Dancing again, at a distance
Top choreographer for Daddy Yankee takes studio outside
Coming off the best year yet of his career, Greg Chapkis fully expected the whirlwind to carry over to 2020.
“You know how they say you go from zero to 100? Well, we went from 100 to zero,” says the worldrenowned choreographer, describing how coronavirus put the brakes on his momentum.
In 2019, Chapkis choreographed YouTube’s mostviewed music video, “Con Calma,” by Latin Music Awardwinner Daddy Yankee and Canadian singer Snow. It led to so many other gigs that Chapkis was living out of his suitcase — and his band of elite dancers was poised to dominate the global stage.
When Chapkis emigrated from Ukraine as a teen in the late 1990s, he knew about 10 words of English. But dance, he knew. It’s a universal language, and it’s in his blood. His dancer dad is a huge star in Ukraine. His mom has a dance studio in Vallejo. Chapkis started his own hiphop studio in 2010; last year it moved from Suisun City to a bigger location in Fairfield. It’s a hub, a refuge and even a beacon for its students, who trek from all over the Bay Area, and from as far afield as Sacramento and Stockton, to train.
Or at least they did. As a nonessential business, Chapkis Dance studio was closed for weeks, with students sheltering in place and taking classes over Zoom. Though the studio resumed inperson classes on June 1, only about 40% of its students have returned, says Amber Chapkis, coowner of the studio and Greg’s wife. Besides that huge drop in revenue, the pandemic also means a slew of missed opportunities for Chapkis and his students, from touring the world with Daddy Yankee to teaching abroad to competing in international events.
“To get cut off is pretty disappointing,” says Adan Cerda, 15, who is among the group of students Chapkis had been grooming for Hip Hop International, which is like a 10day Super Bowl of hiphop. The last time Chapkis Dance teams competed, in 2016, they placed first and second in the U.S. and world championships. Dancers train for years to participate — Adan, for instance, has been studying at Chapkis since he was 7.
The gigs and the intense training, plus the connections Chapkis has made in the dance industry, make Chapkis Dance studio stand out. It’s for serious dancers who want to make it in the entertainment world — they usually have to move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams — and some of them have: Kida Burns, who won the TV competition “So You Think You Can Dance: Next Generation,” in 2016, trained at Chapkis and at age 18 now owns a studio in Sacramento. Burns is competing in the new season of NBC’s “World of Dance,” and four brothers who trained at Chapkis, called the
Williams Family, also tried out.
In late 2018, Chapkis landed the break of a lifetime: choreographing for Daddy Yankee, one of the biggest Latin artists in the world. The “Con Calma” music video, which was released in January 2019 and featured Chapkis dancers front and center, has racked up more than 1.9 billion views on YouTube and plenty of accolades. Since then, Chapkis and several of his handpicked dancers have toured with Daddy Yankee and appeared with him on latenight TV, awards shows and “American Idol.”
Adan was among the Chapkis dancers who went to Mexico last summer to dance at the Latin Kids Choice Awards with Daddy Yankee.
“Dancing next to one of the most famous singers in the world was pretty crazy,” says Adan, who sounded wistful but hopeful. On the plus side, he has learned new skills, like
flips, while he was stuck at home.
Shalena Whitehurst, 25, is assistant director at Chapkis Dance. She appeared in the “Con Calma” video, among other Daddy Yankee music videos (Chapkis has choreographed five), and in December performed at a dozen soldout Daddy Yankee concerts at Coliseo de Puerto Rico, which has a capacity of 18,500. At each show, she says, “You could hear everyone counting down, then everyone would scream. Daddy Yankee is a god over there. Every Uber we got into was playing his songs. I’ll never forget that experience.”
Her work nowadays is a far cry from her packed travel schedule of the past year (she also went to Russia and Kazakhstan to teach with Chapkis in early March and came back to California right before the shelterinplace orders were issued). She and another assistant choreographer, Dylan Gramlich, have helped their boss figure out how to keep their remote students dancing and motivated. They brought in outside choreographers, including famous ones from Los Angeles, to teach classes from time to time. They asked students to record themselves doing dance challenges. Winners got the chance to teach choreography.
That was exciting up to a point, but “you have an idea and it only works for so long,” says Whitehurst, who has danced with Chapkis for about 15 years.
Chapkis is ecstatic that many of his students are at the studio in the flesh again. “Dancers have to learn from each other,” he says, adding that “not having that energy” to feed off one another has been tough. The students are excited, too, but are adjusting to the strange new protocols.
All who show up at the studio — students or the few parents who are allowed to step foot inside because they’re volunteering — must have their temperatures checked. Nobody can wait in the lobby or lounge. Practice for now is mostly outside in the huge parking lot behind the studio. Masks are required at all times. Dancers cannot touch each other and must stay 6 feet apart. There is no partner work in the choreography so far.
Grueling practice schedules for competitions won’t be on the agenda this summer, but Chapkis plans to get back into creating professionally shot concept videos featuring his dancers. That’s how Marlon Peña, the director of Daddy Yankee’s videos, noticed Chapkis in the first place, through YouTube.
“I was doing research, and looking for a certain competitive dance style,” says Peña, who coldcalled Chapkis in late 2018. Now, Peña says, “he has become my goto guy.”
Chapkis Dance studio’s YouTube channel has 658,000 subscribers and counting, with its mostviewed video, a rehearsal for the official “Con Calma” video, earning more than 80 million views. Those numbers make Chapkis confident that pretty much anything the studio produces has the potential to go viral.
“It’ll be fun for kids to do something like that, with fullon costumes, makeup, lighting,” says Chapkis.
Chapkis is determined to keep his students prepared for when they can dance, compete and tour again, not just to maintain his reputation, but also because it’s his livelihood. He and his wife — they met when she took his hiphop class at 24 Hour Fitness in Fairfield about a year after he arrived in the United States — have two young sons.
“It’s all on the line,” he says. “I literally invested all my savings into the studio.”
On the second week of their return to the studio, Chapkis ended a Mondaynight team practice with a pep talk: “We have so many things coming up,” he told his highestlevel group, which consists of a couple of 12yearolds all the way up to 20somethings. “Things will come back.”
He had just booked a couple of new music videos, including one for Daddy Yankee.
Levi Sumagaysay is a Bay Area freelance reporter, editor and podcaster.