Made in L.A. – Music for Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble

Made in L.A. is the first in a series of Bachelors Anonymous soundtracks for digital release. It’s the score for a dance performance by Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble, February 8–10, 1991, at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).¹ Bachelor David Hughes tells the story behind the score.

This album is released on the occasion of All Souls’ Day and is dedicated to the memory of Rudy Perez (1929–2023).

The album is available via
HearNow and Bandcamp

As we noted with our last release, The Big Picture:

We should mention here that we began digital distribution of our catalog in 2020 after having dusted off music we created for dancer-choreographer Rudy Perez in 1991. In the course of becoming reacquainted with Rudy, David became reacquainted with Scott Fraser, who had engineered Rudy’s live sound and whom David had featured in a downtown music series in 1981. Since 1992, Scott has designed sound for the Kronos Quartet and, happily for us, agreed to mix six of our songs and record three missing vocals in his Architecture studio. 

In late August, Scott also mastered the six tracks of Made in L.A., featured here. A month and a day later, on September 29, 2023, Rudy died after a brief illness.²

Even prior to Rudy’s passing, we already had decided to issue the score for Made in L.A. as soon as possible. We felt that the late Mark Stock’s lithographic portrait of Rudy would be fitting for the album cover partly because I first saw Rudy perform in a collaboration with Mark at a gallery across the street from where I lived in Little Tokyo.³ Fortunately we were able to reach Sharon Ding, who manages Stock’s estate; she kindly provided an unframed image of the portrait along with permission to use it. Regarding the cover color scheme, that was a happy accident via Photoshop. As you’ll see, it recalls some of the costuming of Made in L.A., so it was only natural to go with it.

The Project

Sometime in 1990 Rudy asked us for a soundtrack “reel.” It would have included scores we’d created for John Fleck as well as our music for a play by Megan Terry produced at UCLA by director Zack (all of which will be issued in the coming months). After listening to it Rudy invited us to his apartment to view a few videotapes of his company’s work as well as his solos. He was preparing a full-length performance, Made in L.A., at LACE in early February.

I had worked with Rudy since 1980, both in performance and workshops,⁴ but I don’t think Rob had yet been introduced to his choreography. We then visited Rudy’s studio and watched his four dancers—Jeffrey Grimaldo, Anne Goodman, Robert Keane, and Dura Snodgrass. (Keane, also a musician, would become our vocal coach following this collaboration.)

Loop I

As it turned out, for the first section, called “Loop I,” Rudy’s Ensemble already had a working score: the Allegro from the “Spring” movement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The plan was for the quintessentially Baroque to be interlaced with our own twentieth-century composition, each transition imparting a shift in mood, movement, and light. Later, after we delivered our score, Rudy added the subtitle “Spiritual Quest” to this section.

The LACE performance space was a black box, into which costumer Susan Perry Miick splashed the dancers’ saffron robes—again, after we’d delivered the score. I’m compelled to note here that I met Rob Berg not long after he had declined the vows of the Vedanta order at the Ramakrishna mission in Hollywood, whereby he’d have donned such ochre robes.

Remain in Light

The middle section, “Remain in Light,” was termed Rudy’s “second performing wind” in a profile by Los Angeles Times reporter Julie Wheelock: “For the first time since 1983, Perez will appear on stage, performing a premiere work with his company […].”⁵ Rudy told Wheelock that he hadn’t felt the “need” to dance, “the creative process—choreography and teaching—[being] the most exciting part.” But the Persian Gulf War and the recession had depleted his company’s morale. “I feel like the ship is sinking,” he explained, “and I’ve decided to jump into the water and save it.” Furthermore: “Now that I’m into it, I have a reserve of extra energy and suddenly I feel alive again.”

“Remain in Light” was subtitled “or Take Back Your Yellow Ribbon,” the signifier of the stoic’s vigil. Indeed, Rudy dedicated the evening’s performance “to the Men and Women of Persian Gulf,” but without specifying any station they held. In our preparation of the music, in our attendance at rehearsals, we never discussed a prevailing intention—let alone an ideological underpinning—for either dance or score.

And so, while the civic situation may have been Rudy’s inspiration—“The war is bringing a lot of stuff to the surface that’s been dormant in me and in the world,” he told Wheelock—it was not Rudy’s issue in our practicum. Speaking of “Remain in Light,” Rudy said:

This solo piece conveys sorrow, fear and caring, and I’ll be performing rather than dancing, so it’s a matter of stamina and emotional strength. My performance will go from minimal to frantic, back and forth. I won’t be doing any arabesques or jumps—my body can’t take that. I find there’s always doubt, and you need to keep that edge.

No arabesques, no jumps, but rather one or two cross-stage pelvis-pounding body-hurls is what I recall in performance. (I attended all three nights because the LACE sound or lighting engineer came down with the flu and I was called in to sub….)

Loop II

The final section in the triptych, “Loop II”—subtitled “Altered Vision”—had been inspired by Merce Cunningham, according to Wheelock. As I told Rudy in 2020:

Your photographer Nixson Borah came to me at some point during the three nights and said, “I believe that the coming together of your scores and the ensemble’s choreography, dancing,” and of course your solo, “is the most impressive that I’ve ever seen.”⁶ Meaning that the way it worked together. And in [some] cases I know there was some opposition, because Rob told me that he had never experienced asynchronized dancing before. And so there must have been an element of that. That’s why I’m eager see the video.⁷ But then Rob saw Cunningham [the documentary film] recently and he told me, “Oh, I get it.”

Today Rob recalls taking inspiration for the composition of “Loop II” from the work of High Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, an obdurate Catholic who nevertheless served monarchs on their march towards Reformation. (Exactly a year later, the Bachelors used a fragment of Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in alium as an offstage introduction to our show at Club Lingerie.) If the Performance Ensemble members moved counter to Rob’s counterpoint, this appears to have contributed to dance critic Lewis Segal characterizing the “Loop II” characters as “looking hopelessly self-absorbed and out of touch,” as noted below. And so the saffron robes of “exotic” “Loop I” were traded for the “Californian shorts and singlets” of “domestic” “Loop II,” as Segal put it.⁸ Segal called the company’s movement here “dancey, convivial.”

The Reviews

In his review as dance critic for the Los Angeles Times, Segal took pains to construct a narrative arc for Made in L.A., Rudy himself having told profiler Wheelock he had no interest in “performing unless I have something to say, and right now I do.” Segal:

All three sections involve responses to the environment. In Part 1, we see people carrying and wielding umbrellas. Moreover, the score by Robert Berg and David Hughes (with some crucial borrowings from the Baroque) incorporates what may be distant thunder—or something more ominous. In Perez’s solo, the sense of environmental oppression becomes obsessive. Yet the romping sportswear crowd of the last part basks contentedly in the light, oblivious to any suggestion of threat.

[…] “Made in L.A.” seems to explore the war’s impact on different sensibilities—with, as usual, the chic beach set looking hopelessly self-absorbed and out of touch. But the contrasts between groups don’t bring us closer to the sense of jittery dread that Perez embodies in his solo […].

“Made in L.A.” aims for a wider scope, to be sure, but its essential statement consists of one man enraged. The rest, however artful, is mere decoration.

Artist, writer, and educator Jacki Apple, who herself had collaborated with Rudy in 1984, traced her own trajectory for Made in L.A., contrasting “politically or socially topical art” that conforms to “the new doctrine of ‘political correctness’” with Rudy’s “poetic signs rather than obvious slogans.”¹¹ In “Loop I” Apple observed “how East/West ways of being are intertwined from nineteenth-century colonialism, to Vietnam and 1960s spiritual pilgrimages to India, to postmodern cross-cultural art.” The saffron-clad dancers’ “British” umbrellas were “wielded […] like weapons, aiming first at the ground searching for the unseen enemy within, then at the sky reminding how we arm those whom we then make our enemies.” Apple continued: “Vivaldi’s music alternated with David Hughes and Robert Berg’s Tibetan-influenced synthesizer score corresponding with lighting changes. East Asian/Indian right-angled limbs and Western ballet-based modern dance movement fused into a contemporary hybrid.”

The listener can hear for yourself whether the score for “Loop I” was “Tibetan-inflenced” (it wasn’t; and for the record, to paraphrase Freud, “sometimes a boom is just a boom”). The score for Rudy’s solo, “Remain in Light,” of course can be construed as containing unison chant by, say, the Gyuto monks, whom Rob and I had seen at Royce Hall exactly fifteen months before (Ginger Baker sitting a row or two in front of us). Leaving that aside, and not having heard this music for nearly thirty years prior to my revisiting it for my conversation with Rudy, I’m reminded of a similar dynamic present in Peter Gabriel’s “Lay Your Hands On Me” and especially his “Wallflower,” in which a sensual, sexual tension builds to nearly no resolution.

Jacki Apple compared the cultural encounters of “Loop I” with Rudy’s “aesthetic-political clashes closer to home”:

As a Puerto Rican, New York downtown, first-generation minimalist whose work was at the forefront of what became the avant-garde establishment, he always experienced himself as an outsider. Unlike his peers he never rejected narrative, but his formal aesthetic is antithetical to the current dictum on ethnic representation.

To that I will add “and sexual representation.” Rudy chafed at being offered inclusion in an oral history project of LGBT+ elders in 2021. As his emissary, I wrote: “When he worked with [Stephen] Petronio in 2019 for the latter’s Bloodlines series he found that Petronio had pegged him as a gay artist, which, as I said, he doesn’t consider himself to be. As he told me yesterday, he doesn’t consider himself to be a Latinx artist either. He doesn’t see either label as relevant to his work.”¹²

Apple called Rudy’s “Remain in Light” solo “a profoundly moving protest against the tyranny of war, the hypocrisy of justifications, and the spiritual desecration it engenders in our society as a whole” before describing the solo in detail:

Wearing a black suit, his head wrapped Arab-style in an orange scarf, with a red ribbon draped round his shoulders like a prayer shawl, Perez fingered white beads. They became a lash, then bonds about his wrists. He tied the ribbon around his head, and twisting his hands in struggle, wove in and out of the now open umbrellas. Propelled out of blackness, he fell forward face down. Unbound, he nervously crumpled the beads and pulled them from his mouth like words. Gazing upward, beseechingly, he untied the red ribbon and drew it from his hands like blood from Christ’s palms. Violence as a solution is cross-cultural, as is human suffering and ideological and religious dogma.

I transcribe these words two weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel and the cross-cultural call for a solution.

Track List

1. Loop I – Spiritual Quest
2. Remain in Light, Or Take Back Your Yellow Ribbon
3. Loop II – Altered Vision Part 1
4. Loop II – Altered Vision Part 2
5. Loop II – Altered Vision Part 3
6. Loop II – Altered Vision Part 4

Credits

BACHELORS ANONYMOUS is
Rob Berg: Synth
David Hughes: Drum Box, Synth

All music written and arranged by
Rob Berg & David Hughes

Produced by
Bachelors Anonymous

All instruments by Bachelors Anonymous
Recorded at
The Men’s Dept (¼” 4-track), Pasadena, 1990–1991
“Loop II” Edited at
The Men’s Dept (GarageBand), Los Angeles, 2022

Digital transfers by
Rob Berg and David Hughes
The Men’s Dept, Los Angeles and Denver, 2020

Mastered by
Scott Fraser
Architecture, Aug 2023

Dedicated to
Rudy Perez (1929–2023)

Album cover
Design by David Hughes and Rob Berg
Layout by David Hughes
Image by
Mark Stock (1951–2014)
Rudy
1984
Lithograph
7½ x 9⅞ inches

© ℗ 2023 Berg & Hughes
Celibataire Music (ASCAP)

Notes

1. For the record, the LACE Performance Committee at the time consisted of Skip Arnold, Tim Bennett (who co-wrote the script for the Bachelors’ music video “Looking for You“), Erica Bornstein, Harry Gamboa Jr., Dorothy Garcia, Tina Gerstler, Mario Martinez, and Tom Recchion (who with Jacki Apple provided the score for Rudy’s Urban Suite in 1984).
2. Please see my personal tribute to Rudy, Meeting the Master, as well as an official obituary and press release.
3. Technically, I had collaborated with Rudy myself two weeks before at Traction Gallery in Urban Rite, a performance that included David Moreno and Joseph Shuldiner.
4. See my five-part conversations with Rudy from 2020 and 2021 for more on our interactions.
5. Julie Wheelock, “Rudy Perez Finds a New Reason to Dance Again,” Los Angeles Times, 08 Feb 1991, F14. Subsequent quotations are from this same profile.
6. To be clear, Nixson Borah confined his comment to Rudy’s oeuvre, not the wider world of modern dance performances. In 2020 I asked Nixson if he recalled his remark to me. “I’m afraid I have no memory of what you’re describing,” he wrote. “Which is not to say it didn’t happen. I’m sorry to be unhelpful.” From email, 30 Dec 2020.
7. According to my email to Nixson Borah, referenced above, “Alas, no video became available to me.” From email, 27 Dec 2020.
8. Lewis Segal, “Rudy Perez Ensemble in ‘Made in L.A.’,” Los Angeles Times, 11 Feb 1921, F8. Subsequent quotations are from this same review. No still images from “Loop II” are available to us.
9. Doug Sadownick, “Dance Pick of the Week: Rudy Perez,” L.A. Weekly, 08 Feb 1991, 116.
10. Lewis Segal, “Compelling Visions in ‘Borders’,” Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1994, F3.
11. Jacki Apple, Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983–2018, Intellect (UK), 2019, 106–107. Subsequent quotations are from this same source.
12. Email to Tom Bliss, Director of Operations, OUTWORDS, 02 Sep 2021.