Rudy Perez: Paying Tribute to a Pioneer : A founder of Post-Modernism prepares for a six-performance retrospective at LACE

A likely caption for a picture of Rudy Perez might read: “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Dancer.”

But it was inevitable that the man whose track record in the avant-garde stretches back more than 25 years would halt his perpetual journey--now that a retrospective of his ground-breaking choreography is at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions: Six performances beginning March 30 of seminal works traceable to New York’s Judson Church.

It was Perez who helped usher in Post-Modernism with his starkly intense epics of the soul, his spiritually exhausting traversals of the odd man out. And it was Perez who, when he exchanged New York for Los Angeles 11 years ago, became the local conscience of new-age dance.

“I had no reference point in 1963,” says Perez, describing how he plunged into the role of conceptual artist. “There was Merce (Cunningham) and Martha (Graham). What I did came out as what we now call performance art. But then it had no name or precedent.”

Hanya Holm-disciple Mary Anthony, who was Perez’s teacher, agrees: “Rudy and the others--Trisha Brown, David Gordon, et. al.--were trying to find a path away from those titans, Cunningham and Graham. But in the case of Rudy, who was my first scholarship student, something unique evolved. Here was this young man, hardly a dancer type at all. He was stocky and had thinning hair. He wore glasses. Ordinarily, I would not have predicted success for him as a dancer.

“But he had a passion, a need to make dances. And when I told him that my job was to open doors and his was to find the right one, he listened. He did it. I doubt that anything could have stopped him. He discovered how to fit his ideas to his own skin and that meant creating something completely new.”

Alvin Ailey, a peer of the 59-year-old Perez who commissioned a work from him, also remembers being struck by “the originality of Rudy’s ideas. He was a visionary, someone who made things happen.”

That vision, which showed itself as spare essays in universe-groping, gained him a connoisseur audience at the experimental stronghold, Judson Church. But curiously, the minimalist with a message never imagined that he was held in such high regard or that the acclaimed choreographers of his day bothered to see him.

“At a reception once, I was introduced to Antony Tudor,” he says. “His face showed instant recognition of my name--it really surprised me--his eyes lit up. I would never have imagined the great Tudor to know or like what I did.”

Perez was wrong, of course. In 1964 he created a solo titled “Countdown,” which has been performed widely by others, including Clive Thompson of the Ailey company. According to an ongoing and informal poll, most of his peers, including Bella Lewitzky, have seen the piece and remember it vividly.

Perhaps they remember it because of the contained passion and poignant imagery, perhaps because it comes from Perez’s deep and genuine melancholy--depicted on stage as he straddled a chair motionlessly, an overhead spotlight bathing him in shadows and tracing the curling smoke from his cigarette.

A soprano voice on a scratchy old recording sings wistful ballads, Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” reaching back to long ago and far away. Not much happens. Yet the very gradual, very minimal motion of this stage picture conveys an intensity of longing and loneliness difficult to forget.

By his own accounting, it was “the first serious piece I did. What guided me in this and almost everything else was the sense of having to reign in what I felt. Remember, at that time, one’s personal feelings were outlawed. Everything was conceptualism. Passion had no place among the elite (from which) I was definitely excluded.”

Still, when he did “Countdown,” his sense of going against the trend seemed--to him--the primary thrust. And stepping forward to perform the piece again at the Los Angeles Festival two years ago, he came away with a similarly skewed perception.

“What the audience probably saw,” he says, “was an older person performing a solo.” Not true, but then Perez is hardly his own best agent. Since he never made technical virtuosity or dancerly movement central to his work it presents no challenge to him, young or old. But he has little narcissistic investment in a stage persona anyway.

“I was horrified to see Merce and Martha ignoring their physical decline and appearing on stage,” he admits. His transition to the role of educator/choreographer posed no problems and he feels no regret over ending the performance phase of his career.

In fact, he’s happy to turn the various vintage solos over to his dancers--Anne Goodman, Jeffrey Grimaldo, Robert Keane and Anet Margot Ris--who will alternate in four of them.

Not everything in the Perez oeuvre points towards self-revelation, though. One solo, the 1964 “Bang-Bang,” uses a tape of Julia Child cooking asparagus; it invokes social commentary as a leitmotif.

The other two program entries are for the ensemble and one is a work-in-progress, included because,” Perez says, “Nothing we ever do is locked into the past. I feel it’s important to show what’s happening right now, despite the label of retrospective. My nature is continuance and the dancers also need this balance between old and new.”

So do we all, if for no other reason than to affirm the vital presence of Rudy Perez.