Issue #41
Fall 2012
There is something remarkably contemporary about Cover Artist Rudy Perez’s 50-year career. In 1978 Rudy Perez told Jennifer Dunning: “The people at Judson were anti- drama and emotion and I think I suppressed the very thing I’m good at. That’s how I arrived at the stillness that I’m known for.” Goldman isolates this quote in her brilliant essay on Perez’s early work to illuminate the social dimensions at play in suppressing theatricality. In Chris Yon’s interview with Perez, they discuss Perez’s approach to his artistic life (“always work… the day job”) and his current career in Los Angeles. In a reprint of a 1971 essay in Art in America, Deborah Jowitt discusses the sculptural elements of Perez’s work, concluding that: “His is not a direction for all dance to take, but a quiet, private and ultimately fascinating path.” I am thrilled to share some part of that path with readers of MRPJ in this Cover Artist Portfolio. Thank you, Ursula, for making that happen — and thank you, Rudy, for your tenacious vision.
Editorial team
Cover Artist
Rudy Perez
Editor-In-Chief
Ursula Eagly
Managing Editor
Moriah Evans
Contributing Editor
Lydia Bell - Trajal Harrell - Buck Wanner - Jane Gabriels - Matthew Lyons
Intern
Allisa-Zee Hartmann
Ad Layout
Sarah Holcman
Copy Editor
Buck Wanner
Troy Lambert
Articles
Editor's Letter: Issue #41
Editor's Letter So, “Judson”: A place, an ideology, a historic artist collective, a present-day performance series. All of these Judsons live in this edition of the Performance Journal. This issue...
Recommended: Eight Pubs to Know About
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Interview Tim Griffin at The Kitchen
Moriah Evans: So who are you? Tim Griffin: I am Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Kitchen. But you were asking before if I had a background...
Black Box / White Cube: Yve Laris Cohen and Mika Tajima
Mika Tajima: We are both interrogating how the body is shaped, formed, or constrained by architecture and by form. In your recent work Coda, an installation with performance on view...
The Hudson Movement
In 1981 I had a beautiful boyfriend from Italy named Enzo Cosimi. He loved me very much and I him. He was studying in New York for two years at...
Infidel
I’m an atheist. A culturally Jewish atheist, completely opposed to organized religion. I always feel the need to say this whenever I am asked about Judson, where I worked for...
Judson Regulars
STEVE STASO calls himself an anti-artist and anti-filmmaker. He has been going to three out of four Monday night perfor-mances at Judson every month since the 1990s. At first, he...
Object, Image, Movement
From the Ballets Russes through Merce Cunningham, the histories of twentieth-century visual art and dance overlap through the regular collaborations by some of the major figures from both realms. These...
Fabulous Freddy
...At certain junctures [Freddy Herko] made the kind of contributions to the Judson concerts that were essential to the spleen of the movement. I recall with wry affection his Little...
The Future of Contact Improvisation: Amanda Abrams Interviews Nancy Stark Smith
Contact improvisation—a movement form based on weight-sharing—was created by Steve Paxton and first performed by him and several students at Oberlin College in 1972. Nancy Stark Smith was among the...
The Show Must Go On @ MoMA
MRPJ: When was the last time your presented one of your pieces in NYC? Also, when was the last time that you presented The Show Must Go On in New...
Interview: Moriah Evans and Asad Raza
This interview is a departure from much of the content in the MRPJ. Usually, we feature conversations with people who are practitioners of dance and choreography. I decided to take...
Who is Rudy Perez?
When I asked choreographer Chris Yon earlier this year about Rudy Perez, Yon’s first dance teacher, he said something that stuck with me: “Rudy is the choreographic grandfather you didn’t...
Rudy Perez in Conversation With Chris Yon
Rudy Perez talked with Chris Yon at Rudy’s apartment in Hollywood, California on May 22 and May 29, 2012. Chris first met Rudy as a student in Rudy’s class at...
“Still Waters Run Deep”: The Minimalist Explorations of Rudy Perez
In 1963, Rudy Perez choreographed his first work, Take Your Alligator With You, which he presented at the Judson Dance Theater in Concert #7, alongside artists such as Trisha Brown,...
Review: “The Stillness of Rudy Perez”
In the summer of 1952, at Black Mountain College, John Cage engineered a now-famous theater event. Above the collage of simultaneously performed dance, poetry, piano music and recorded music were...