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Doris Rudko, continued.
In her biography Louis Horst: A Musician in a Dancer's World, Janet Soares' quotes Rudko's memories of that period in her life. She assisted Horst as he reviewed performances at the American Dance Festival for the New London Evening Day: "I'd eke out reviews for the Day with him the way I'd eke out students’ compositions. I'd sit at the typewriter and he dictated. It was always a task. He always had someone I think, to put him to the task." On August 5, 1958 he reviewed one of Rudko's concerts, presumably without her help: "Field of Torment," he wrote, "a work of dimension and distinction, shows not only a lean, almost classical understanding of spatial design but also a fine awareness of form.”

He did, however, think it was too long. Of another work by Rudko on the program, he said, "Between is a tender work dealing with ... women waiting, waiting with patience, with the restlessness of fear and desperation, and finally with the fatalistic calm of acceptance. The subtle interweaving of contrapuntal patterns was admirably suited to the gentle mood and simplicity of this evocative piece." The teacher of thematically organized dance composition was pleased with his student. He would not have been pleased if she had joined the postmodernists. "I would have been a member of Judson," she tells me, "if I hadn't been assisting Louis."

By the time Rudko became Horst's assistant, she had had an extensive teaching career at the High School for the Performing Arts, where she taught from 1949 until the mid-fifties, and served at one point as acting chair of the dance faculty. None of the members of the dance faculty had a permanent teaching license from the New York City Board of Education; they all had substitute licenses and received a per diem for teaching. Around 1955, Rudko remembers, the Board began to urge dance faculty members to get degrees in fields like English in order to be eligible for permanent licenses. "Tenure," Rudko says, "wasn't the issue. Many of us felt that dance teachers needed to take classes in technique, and be active in the professional field. It was a professional issue." In the end, Rudko and most of her fellow dance faculty members left. "The Board of Education didn't understand the art form from a professional point of view," she said.

Photo of Louis Horst, courtesy of the Dance Collection, New York Public Library.

This was not true of Rudko; she was practicing her art as well as teaching it. Her choreographic credits include work for Contemporary Dance Productions, a choreographers' cooperative formed by Rudko, Jack Moore, Marion Scott and others, as well as a number of free-lance assignments, some of them for theater groups. She was also dance director for the New York Music and Dance Improvisation Ensemble. In her own work, Rudko took plenty of the chances she instructs her students to take; few choreographers would be brave enough to take on The Waves, Virginia Woolf's most complex stream-of-consciousness novel as the libretto for a dance, but in 1962 the work premiered at the 92nd Street Y. Why The Waves? "Well, I read the book!" Rudko says. "The piece was called Patterns of Soliloquies and it was really about inner dialogue with self, abstract in treatment. It wasn't a narrative or about specific characters. I used some short works by Webern; I remember a group of dancers seated upstage who had their backs to the audience, they were looking into the distance, like a dream."

It's in fact not surprising that Rudko would have taken inspiration from an intensely cerebral writer such as Woolf. Her studies with Margaret H'Doubler at Wisconsin and Horst in New York focused on intellectual as well as on aesthetic and expressive concerns. Dance does not exist in a vacuum and when Rudko discusses the various influences on the art form in her most active years in New York, she speaks of Dada, Surrealism, Freud, Einstein, “chance,” and Marshall McLuhan, among many others.

Rudko understands context and is open to all kinds of movement, and these are things she puts into practice as a teacher of composition. She adheres to no particular aesthetic, unlike what she sees in young choreographers giving workshops today. "They teach their own aesthetic," she says. "It's repertory, not composition."