Remembering Chita Rivera, 1933–2024: “I Wouldn’t Commerce Being a Dancer for Something”

Chita Rivera didn’t make steps look simple—she made them look highly effective. Even probably the most delicate isolation concerned her whole physique; even her stillness buzzed with power. Her complete dedication to motion gave her complete command of the stage.

The epitome of a triple menace, Rivera was a veritable Broadway legend, profitable a number of Tony Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Kennedy Middle Honor. However she at all times described herself as a dancer first. (Her 2005 Broadway present was even titled Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.) As she advised Dance Journal in 2004: “I wouldn’t commerce being a dancer for something.”

After radiating honest pleasure onstage for many years and galvanizing generations of dancers, she died shortly after her 91st birthday, on January 30, 2024, in New York Metropolis.

Rivera was born in Washington, DC, on January 23, 1933, as Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero. She started dancing when her widowed mom enrolled her on the esteemed Jones-Haywood Dance College to rein in her “tomboy” power. Quickly, Rivera was coaching on the College of American Ballet on a scholarship supplied by George Balanchine himself. Though she ended up making her profession in musical theater, that ballet background gave her motion a classical class that might nonetheless be seen a long time later within the delicate strains of her fingertips and the open carriage of her higher physique.

Upon graduating from highschool in 1951, Rivera booked her first performing job in a nationwide tour of Irving Berlin’s Name Me Madam. Lower than a yr later, she made her Broadway debut as a principal dancer in Guys and Dolls. However the position that made her a star got here in 1957 when, at age 24, she drew upon her Puerto Rican heritage as Anita in West Facet Story. Dance Journal put her on the quilt for the primary time that November. Inside the problem, author Leo Lerman declared, “Here’s a performer of huge individuality with a dance method fairly uniquely her personal.”

Her profession took off, and held regular. In 1961, she obtained her first Tony Award nomination for her portrayal of Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie; in 1976, she acquired one other for originating the position of Velma Kelly in Chicago. Rivera was fast to acknowledge that she tremendously benefited from working with iconic choreographers like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Kidd, and Gower Champion. They created the steps; she made them sizzle.

When a automobile crash in 1986 crushed her left leg, medical doctors advised her she would by no means dance once more. They clearly didn’t know Rivera. Inside a yr, she was performing in cabarets, wowing audiences together with her signature irrepressible power (even when the kicks have been a little bit decrease). She even returned to Broadway in 1993, within the title position of Kiss of the Spider Girl—for which she gained a Tony for Finest Actress in a Musical. In complete, she appeared in additional than 20 Broadway productions over the course of seven a long time, receiving 10 Tony Award nominations and profitable three.

In 2017, when the Astaire Awards—which honor dance in theater and movie—wanted to be rebranded, they have been swiftly renamed the Chita Rivera Awards for Dance and Choreography. Immediately, a Chita Rivera Award is likely one of the highest honors for a musical theater dancer or choreographer. On the pink carpet earlier than the primary ceremony below Rivera’s identify, former Dance Journal editor in chief Wendy Perron requested Rivera for her recommendation for younger dancers. Rivera responded: “Maintain caring. Maintain dancing. Maintain working laborious. However most of all, preserve loving, loving to bounce.”

Rivera’s personal love stayed robust till the top. When her memoir was launched final yr, Rivera advised “CBS Sunday Morning”: “If I come again, I need to come again a dancer. That shall be my second life.”