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Rudy Perez, a minimalist choreographer who was a pioneer of postmodern dance, a movement that upended notions of what dance might look like, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.<\/p>\n
The cause was complications of asthma, said Sarah Swenson, a friend and fellow choreographer who was a member of Mr. Perez\u2019s ensemble.<\/p>\n
In the early 1960s, Mr. Perez was among a cohort of avant-garde artists who blurred the lines of their disciplines and employed all sorts of quotidian and often absurdist actions in their work. Performance art and conceptual art, experimental theater, music and dance seemed all of a piece, their practitioners united in challenging established traditions. Many of them were members of Judson Dance Theater, an experimental collective in Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n
The collective was short-lived \u2014 it began in the fall of 1962 and lasted only a few years \u2014 but it was influential. Performances were typically bare-bones, held in a church on the south side of Washington Square Park, and admission was free. There, Carol Schneeman staged her food fight, otherwise known as \u201cMeat Joy,\u201d<\/a> with half-dressed dancers rolling about in raw chickens, wet paint and scraps of this and that. Lucinda Childs enveloped herself in a stretchy tube of fabric<\/a> and transformed it into what looked, variously, like a bathtub, a boat and a crib. And Mr. Perez performed his duet \u201cTake Your Alligator With You,\u201d a spoof of the tropes of fashion photography enacted in a series of campy poses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Perez later carried the Judson spirit with him, in pieces that defied categories and narratives. In \u201cBang Bang,\u201d a piece he staged in 1966, he stalked the stage, dressed in coveralls and work goggles and brandishing a large pole, while the sound of an episode of Julia Child\u2019s cooking show devoted to asparagus was heard in the background; you could hear Ms. Child\u2019s high, piping voice declaiming the delights of that vegetable.<\/p>\n That same year, Mr. Perez performed what would become one of his best-known works, \u201cCountdown,\u201d in which he sat majestically on a stool smoking a cigarette, his face impassive but streaked with paint, as a recording of French folk songs played.<\/p>\n Don McDonagh, writing in The New York Times in 1968<\/a>, called the piece a \u201cdreamy work of meditative intensity\u201d that showed a man \u201cbrought out of himself by a few French songs.\u201d \u201cIn all his works,\u201d he added, \u201cMr. Perez moves like a graceful strongman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But was it dance? Like that of his colleagues, Mr. Perez\u2019s work was confounding because it had so little conventional movement in it, as Lewis Segal, the longtime dance critic for The Los Angeles Times, said in a documentary about Mr. Perez<\/a>. Because of Mr. Perez and others, Mr. Segal said, \u201cNow you can pretty much accept that you can have any kind of movement be dance if a dance intelligence and a dance artistry shapes it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Perez was known for his spare choreography, but he sometimes veered into zany maximalism. For a piece he staged in 1972 in a parking lot at Connecticut College in New London as part of a dance festival for the college\u2019s 25th-anniversary celebration, a bicycle, six cars and two motorcycles careened around a hapless, ineffectual traffic cop. Writing in The New York Times, Mr. McDonagh called it<\/a> \u201can elaborate ballet of evasion.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCoverage,\u201d first performed in 1970, was one of Mr. Perez\u2019s best-loved works, and it became a touchstone for generations of dancers. In that piece, a man dressed in white coveralls and a blue hard hat confines himself within a square of red tape that he carefully lays out on the stage. Inside its parameters, he slips off his uniform and leaps about \u2014 one moment a basketball player, another a Bob Fosse dancer \u2014 to snippets of pop music, news reports, the sound of keening bagpipes and, in conclusion, \u201cGod Bless America.\u201d It seemed like an elegy of sorts to the plight of the modern American male, caught between conformity and individualism. Or maybe not.<\/p>\n \u201cHe liked to leave things open,\u201d Anne Grimaldo, who was a member of Mr. Perez\u2019s company for 35 years, said in a phone interview. \u201cHe never spoon-fed the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By 1978, Mr. Perez had moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of California. He was hired for a year but stayed in Los Angeles after that, having fallen in love with the city\u2019s open vistas and the potential, as Deborah Vankin of The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2015<\/a>, to stretch out his work in site-specific spaces. There, he formed his own company and became part of a vibrant dance scene. (He also learned to drive at age 49.)<\/p>\n \u201cThere were so many wonderful spaces to do outdoor pieces \u2014 streets, office buildings, courtyards, that weren\u2019t being used,\u201d he told Ms. Vankin. \u201cIn L.A., I felt freer, I was able to go beyond. I wanted to get away from the emphasis on dance and work more with theater and natural movement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was, Mr. Segal of The Los Angeles Times said by phone, \u201clike an abstract expressionist,\u201d adding: \u201cHis pieces were very emotional and very dramatic without telling a story. They were dreams without a plot or characters.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Perez was always reluctant to interpret his own work for others. When Ms. Vankin visited his studio in 2015 and asked him to explain a new piece he was staging, he told her, \u201cIt\u2019s very much how I feel about what\u2019s going on in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is what, exactly? Ms. Vankin asked.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not gonna say. I\u2019m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it\u2019s all over. Let the audience decide what it\u2019s about.\u201d<\/p>\n Rudolph Anthony Perez was born on Nov. 24, 1929, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem. His mother, Maria Rivera, was a homemaker. He was adopted by his stepfather, Albino Perez, a merchant mariner.<\/p>\n His mother died of tuberculosis when Rudy was 7; he was also stricken by the disease and spent the next three years mostly bedridden in various hospitals, an experience that instilled in him a sense of always being an outsider.<\/p>\n When he was a little older, he began dancing the samba and the cha-cha at family gatherings. \u201cI didn\u2019t set out to be a dancer,\u201d he told an interviewer in 2020<\/a>, \u201cit was just a hobby at the time.\u201d He added, \u201cBecause I was a very good social dancer, as a young person, as a Latino, you got me on the dance floor and you couldn\u2019t get me off.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He took piano and voice at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) before turning to dance, which he studied at the New Dance Group, an early modern dance collective and school, in 1951. He later studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.<\/p>\n In a class with Cunningham, he met Elaine Summers, a member of the Judson collective, who invited him to perform with her. Yet even then dance was still a hobby for him; it was therapy, he told The New York Times in 2019.<\/a> He had day jobs as a messenger, a computer operator, an usher, a waiter and a stock boy at Bloomingdale\u2019s. He also worked at Bellevue Hospital with the movement therapist Marian Chace.<\/p>\n Mr. Perez is survived by a brother, Richard, and his longtime partner, James P. Kovacs.<\/p>\n Mr. Perez created some 100 dances during his long career and taught for more than half a century, even after his sight dimmed from glaucoma and macular degeneration. In 2018, the choreographer Jeff Slayton asked him which ones were his favorites<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI really enjoyed doing my solos,\u201d Mr. Perez said \u2014 the ones, he added, \u201cwhere I could just be a guy and maybe poke fun at dance. That I loved.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n