Miracle AIDS patient’s dance to aid hospice
Jazz singer Juanita Holiday will narrate the life story of Jay Alvin Chestnut, as he performs his original Rites of Passage - A Celebration of Life with ArcheDream for Humankind on Thursday, August 25, 7:30 p.m. at First United Methodist Church of Germantown.
by LEN LEAR
When AIDS patient Jay Alvin Chestnut was sent to Keystone Hospice in Wyndmoor in June of 2004, neither he nor anyone else held out any hope that he would survive more than a few weeks. He had been transferred from Cooper Hospital in Camden because he was unable to eat or care for himself.
“I weighed 96 pounds,” said the 5-foot-11 South Carolina native who will turn 66 the day this article comes out (August 17). “I came in here on a walker, and I knew I was dying. I got rid of all my possessions.”
On his 65th birthday last year, the former professional dancer managed to work up the energy for “one last dance.” In the back yard of the hospice at 8765 Stenton Ave., under a stately tree, Jay entertained an audience of hospice workers, residents and friends with the “Dance of the Dying Swan.”
“I looked like a dead guy who got up one last time to walk,” said Jay, whose “last dance” was filmed by TV cameramen and later shown on Channel 12.
Numerous treatments had been tried with Chestnut since he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1996, but this time a Dr. Tadaldi at Temple University Hospital tried one last form of antiretroviral therapy. After a period of horrific side effects, Chestnut’s agony and other side effects began to diminish gradually; his appetite and energy returned, and he put on weight.
With constant vigilance, especially on the part of Keystone Hospice founder and executive director, Gail Inderwies, and support of staff and volunteers during the period of extreme side effects, Jay has lived to dance another day.
According to David Traupman, vice-president at Keystone Hospice, “I cannot tell you what an inspiration Jay is to everybody around here. He is a wonderful human being who inspires us all here every day with his upbeat attitude, and it is a joy to watch him dance.”
Today Jay weighs 150, feels great, teaches dance at Temple’s Annenberg Center two days a week and rehearses three days a week. To celebrate this “miracle,” Keystone Hospice has joined with dance troupe ArcheDream to present a multi-media dance experience, on Thursday, August 25, 7:30 p.m., in Pilling Hall at First United Methodist Church Of Germantown (FUMCOG), 6023 Germantown Ave., to benefit both Keystone Hospice and ArcheDream for Humankind and their efforts toward HIV/AIDS education and health services.
Chestnut conceived of a new work,Rites of Passage - A Celebration of Life, to celebrate his 66th birthday. The premiere will be narrated by Philadelphia jazz and blues singer Juanita Holiday, and hosted by J. Edward Murray, Deputy Director of Philadelphia FIGHT.
Rites of Passage “fire dancers” (members of the ArcheDream troupe) will perform at the benefit for Keystone Hospice.
Chestnut’s recovery from AIDS, which defied logic, probability and medical science, was not the first miracle of his life. The first was his almost unbelievable journey as a once-illiterate, dirt-poor sharecropper’s son to a 30-year career as a professional dancer, ballet master and choreographer with the Paris Opera, La Scala in Milan and almost every other major opera house and dance company in Western Europe.
Jay Chestnut was born in rural South Carolina where his parents where sharecroppers. His father made and sold corn liquor, and his mother was known as a “heavy picker,” able to pick between 250 to 300 pounds of cotton a day. Jay was considered by many to be a natural dancer, always moving like “a worm in hot sand.” His early experience with dance began in church, watching adults “shout” to the music of the piano and tambourine. After years of sharecropping and raising nine children, the Chestnuts moved north to Camden, N.J., when Jay was 12 years old. For the first time, Jay attended school every day.
At the Sidney King Dance Studio in Camden in the mid-1950s, a girl named Lola Falana, a Germantown resident who went on to have an international career as a dancer and nightclub performer, began teaching Jay dance steps and techniques.
“I was hooked,” said Jay. “I felt myself dancing with a spirit. It just came out of me somehow.” Jay could not afford dance lessons, but he offered to mop and clean the dance studio in return for lessons. At the age of 17, after excelling at the dance lessons, Jay received an offer to join the Larry Steele Review, a group touring Italy for six weeks. Jay was adopted by a German family, who paid for him to attend Volkwang Schule, the National School of the Performing Arts in Essen Rhine, Westphalia, for two years, followed by a scholarship to the Paris Opera Ballet.
Jay’s remarkable career spanned over three decades as a dancer, ballet master and choreographer with the Paris Opera and other opera houses and dance companies throughout Europe.
Jay also participated in a cultural exchange at the University of Nairobi, in Kenya, Africa, where he taught a comparison of African movement based on ceremony and ritual and its evolution in America following the introduction of African slaves. He also served as artistic director for a chain of casinos in Africa.
When Jay was 13, a Salvation Army worker gave him a recording of “Amore Mio,” an aria from La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, one of the world’s greatest operas. Twenty-two years later, after Chestnut had established himself as a first-rate dancer in Europe, he was commissioned to choreograph a piece of music at La Scala in Milan. What was the piece of music?
It was “Amore Mio” from La Traviata. “When I saw that’s what the music was, I cried like a baby,” said Chestnut. “I had chills ... It made me realize how far I had come, from the cotton fields of South Carolina to the world’s greatest opera house in Italy. It’s like the two ends of the earth ... My life has been amazing, even to me.” (Jay, who picked cotton until he was 12 and whose parents could not read or write, is now able to speak German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Swahili.)
In the latter years of his career, Jay formed his own dance company. In 1995 Jay returned to Camden and found out that he was HIV+. He started several medication regimens, but severe side effects caused him to stop treatments.
He was too ill to dance, so he went to take courses at a beauty culture school in New York and then lived for two years in Los Angeles, doing makeup and hair for TV shows and music videos. Now that he has made a miraculous recovery, he is writing his memoirs, and he plans to eventually open a community outreach and cultural arts studio in the area that also teaches HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.
Within the last five years, seven of Chestnut’s eight siblings have died. His mom, still alive, is 88.
Tickets to the August 25 fundraising event can be ordered by calling Keystone Hospice at 215-836-2440.
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