Chita Rivera Pays Homage To Childhood Dance Teacher Doris Jones

"I don't think I would've recovered had I not had the training that Miss Jones gave me," Broadway legend Chita Rivera says of the time, in 1986, when the car she was driving was struck by a taxi and she suffered a compound fracture in her left leg that required 16 screws and months of healing.

The Miss Jones she refers to is another legend in Rivera's childhood home of Washington D.C.

Doris Jones, who passed on in 2006 at age 92, loved to dance as a child growing up in Massachusetts, but, being black, was refused entry to most ballet schools. Some allowed her to watch classes, and through keen observation she not only learned to dance herself, but she learned how to teach others.

In 1941, she and Claire Haywood opened the Jones-Haywood Dance School in Washington D.C., with a mission to provide classical training for minority students. Through the years, their students have gone on to successful careers with Alvin Ailey Company, Philadanco, Royal Netherlands Ballet Company, The Washington Ballet and Paul Taylor Dance Company. Alumni include three-time Tony-winner Hinton Battle and ballet and film choreographer Louis Johnson.

"You have to have the lows in your life so you can deal with them," Rivera tells The Washington Post. "That's what Miss Jones taught. She was so elegant, and so strong at the same time. She took no excuses."

"And most definitely to work really hard, 'cause you don't get anything free. I don't care who you are, you really have to work for it. And that's stuck with me all these years."

When a representative from New York's School of American Ballet asked Rivera to audition before the revered ballet master, George Balanchine, she was rattled at first by the high-pressure.

"At New York City Ballet the girls were all very tall and very thin, and I got off the elevator and said, 'Oh, Miss Jones, I'm short and Puerto Rican!' " Rivera recalls. "And she said, 'Now, Conchita, you just stay in your lane and do what I've taught you to do.' "

As Rivera went on to Broadway fame she always invited Jones to her openings. But her teacher never came until KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN. At the party afterwards, Rivera asked why she hadn't attended her other shows.

"She said, 'Well, Conchita, I would love to have come, but I was too busy making other young girls into beautiful dancers.'

"And that was her," said Rivera. "That was the way she thought and the way she taught."

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Visit joneshaywood.com.