Countdown

Rudy Perez originally created Countdown as a solo for himself in 1966. Set to two folk songs from the Auvergne region in the heart of France, Perez’s ballet communicates desolation through minimal yet dramatic movement. Don McDonagh, writing in The New York Times in 1968, called the piece a “dreamy work of meditative intensity” that showed a man “brought out of himself by a few French songs.”