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Doris Rudko, continued.
Rudko is definite in her opinions and she has earned the right to speak her mind. As a dancer, choreographer, and master teacher, she has been involved in dance in New York for half a century. And elsewhere. She has taught her classes in dance composition all over the world—Taiwan, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden—and she still teaches choreography workshops in New York. A flyer on a table at Judson announces one she will teach the following week at the Mulberry Street Theatre, “Intuition and Craft: Explorations with Time."

Earlier in the day we had met at Juilliard, where Rudko was a member of the dance composition faculty from 1969 to 1992. We talked about her life in dance and how it started. Born Doris Ebener in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of German-American parents (Rudko has been married for fifty years to Lionel Rudko, a musician and now retired former assistant to Isaac Stern), she was an athletic child in a town where there was enormous interest in gymnastics. "Not tumbling," she quickly points out, in a slightly raspy, whispery voice, "but apparatus, parallel bars, etc. And my gym teacher in high school was very dance conscious." Rudko, who retains the pared-down body of an athlete or the dancer she became, took formal dance classes in high school and majored in dance at the University of Wisconsin, where Margaret H'Doubler had created the first dance major in the United States.

"She had the educator's point of view," Rudko says, "teaching dance with an emphasis on spiritual, intellectual, and physical oneness. From her I learned that learning to trust one's intuitive intelligence is the basis of creativity; from Louis Horst I learned the craft of choreography." Following her graduation in 1945, Rudko taught at New Trier High School in Illinois and in 1947 she went to New York, intending to have a career as a dancer.

"I danced in the last performance of On the Town," which took place on the steel pier in Atlantic City. "Comden and Green and Robbins were all there." Performances in Shootin' Star in tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia followed. "Lester Horton was the choreographer," she says, "It closed on the road and it never opened on Broadway. In rehearsals the cast wore blue jeans, but the pink and beige color-coordinated musical comedy cowboy costumes ruined the dramatic realism of the show that was billed as a new direction in musicals. That ended my excursion into show biz!"

Rudko, having decided to pursue dance as a creative rather than show business endeavor, signed up for classes in composition with Louis Horst, the founding father of dance composition pedagogy, who was teaching at the time in Jean Erdman's studio in the Village. "Bob Joffrey and Jerry Arpino were in the classes, too. We all went to Bigelow's Drugstore afterwards." (The ice cream at Bigelow's was delicious, as every child who grew up in the Village knew.)

Horst is remembered particularly for being a mentor to Martha Graham and many others during the early days of modern dance. As early as 1925 he was also a proponent of the work of the German dance pioneer Mary Wigman. In his later years, Horst had no tolerance for the work of artists who came to challenge traditional modernism in dance such as Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, or members of the Judson group. By the late fifties and early sixties, when young choreographers were, as Rudko put it, negating the past in order to move forward, Horst was unable to make the journey with them. Dance historian Don McDonagh has called him a "symbol of fixity" and Rudko says of him in this later period, "He didn't follow the downtown scene nor did he understand that the neo-Dada aesthetic of the Judson dancers was about experimentation and breaking barriers ... 'art as process,' not about creating a beautiful work of art.'”

Rudko's clear-eyed view of Horst comes from a long, close relationship with him. She took his classes at Erdman's studio two times over and by 1956 she had become his assistant, working with him at the American Dance Festival, the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, and as associate editor of Dance Observer, the magazine he founded in 1934. The relationship endedwith Horst's death from a stroke following a heart attack in 1964.