Once or twice a week in his Oak Park home, Kris Lenzo slides out of his wheelchair and scoots downstairs to the basement. Once there, he wiggles into and laces up a pair of pants designed for trapeze artists, then uses his muscular arms to climb to the top of a six-foot-tall wooden apparatus–essentially a plank rigged onto a scaffold. His wife, Sheri, or his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Natalie, straps him in. Safety ropes are attached to metal panels sewn into the sides of his pants; a hinged and padded wooden board is clamped over the backs of his thighs. Once that’s done, Lenzo bends forward, letting his body hang upside down from the edge of the apparatus.
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Lenzo has been doing this for the past two months in preparation for a role in the two-person dance Ashes, which he first performed with the Oak Park dance company Momenta last spring. The nine-minute piece was choreographed and first performed by Tom Trimble, a personal trainer with an MFA in dance from the University of Illinois in Champaign, in 2002. Ashes opens with Lenzo with his back to the audience, hanging upside down from an eight-foot-high scaffold similar to the one he’s been training on. At the start of the piece, he’s in a lengthy entwined embrace with dancer Sandra Kaufmann, whom he gently lowers to the floor. After she drifts away, Kaufmann twists and swirls alone, mournfully–the music is the “lento e largo” movement of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3–until she dances back to Lenzo, who lifts, cradles, and rocks her. This embrace and separation is repeated three times; at the end of the piece, Kaufmann is balled up in the fetal position at the base of the scaffold, just beyond Lenzo’s desperate reach.
“It’s about loss, grief,” Lenzo says. “Tom said that she’s a ghost. But when we were rehearsing he said it looks more like I’m a ghost. When she’s with me everything’s all right. But when she’s gone there’s nothing but pain. When I say that, that is the true reality of performing and rehearsing it. When we’re together, I’m focusing on what we have to do–lift her, grab this arm, grab that foot, and lower her slowly. And then when she’s gone, it’s like ‘Oh my God, my ass is killing me.’ I haven’t been in that much pain since my hospitalization after my accident.”
Four years later, he was working as a wheelchair salesman and became heavily involved in wheelchair basketball and track. (He’s still an avid, though not competitive, hand cyclist.) It was in that context that he met his wife Sheri in 1995, who was working as a physical therapist at a school in Lansing, Michigan, and Lenzo was giving a wheelchair sports demonstration for disabled students there. They married in 1996. Today Sheri works as a physical therapist and assistive-technology specialist for Oak Park’s elementary school district, while Lenzo is a stay-at-home dad, stepdad, and foster dad. Olivia, 7, is his daughter with Sheri; Natalie, 12, is Sheri’s daughter from a previous marriage; foster daughter Thia, also 12, is a former classmate of Natalie’s who has cerebral palsy and also uses a wheelchair. Lenzo also has two older daughters, Elizabeth and Hannah, from a previous marriage; Lenzo and Sheri moved to Oak Park from Michigan in 1997 to be closer to them.
“He had such a terrific presence and charisma, and he’s such a fine athlete,” Clemens says of his performance. “Even with the kids I teach, you can tell when you put someone onstage whether they’re going to shrink or bloom. Lenzo was a bloomer.”
