DANCE REVIEW : RUDY PEREZ, TIM MILLER TAKE HARD LOOKS AT L.A.

Nobody in modern dance and dance-based performance art captures the casual style and just as casual cruelty of Los Angeles with quite the icy scorn of Rudy Perez or the wounded but enduring faith of Tim Miller.

At 55, Perez looks at the city with the eyes of a wary New York-born outsider. He misses nothing, and in remarkably mordant choreographic action-paintings he penetrates our rituals of self-celebration to reveal the abyss beneath.

Miller grew up here believing in the Hollywood dream, learned better and left. Now, at 27, he has returned from a career in New York performance art with his perceptions of his youth honed sharp enough to draw blood.

Perez and Miller shared the Friday “Dance Park” program at the John Anson Ford Theater--with Perez presenting three dance abstractions originally created for radically different spaces than this two-level outdoor stage and Miller introducing the first half of an autobiographical performance piece set in this very neighborhood.

In Perez’s “Fall-Out” (music by Lloyd Rogers), his six-member company wore oversized jackets over sleek trousers and sneakers--a chic uniform for what seemed a restless and nearly desperate mating dance. Staggering into brief pairings--with a woman often flinging herself at her man (to be flung away a moment later)--these punchy, on-the-prowl unisex paragons paused only for preening, fashion-model poses: L.A. narcissism in excelsis .

With its unison routines marked by unusually showy steps and unyielding painted smiles, “Debut” appeared to be Perez’s contemptuous comment on show-dance. Indeed, the perky athletic platitudes were accompanied by both weighty organ tones (undercutting the empty cheer) and a voice track--a TV director giving his camera crew instructions--that served as another distancing mechanism.

In “Triangles Red,” set to another Rogers score, Perez’s company manipulated four large Brian Pilon sculpture units on the upper stage level, moving through the new apertures that each shift of position provided. Beyond its striking if remote compositions, the piece served as a kind of commercial for Pilon: The dancing did little more than continually use/display/highlight The Product. Maybe Perez is in danger of going Hollywood after all.

Tim Miller went Hollywood in 1977--searching for “true love, real sex and worldly experience” and finding two out of three on Highland. His deeply felt, liberating “Buddy Systems” recalled the reckless fantasy and sordid reality of these teen-age homosexual forays in eruptions of disjointed movement and confessional speech by Miller, plus slide projections, taped music and the queries of Douglas Sadownick (a k a “the boyfriend”).

Alternately agonized and ironic, intensely vulnerable or defiantly insular, Miller always remained true to his confused younger self. And he was astonishing, whether hurling himself into and eventually over a wall of mattresses or reliving a moment of satori inspired by a soprano performing Wagner’s “Liebestod” at Hollywood Bowl.

This story made a brilliant finale, and though, alas, it may never have happened (for nobody sang any Wagner in the 1977 Bowl season), the upbeat Hollywood ending expressed a longing for transcendence ultimately more truthful than mere facts.