Choreographer Frank Chaves, in his damaged body, creates one more beautiful dance in Chicago – ryan

The dancers — eight of them — are young, lean and eager to please.

The man directing them was that way too, years ago. He’s 65 now, and the sharp edges of his dancer’s physique are long gone.

The dancers wear ballet slippers. His shoes are clunky, with Velcro straps that can be loosened to accommodate badly swollen feet.

Choreographer Frank Chaves, seated in a motorized wheelchair, has no sensation from the chest down. His arms must do the work that his legs once did.

“The anger and the frustration, and the sheer just wanting to scream,” Chaves tells the dancers during a recent rehearsal at the Red Clay Dance Company studio in Woodlawn.

Chaves is talking about “Temporal Trance,” a piece he choreographed when he was co-director of the critically acclaimed but now-defunct River North Dance Company. His mother’s death from pancreatic cancer in 1998 provided the emotional heft for the piece. But the silent scream Chaves wants his dancers to convey could just as easily come from his own physical struggles.

He’s here in Chicago for two weeks, rehearsing “Trance” with South Chicago Dance Theatre for one performance, May 3, at The Auditorium in a special presentation of the work. The same night, the dance company will present Chaves with its Cultural Hero Hall of Fame award.

It took him three days to get here, in a specially equipped minivan from his home in Sarasota, Florida. He is staying in a hotel that allowed a hospital-type bed to be wheeled into his room.

But Chaves is not helpless. He is thriving, he says, in a way that he wasn’t even in his able-bodied life — even as the rare spine condition that has stolen his mobility worsens.

“This whole season has been a real gift from the universe,” he says. “I’m feeling really good and I’m feeling really happy.”

Dance, he says, “is the absolute best medicine, and it really just breathes life into me.”

Gotta dance

It was 1993, and a young Frank Chaves saunters downtown — movie-star handsome, his hair styled into a pompadour.

“As soon as I hear music, my head just fills up with steps,” he tells an interviewer as part of a 1993 documentary about River North Dance Company, where Chaves was, at the time, the associate artistic director.

Chaves was born in Cuba, but like so many Cubans, his parents moved the family to Miami. Chaves’ home as a child echoed with the clattering rhythms of salsa and merengue. He didn’t consider a life in dance until after taking a jazz dance class in college.

“I was like a kid in a candy store. I couldn’t get enough of it,” he says.

He trained in Miami, joined his first dance company there, then got hired in New York to dance with Ballet Hispanico. He spent two years dancing and teaching in Philadelphia, before making his way here in 1985 and eventually to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, then a 10-year-old company whose dancers were known for their versatility and physicality.

Mark Reeves, Chaves’ partner of 32 years, remembers marveling at Chaves’ strength (on stage with another dancer) — before Reeves had any romantic interest.

“They had this very physical duet, where they would run and jump and catch each other,” Reeves recalls. “It was almost like dance wrestling.”

Reeves keeps a photograph of Chaves performing an aerial version of the splits.

“That was really the cream of the crop for me,” Chaves says of Hubbard Street. He traveled the globe with the company.

But just a few years in, Chaves found himself limping during a piece that required lots of backstage running. Exploratory surgery didn’t turn up anything unusual.

“I just wasn’t able to handle eight hours a day of dance and performances,” Chaves recounts. “It was incredibly painful (emotionally). I’d just found my stride, and I felt like I really had many years left in me.” Chaves was 33 at the time.

The Chaves style

The dance world cliché goes something like this: A dancer dies two deaths — the one when he stops breathing and the one when he stops dancing.

The lucky ones find another way to keep going.

Sherry Zunker, a dancer/choreographer Chaves had first met in the 1980s, convinced him in 1993 to work with her at River North Dance Chicago, then a small, up-and-coming company where she was the artistic director.

“As a dancer, he was such a great mover. He also had a gift for choreography,” Zunker recalls.

Chaves was an accomplished dancer, but at River North, he would become a legend.

“Frank has a very rare gift for tapping into the human experience, finding a movement that resonates with anyone. So you don’t have to be an educated dance audience,” says Ethan Kirschbaum, who danced with River North from 2011 to 2015.

Or as Lucia Mauro, a former Chicago dance critic and now a filmmaker put it, Chaves’ work was the perfect experience for a “first date.”

Perhaps they saw something of themselves in the intimacy on stage.

“There’s just something about two bodies and the limitless possibilities of what can be done,” Chaves says of his reputation for dazzling partner choreography.

Cuban rhythms, jazz, American standards and other-worldly music accompany Chaves’ choreography.

No single word defines Chaves’ style. In one of his works, dancers start out lying on the stage in a blue mist, twitching and squirming like new life forms emerging from the primordial soup. In another, the dancers straddle and leap over folding metal chairs. At one point, each dancer’s arms and torso are pinned within a chair, and yet each is still able to dance — as if foreshadowing Chaves’ later ability to thrive in a wheelchair despite his disability.

In 2001, Zunker departed River North Dance, and Chaves became sole artistic director. The company’s reputation continued to grow. There were tours of Europe, Israel, Russia.

Jessica Wolfrum Raun spent 14 years dancing with River North. Audiences stomped their feet in Germany. They wept with joy in Russia, she says. “It was like we were movie stars.”

And Chaves was their acclaimed director.

“His whole being was filled with a desire to express himself through movement … ,” Mauro says. “And he didn’t shy away from the messy and erratic phases of love, loss and grief.”

Life-changing news

As a choreographer, Chaves was now more of a spectator. No jumps, no heavy lifting. So the weakness in his left leg went away — for a time. When it returned in 2005, he went to his doctor, who ordered an MRI.

The diagnosis: syringomyelia, a rare condition where fluid-filled cavities develop within the spinal cord, putting pressure on the cord. In time, the cyst can grow, as it has in Chaves’ case, compressing and damaging the spine.

In the 2009 documentary, “Every Dancer Has a Story,” Chaves reveals how he imagined his future self in a wheelchair.

“I have pictured myself though and I have pictured myself still creating beautiful, beautiful things,” he says.

Six surgeries followed — not to cure, but to try to corral the disease. Doctors described Chaves’ case as “particularly aggressive.”

“To see a disease just kind of take all of that (movement) away and (it) being a really cruel fate for a dancer. To lose the use of his legs, it’s heartbreaking,” says Reeves.

Chaves refused to stop working. When he could no longer walk, even with a walker, he got fitted for a wheelchair.

“When I first saw myself in the mirror in the chair, that was an especially low point,” he says.

When the elevators occasionally broke down at River North’s rehearsal space, Chaves was unable to be in the room where the magic happened.

In April 2015, Chaves announced his retirement from River North Dance.

“I’ve done my time in terms of running a company,” Chaves told the Sun-Times at the time. “But I plan to continue choreographing for other companies, and for River North, if it’s right for the situation. My imagination is still intact. I also will be focusing on my health.”

Later that year, Chaves and River North gave their final performance — to a sold-out audience at The Auditorium theater. Among the pieces, “Temporal Trance.”

Chaves came on stage for final curtain calls. Raun, who describes Chaves as “like a second dad,” held his hand.

“People flew from all over to see River North’s last show …,” Raun says. “The love pouring from the audience was palpable.”

The company folded about a year later.

A new normal

Chaves and his partner moved to Florida in 2021. The house has a ramp and a hospital bed. Chaves still buttons his shirts, but needs Reeves to put on his pants, socks and shoes. It takes Chaves two hours to get ready each morning. He takes a handful of medications daily.

“Seeing his face grimace or hearing him moan or say how badly he feels — and there is nothing I can do — that is really challenging,” Reeves says.

And yet, in Chaves’ head, bodies leap, jeté and pirouette unfettered. He’ll recline his electric wheelchair, earbuds in place. He’ll lift his arm like a conductor.

“He’s seeing the dance in his head, and so his eyebrows go up; you’ll see him smile,” Reeves says.

Chaves is still working, just not in the old way. He recently returned from a five-week stay in Atlanta, where he choreographed a piece for Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre.

Coming home

In 2009, Kia Smith, now the founder and executive artistic director of South Chicago Dance, was a student at Western Michigan University, where Chaves was an adjunct professor. Chaves set “Temporal Trance” for the university’s students. Smith has never forgotten the performance.

“It’s this beautiful embodiment of everything Frank is known for. The partnering is very daring. The women are being pushed up into the air, they’re in the splits, upside down,” she recalls.

Smith wanted to stage the work in Chicago, but not without Chaves. So she asked him if he would come.

“Getting on an airplane? We haven’t even attempted that for well over a decade,” Reeves says.

But Chaves was determined to return to Chicago.

“There really wasn’t a question; we were going to make it work somehow,” Reeves says.

And so last week, the couple set off in their converted minivan for the trip.

The teacher teaches

Chaves rolled into the Red Clay Dance studio (held there and not at South Chicago Dance’s Hyde Park studio because the latter isn’t wheelchair-accessible) this past week, a Starbucks coffee cup in one hand. During the three-day trip, he’d managed a total of only a couple of hours of sleep, he says.

Applause and starstruck stares greeted him. He toggled into the rehearsal space, maneuvering his wheelchair to face the dancers.

“My best method is to walk and talk initially,” he says, adding that he was looking for lots of detail and “nuance.”

He prepared to set the dancers in motion: “A five, six, seven, eight …”

The section they were rehearsing has a muscular, tribal rhythm to it — propelled forward with the guttural blare of what sounds like a didgeridoo.

Mostly, Chaves nodded in time to the beat, occasionally stopping the dancers to offer a suggestion.

“This is like a silent scream, but we certainly see it in your body,” he said at one point.

Chaves’ arms rise in a swirl when he wants the dancers to go bigger, bolder.

“Let it ripple up all the way along the spine,” he urges.

He can’t demonstrate that, of course.

“I have the vision, I have the words to describe it, but (the dancers) are my body,” Chaves tells the Sun-Times.

“In some ways, he is better than other choreographers because he has to be so expressive with the details,” said dancer Chloe Chandler during a break in the rehearsal. “All of us are definitely taking this very seriously because this is his opportunity to bring his work back to the world and we want to do it justice.”

The Auditorium show will be the first time “Temporal Trance” will be performed in Chicago since the 2015 farewell.

Before the Monday rehearsal ends, Chaves has the dancers run through the entire third section.

He tells them to breathe in deeply because “it’s a long build.”

And when the leaping, the stomping, the spinning are finished, all that can be heard is a chorus of spent, panting dancers.

Chaves leads a round of rapturous applause. There are giddy smiles all around.

“That was awesome! That was the bomb!” Chaves says. “I can’t imagine the level it will get to when you get to the stage!”