Doris Rudko and the long journey of making dances
by Martha Ullman West
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Photo of Doris Rudko, courtesy of the Dance Collection, New York Public Library. |
Doris Rudko seats herself firmly on a folding metal chair, shrugs out of her leather coat, and anchors her bag to the floor by sticking her black-booted foot through its handle. "I always do that," she says in response to my raised eyebrows. "If anyone tries to take my bag, they're going to have to drag me along with it."
Rudko is not young—she is somewhere between seventy and eighty but won't say exactly where—stands barely five foot two, and might weigh as much as a hundred pounds, but she's far from frail. In the studios where she still teaches dance composition, and on the streets of downtown New York where she attends as many performances as she can get to from her home in Clifton, New Jersey, she's clearly a force to be reckoned with.
She also speaks her mind. Looking around at the blue painted walls and fake marble decoration in the Judson Memorial Church, Rudko pats her already impeccably pulled back hair into place and says of the site dance aficionados believe to be sacred for reasons other than religious ones, "This is a hideous space, isn't it?"
It is a cold February night and we're about to see three short pieces performed under the rubric of Movement Research at Judson Church, where Terpsichore first danced in sneakers, not to mention swim fins, in the early sixties. Rudko, who likes to be where history is happening, saw it all, and retains a vivid memory of many performances there, among them one by Steve Paxton wallowing among rocks in a big tub.
The lights go down and the performance begins with a solo improvisation by Osmany Tellez, a young Brazilian choreographer who stands poised on the staircase before performing a solo that starts small, with flexed hands and feet, then gets bigger as he moves all over the large space—fidgeting, fondling the face of a plaster angel, circling with increased speed, and ending finally with floor rolls that precede a cross-legged pose. Bathed in sweat, he takes a bow and Rudko whispers, "I wish he had done more dancing."
She gets her wish for at least more organized dancing when Lisa Race, a member of David Dorfman's company, does a spiraling, full-bodied, shapely dance to accordion music. "She has a good sense of phrasing," Rudko comments once the lights go up. "This piece is organic, it comes from the impulse of movement." The next work, 3XLA, is performed by Sarah Michelson and Mike Iveson and is closer to performance art than dance, more reminiscent of acrobatics than organized movement. About this, Rudko has no comment. As we fold up our chairs, she looks around the room at the audience of twenty-five or so, and sadly says, "This series used to be packed. This was very thin fare."
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