created on Broadway - but she always soldiered on in a Darwinian environment in which talent, luck, and grit were her constant dance partners. 

Here, she’s content to remind us of her greatness not to prove it. She never forgot the advice given to her by her first dance instructor before her first big audition, “Conchita, stay in your lane,” dance language for ‘Don’t worry about the dancers around you, just be who you are.’ Rivera is still stoked with stamina, talent, and attitude but, simply put, she hasn’t forgotten that she’s seventy-four.

Great singers and dancers like Rivera instinctively embrace their audience. One isn’t surprised to hear her say softly near the end of her show, ”When you drag yourself to the theater on a rainy afternoon and the matinée is less than half full, you are there for that one person whose life might be changed by what you do.” When she looked into the audience, I felt she was looking right at me and I’ll bet someone thirty rows away felt the same thing.

“Passing The Torch”, the last section on the program, features Rivera and her dancers in an exuberant, full throttle rendition of “All That Jazz” (Chicago). Under the combustion, one feels Father Time tapping his feet to the music, a poignant reminder that all shows, Rivera’s and ours, have a finale.

Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero knows what she’s got left in the tank and drives accordingly. What an instructive lesson to those of us not too far behind her in the parade.

The Elders Dance Ensemble, a silver lining

The Elders Dance Ensemble, Prometheus Dance Company
The Dance Complex, 536 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
April 16, 2006

You've got to be kidding me. A dance ensemble made up of eight women from 60 to 83 years of age? These proto baby boomers who've spent their lives telling their offspring "You can become anything you can dream" appear to have taken their own advice. They call themselves "post career" dancers.

To its credit, the dance community has become much more diverse. Dancers of all colors, shapes and sizes are the norm. But we're hip deep in youth culture. People beyond a certain age are not represented in popular entertainment media. Is there an audience for a senior dance company? What will audiences of elders think of dancers who look like them - gray haired, with the wrinkles and sags that come with age? Will they be inspired by the creativity, wisdom, and complete lack of self-consciousness of these performers or jarred into an acceptance of their own struggles with age and the spectral future. I've been old enough to qualify for an AARP card for several years. Those were the contradictory thoughts that raced through my mind as I watched these Elders.

Where did the idea of silver haired sylphs come from? The spirit of Dame Margo Fonteyn smoldered in the hearts of these women while they raised families or climbed career ladders. The embers were fanned when some began performing at senior citizen and assisted living centers and became fully ignited when many of them performed in a Prometheus Dance performance in 2002. By 2003, the artistic directors of the Prometheus Dance were sufficiently awed and inspired by the work of these grande dames that they assumed responsibility for training them in their 55+ dance class at the Dance Complex in Cambridge and created The Elders Dance Ensemble as a performing company within their own Prometheus Dance Company. The Elders Ensemble of Prometheus Dance Inc. was founded by a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council in 2005.

The evening's performance at the Dance Complex studio in Cambridge consisted of five pieces: “Interview”; “Shadow Prophesy”; “Reading of Original Stories and Poems”; “Troika”; and “There's a Dance in the Ol' Dame Yet”.

The performers dance their age. Slow graceful movements, facial expressions, bends, and rolls are the staples of their dance. One reason it's fascinating to watch them perform is that they don't embarrass themselves, or us, by attempting grande jetes and deep plies that just don't work for dancers over sixty. They've found grace by respecting gravity.

"Interview" is actually the audiotape of a WBUR FM “Here and Now” story about the Elders Dance Company. "Reading of Original Stories and Poems" offers a window into the interior personalities as three dancers read their work. "Shadow Prophesy" performed between one dancer and a quartet of others who seemed to be guides, might be interpreted as a metaphorical dance from uncertainty to a centered calm and acceptance of the future.

The two-part “Troika” was a brilliant surprise. Part One was a fast paced vigorous dance performed by three dancers in their twenties. The energy and firm bodies of the young women were a stark contrast to the more stately and mature Elders. What were they doing here? The lights dimmed momentarily, the three young women drifted off stage and three members of the Elders company, using the same edgy music, echoed the movements of their young counterparts, with equal intensity but without the athleticism. The six joined for a confident and proud finish together… a very satisfying fusion of age and energy.

The last dance, “There's a Dance in the Ol' Dame Yet”, is imaginatively conceived. As the stage lights come up, there stand all eight Elder dancers wearing retro sunglasses and exuding attitude. Using lawn chairs as props, the eight seem to portray the range of life in the gray zone: some interact energetically with each other, one or two seem in a fog (dementia, Alzheimer's?), others are contemplatively engaged. At one point, they perform a synchronized send up of a chorus line, high kicks and all, from sedentary positions on their lawn chairs. The music slows and fades. In small groups and individually, some holding hands and hugging, they exit the stage. A poignantly bittersweet finale.

Perhaps the story here is not so much what these senior women did, but that they did it at all. They may be the forefront of a movement of in which elder members of society will showcase their vitality and make performing arts a truly intergenerational experience. I'm not kidding.

The web site for the Prometheus Dance Company
www.prometheusdance.org

Here and Now WBUR story about Prometheus Dance Elder Ensemble
http://www.here-now.org/shows/2005/06/20050610_17.asp

Dancing with Mona Lisa

I danced with Mona Lisa last night. The inscrutable smile, beguiling, embracing, and distant. Eyes that followed me wherever I turned. She gazed into me and through me at the same time.

She followed my movements intuitively, without a trace of irritation at my novice’s blunders, me, a man of good intention and poor execution, a man in need of a learner’s permit to gain entrance to the dance floor. If my dancing were my driving and I hadn’t been on the safer confines of the dance hall’s golden oak floor, I’d have been the subject of the eleven o’clock news describing a massive chain reaction car collision at Wellington Circle.

I watch her dance effortlessly with men who possess glorious gifts of timing, graceful and confident technique. Yet here she is in my arms, tolerating my awkward, wet from the chrysalis attempts at leading, always one step behind myself.

I am drawn to her by the safety of that smile, not ironic or with rolled eyes, but accepting and without judgment, allowing me to fail before I succeed. Is she recalling her own ascent into ballroom stratosphere, her own tentative first steps, her only strength being her desire to succeed?

Some day I will be free of the fetters of counting and memorization and launch into the cosmos of the dance, subject only to the laws of gravity and my imagination. Under the gaze of this Mona Lisa, I will grow into the dancer I am destined to become.

Salsa redux

Salsa at Ryles in Cambridge, can also be applied to salsa at Union Station in Newton Corner...

Those six short Latin steps did it. The aesthetic ideals I apply women were laid waste last night. I fell hopelessly in love with several women at a salsa dance. Women of all shapes and sizes, women who wouldn’t have been laser beamed into my radar in the workaday world, skyrocketed like roman candles into my consciousness, dislodging my notions of sculpted playboy beauty. They were chunkier, plainer of face, unremarkable in proportion. But on the dance floor they were wet dreams in motion, Utterly transformed into graceful, commanding, sinuously moving creatures who found a fourth dimension hitherto unseen by this Yankee boy. I could not keep from staring at them from the perimeter of the dance floor.

One heavy set blonde woman, anti matter as far as cover girl proportions go, wearing a black outfit, jiggling midriff-baring top and short skirt, was transformed into a goddess with agile feet, perfect balance and a megawatt smile. She attracted the most amazing posse of men, young and old, who vied for her attention on the parquet. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Textbook salsa, upper torso remaining upright under her feet and her hips, my god, her hips swiveling in a way to make Fidel proclaim salsa as the national dance. More powerful than sexy, this was sensual. And fun. Are epiphanies accompanied by eight beats sounded out in six steps?

I have vowed to learn this dance, to commit it to muscle memory. I dream of the day I can take one of these goddess's hands in mine and lead her in this dance of love. I want to see her eyes light with anticipation when she sees me walking toward her with my extended hand.

There’s mystery afoot, too. I don’t want to seduce these women, I want to dance with them. Very well. I want to express my masculinity by leading them in ways that bring us both pleasure - sensual kinesthesia.

How many women are walking down the street who can make the Clark Kent quick change into black smooth soled pumps and suck the hearts out of unsuspecting partners within sight lines on a dance floor? And how many men? In time, at least one more of them. Maybe I’ve been transformed into a Yanqui Boy.