He’s Not Content With a Pioneering Past

At just about the time you’d expect Rudy Perez, choreographer, dancer, company head and teacher, to be happily retired, he’s starting anew.

Perez, who turns 72 in November, is preparing for a return to the stage, with new dances and dancers and a solo for himself.

Although he insists this is not a comeback, the concert is something to trumpet: Perez was awarded a $30,000 James Irvine Foundation dance fellowship in 1999 to document his teaching and choreographic process. The grant proposal didn’t say anything about starting a new company or creating new work.

“But I’m doing both,” he admits with a laugh in his soft, determined voice.

“They asked what I needed at this stage in my career, and I said, ‘I haven’t had a group of people in a long time, and [although the foundation] wanted something more imaginative than to do new work--not what they call ‘business as usual’--I wasn’t going to sit home and read books on dance. It turned out really nice, because when you’re given time and money to work, dances come out of it.”

And so they have: Perez assembled a quartet of dancers (Stefan Fabry, Anne and Jeffrey Grimaldo and Tamsin Carlson) who, under the banner the Rudy Perez Project, will be performing at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Theater next Sunday as part of the Intimate Encounters series (the audience surrounds the performers on stage). The program also features some of Perez’s high school students, has original music by Mark Ramos-Nishita and spotlights six short new works, including the Perez solo. The dance maker will also discuss his choreographic process.

Glaucoma recently rendered Perez legally blind (he had lens implants last year and though he can see, his vision is hazy and the state has determined that he can no longer drive a car). He nevertheless says he is very much “alive and kicking.” He’s been trained to use a cane to help him get around, but he doesn’t feel he needs it. Still, he incorporated it into his solo piece, “Feeling for Open Spaces, None for Crowded Areas.”

The Perez Project has so far been assembled just for this one concert, but from the choreographer’s perspective, it is the opening of another act in his long career.

“What’s happening now will bring attention to my work and make people aware, despite the fact that I haven’t done anything major in a while, I’m still here,” he explains. “It’s given me the opportunity to present myself to a whole new audience, and to bring back my old audience.”

At a rehearsal at the Red Shield Recreation Center’s City Ballet Studio, in downtown L.A., Perez, who looks fit and far younger than his years in his white sneakers, bandanna and workout gear, is directing his dancers in his minimalist way--a concentrated nod, a walk around the floor to check out perspective, a “That’s nice.”

Of Puerto Rican descent and born in Manhattan, Perez was raised in the Bronx. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 7, and he too was hospitalized for three years with the disease. Once he recovered, he says, the rest of his childhood was pretty typical. He discovered dance, for example, as a social thing in high school, “like a lot of Latinos.”

But his reaction was a little out of the ordinary. He got hooked and began modern dance studies, working with Mary Anthony, a disciple of Hanya Holm, an influential Modernist who also choreographed for Broadway. Perez then made his way to the source--Martha Graham. He spent five years studying with her in the ‘50s. After a short-lived stint with Merce Cunningham in the early 1960s, he began to do his own work.

From there, Perez, along with David Gordon, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and several others, founded the experimental Judson Dance Theatre in New York in 1962. Judson would define boundary-breaking “downtown” aesthetics and was the original stomping ground of what would come to be called performance art.

“I didn’t disconnect myself from Merce, but we were all ‘below 14th Street’ dancers--more experimental and avant-garde. We weren’t technique-oriented, but task-oriented. When Baryshnikov came to L.A. with White Oak [Dance Project] last year and did some of those [early Judson] works, I was impressed by how well [they] held up and how splendid they looked. There’s interest in my work being done by [Baryshnikov] in the future.”

Until then, Perez can take credit for an already impressive body of work: He has choreographed more than 50 dances since moving to California 23 years ago; his New York-based company in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Rudy Perez Dance Theatre, toured throughout the United States, Germany and Canada. His signature solo pieces of the time, “Countdown” (created in 1964; Perez last danced the work at Occidental College in 1998 to critical acclaim), and “Coverage” (1970) were part of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company repertory.

Ailey, who commissioned the works, called Perez “a visionary, someone who made things happen.” In 1987 The Times’ Lewis Segal cited Perez as “the conscience of Los Angeles dance.”

A lot to live up to? Yes, but nothing Perez dwells on. “I don’t get caught up in that sort of thing. It’s nice to hear, and when something comes up from my past, it [helps] keep me afloat.”

The Luckman event, titled “The Art of Rudy Perez,” also carries the subtitle “Thank You, Martha, Hello Merce.” It’s the artist’s way of acknowledging Graham for creating an environment in which people could function and bloom, and Cunningham for injecting intellectualism and complexity into the Modernist mix--elements that Perez finds highly relevant today.

“Art as a whole is ahead of the public,” Perez notes. “We need to keep doing the work and the audience needs to be exposed to something where they have to think about dance and see it in a different light. It’s not always about entertainment.”

For the Luckman program, Perez set himself the task of incorporating props in his work. “I’m using wooden poles in every piece, but they don’t symbolize anything consciously. [I wanted] to see how far I could stretch using them.”

In “Spiritual Offering,” each of the four dancers works with a pole--straddling it, balancing it, holding it aloft. The piece is nothing flashy, nothing big. But it flows with Perez’s hallmark easy style. Segal, writing about “Countdown” in 1998, noted “how potent the simplest movement statements can be.”

English-born Carlson understudied for the Cunningham Dance Company and was a faculty member of that school. Last year she toured with Lucinda Childs Dance Company; now, she is excited to be working with Perez.

“The way Rudy will see what we’re doing and use it and [be] flexible with it is similar to Merce,” Carson says, adding, “The work is good, challenging and fun.”

Perez, who has received Lester Horton Awards for solo performance, teaching, and the revival of a work, is on the faculty of the Los Angeles County High School for the Performing Arts. Many of his students have gone on to dance at notable companies, such as Twyla Tharp’s and Ailey. He has also taught at UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, CalArts and USC, which has asked him to donate his substantial archives.

Among the archives will be tapes of performances by the Rudy Perez Dance Company, the company Perez started after his move to L.A., at Royce Hall in 1981, the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 and the Los Angeles Festival in 1987. During those years, Perez was dependent on National Endowment for the Arts grants. But the culture wars dried up such funding, and he saw his commissions dwindle along with his ability to maintain a company. His last major piece was “The Dance-Crazy Kid From New Jersey Meets Hofmannsthal”--a homage to dancer Ruth St. Denis that was danced in 1992 at Pasadena’s Armory Arts Center, which commissioned the work.

The Irvine Foundation grant, then, was a much-needed shot in the arm. His current crop of dancers, his first formal company since 1991, has been working with him, for pay, for nine months. Should his return to center stage be successful, the artist hopes to present a dance-only full-evening program at the Luckman next spring, as well as concerts in next fall and 2003, for which the Irvine Foundation, he says, would allow him a stipend.

“I’d like to expand the company, but it depends on the response at the Luckman and the community’s interest in being part of what I do,” Perez said. “For now, I love the process. It’s like having children or having a garden and seeing something grow. In the end, it’s all about persevering. Everyone wants overnight success. The value in what I’m doing is I’ve had to strive for it. The best revenge is longevity.” *

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“THE ART OF RUDY PEREZ,” Luckman Fine Arts Complex, 5151 State University Drive, L.A. Date: Next Sunday, 3 p.m. Price: $20. Phone: (323) 343-6600.