Rudy Perez (November 24, 1929 – September 29, 2023)
Rudy Perez, a post-modern dance Everyman
Rudy Perez, a post-modern dance Everyman
Choreographer Rudy Perez (Rudolph Anthony Perez) died at home after a brief hospitalization.
Knowing that his end was soon approaching, he gathered all his remaining strength to remember and either speak with or receive emails from family, his former dancers, collaborators, students and the many friends with whom he took care to stay in touch over the years.
Born at the beginning of the Great Depression, when the world was thrown into a time of imposed frugality, the sense of spareness that was part of his early life became a hallmark of his work. Nothing was extra or wasted. It was uncluttered, sculpted, compressed essences of motion, crafted and compressed to give us equally telling essences of emotion. It was through how he assembled movement, sound, costumes, props and lighting, we sensed what might lie sometimes restlessly or unrecognized below the veneers we construct whether knowingly or not.
His childhood included the loss of his mother to TB and his own two-year hospitalization and immobilization for it. Born to Puerto Rican parents, after his mother’s death, his father, who had been a Merchant Marine, became the caretaker of a Bronx synagogue to be with his three sons, of whom Rudy was the eldest, and they lived next to the synagogue.
Rudy graduated from Manhattan’s High School for the Arts in 1948 and began working at various day jobs including computer programming. Up to that point, dancing was for social events and entertaining friends and family. “I could have gone bowling. I didn’t set out to be a dancer. It was just something I did because I had to work. It was either that or bowling, so I thought dance would be more interesting. I needed a balance in my life which dancing unexpectedly provided.”
He began his studies at the New Dance Group in 1950, continuing with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins and Mary Anthony to name a few. “I say that from Merce I got the intelligence, from Martha I got the passion, and from Mary Anthony I learned how to structure a class so that it’s an overall experience and deals with what is necessary for technique, improvisation and building work.” Anthony emphasized dance as a connection to not only the physical, but the emotional and spiritual aspects of the individual. Another important experience was the time he spent working under the tutelage of the founder of Dance Therapy, Marian Chace in the psychiatric section of Bellevue Hospital. Chace’s work was based on seeing movement as symbolic of the unconscious.
In his work, there was emotion, but without emoting. As in “Countdown,” he might paint three lines of green under his eye that might be interpreted as tears, but his face or body never crumpled the way we do when crying. It was there and not there. This contributed to the sense of mystery in his work. There were somehow realms hinted at beyond what we could see and maybe those realms were in us and not just in the figure or figures we witnessed onstage. The realms from which he drew inspiration were numerous. He was like a radio whose tuning knob was being constantly turned with bits of information continually appearing to him to be brought together in unlikely but illuminating configurations.
While his work in Los Angeles expanded with the use of dancers with other training, however they were deployed, whatever props or costumes and the use of more music composed for him, he always provided his audience the invitation to remeasure and rethink more deeply what might have first seemed only abstract. But he made sure the abstractions were always beautiful, interesting and kaleidoscopic as he constantly worked and reworked the movement, “the information,” as he called it. As a choreographer, he continued to listen and observe how the information lived in his dancers bodies and minds.
He approached choreography as a serious and devoted craftsman, there to assemble these elements and then from them construct a choreographic experience. While his early dance, “Coverage,” presented him in coveralls and hardhat, the dress and protective outerwear of a workman – an Everyman, he let us into the internal workings of that person. But at the same time, he was showing us his craft and his art as he measured out a space in which he could shed that outer restriction and move more authentically. In it and much of his choreography, we could experience, the common denominators of our shared humanity.
When age and increasingly limited sight began to create limits to his everyday life, he continued to communicate through his ongoing company work, only discontinued at the age of 90 by the Covid shutdown. No matter, he continued to reach out through brief email missives with quotes of poetry, music lyrics, links to something positive to watch online, sent to a list of 400 recipients. Having once called himself a minimalist, his life became one of bountiful gratitude, love and concern for the many people in his life and the pleasure he took in the everyday tasks he could still perform, not for an audience, but in the act of the everyday living he had plumbed in so many ways.
For information on his works and achievements please go to www.rudyperezdance.org
*
Knowing that his end was soon approaching, he gathered all his remaining strength to remember and either speak with or receive emails from family, his former dancers, collaborators, students and the many friends with whom he took care to stay in touch over the years.
Born at the beginning of the Great Depression, when the world was thrown into a time of imposed frugality, the sense of spareness that was part of his early life became a hallmark of his work. Nothing was extra or wasted. It was uncluttered, sculpted, compressed essences of motion, crafted and compressed to give us equally telling essences of emotion. It was through how he assembled movement, sound, costumes, props and lighting, we sensed what might lie sometimes restlessly or unrecognized below the veneers we construct whether knowingly or not.
His childhood included the loss of his mother to TB and his own two-year hospitalization and immobilization for it. Born to Puerto Rican parents, after his mother’s death, his father, who had been a Merchant Marine, became the caretaker of a Bronx synagogue to be with his three sons, of whom Rudy was the eldest, and they lived next to the synagogue.
Rudy graduated from Manhattan’s High School for the Arts in 1948 and began working at various day jobs including computer programming. Up to that point, dancing was for social events and entertaining friends and family. “I could have gone bowling. I didn’t set out to be a dancer. It was just something I did because I had to work. It was either that or bowling, so I thought dance would be more interesting. I needed a balance in my life which dancing unexpectedly provided.”
He began his studies at the New Dance Group in 1950, continuing with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins and Mary Anthony to name a few. “I say that from Merce I got the intelligence, from Martha I got the passion, and from Mary Anthony I learned how to structure a class so that it’s an overall experience and deals with what is necessary for technique, improvisation and building work.” Anthony emphasized dance as a connection to not only the physical, but the emotional and spiritual aspects of the individual. Another important experience was the time he spent working under the tutelage of the founder of Dance Therapy, Marian Chace in the psychiatric section of Bellevue Hospital. Chace’s work was based on seeing movement as symbolic of the unconscious.
In his work, there was emotion, but without emoting. As in “Countdown,” he might paint three lines of green under his eye that might be interpreted as tears, but his face or body never crumpled the way we do when crying. It was there and not there. This contributed to the sense of mystery in his work. There were somehow realms hinted at beyond what we could see and maybe those realms were in us and not just in the figure or figures we witnessed onstage. The realms from which he drew inspiration were numerous. He was like a radio whose tuning knob was being constantly turned with bits of information continually appearing to him to be brought together in unlikely but illuminating configurations.
While his work in Los Angeles expanded with the use of dancers with other training, however they were deployed, whatever props or costumes and the use of more music composed for him, he always provided his audience the invitation to remeasure and rethink more deeply what might have first seemed only abstract. But he made sure the abstractions were always beautiful, interesting and kaleidoscopic as he constantly worked and reworked the movement, “the information,” as he called it. As a choreographer, he continued to listen and observe how the information lived in his dancers bodies and minds.
He approached choreography as a serious and devoted craftsman, there to assemble these elements and then from them construct a choreographic experience. While his early dance, “Coverage,” presented him in coveralls and hardhat, the dress and protective outerwear of a workman – an Everyman, he let us into the internal workings of that person. But at the same time, he was showing us his craft and his art as he measured out a space in which he could shed that outer restriction and move more authentically. In it and much of his choreography, we could experience, the common denominators of our shared humanity.
When age and increasingly limited sight began to create limits to his everyday life, he continued to communicate through his ongoing company work, only discontinued at the age of 90 by the Covid shutdown. No matter, he continued to reach out through brief email missives with quotes of poetry, music lyrics, links to something positive to watch online, sent to a list of 400 recipients. Having once called himself a minimalist, his life became one of bountiful gratitude, love and concern for the many people in his life and the pleasure he took in the everyday tasks he could still perform, not for an audience, but in the act of the everyday living he had plumbed in so many ways.
For information on his works and achievements please go to www.rudyperezdance.org
*