Charles Dennis, an experimental artist who in 1980 helped found the boundary-pushing performance center P.S. 122 in downtown Manhattan, becoming a central figure in the era’s avant-garde dance and theater scene, died on May 8 at his home in Hurley, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 77.
His death was caused by lung cancer, his wife, Mona Banzer, said.
A performance artist, dancer, choreographer, videographer, filmmaker and curator, Mr. Dennis began his career in 1971 as a member of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the company that the provocative director Robert Wilson had founded a few years earlier.
Mr. Dennis performed in some of Mr. Wilson’s strange, superlong early works and was an ensemble dancer in “Einstein on the Beach,” the pathbreaking, plotless, nearly five-hour opera that Mr. Wilson created with the composer Philip Glass. (In Avignon, France, where “Einstein” premiered in 1976, a friend spotted Mr. Dennis dancing in a cafe while pretending to be a rabbit, complete with bunny ears, giving a sense of the surreal style he was by then practiced in.)
In 1977, Mr. Dennis began creating his own form of what he called physical theater. In one solo, “Chaol Canyon,” he combined dance, a sculpture of a dragonfly with an eight-foot wingspan, a slide projection, and video and audio to evoke the immersive environment of a remote Arizona gorge.
Three years later, he founded Performance Space 122 with a group that included the choreographer Charles Moulton and the performance artist Tim Miller.
Mr. Moulton had been searching for a rehearsal space in 1979 when he discovered P.S. 122, an abandoned elementary school on First Avenue between Ninth and 10th Streets. In the auditorium, he tore up the linoleum to uncover a wood floor. (Soon after, the space was used to shoot the dance and audition scenes in the movie “Fame,” about students at the High School of Performing Arts.)
New York City had not yet emerged from a devastating financial crisis, and the East Village had its share of abandoned buildings, but the neighborhood was also full of the raw energy of experimentation by artists, dancers, punks and rappers.
P.S. 122, as the institution was widely known, was “the performance answer to punk rock,” Mark Russell, its artistic director from 1983 to 2004, said in an interview.
And Mr. Dennis embodied that rebellious, subversive spirit: In an interview, Mr. Moulton called him “an advocate of what was exciting and unknown. Take a chance. Damn the torpedoes.”
Mr. Dennis helped introduce two mainstay programs: Open Movement focused on improvisational dance, and Avant-Garde-Arama featured short works of dance, film, music, performance art, poetry and puppetry.
When a piece didn’t work, Mr. Dennis encouraged booing. “Failure was necessary,” Mr. Moulton said.
Blue Man Group debuted work there. Spalding Gray performed monologues. The performance artist Karen Finley read her father’s suicide note. David Leslie, a performance artist and stuntman, tumbled down a towering mountain built in the courtyard, crashing into cardboard boxes filled with balloons, while dressed as Maria von Trapp from “The Sound of Music.”
Having played ice hockey, football and basketball when he was younger, Mr. Dennis danced with an athlete’s improvisational and loose-limbed agility; he could be relaxed and leisurely, or twitchily kinetic. He created and participated in solo and group performances at P.S. 122 (which reopened after a renovation in 2018 as Performance Space New York) and elsewhere from 1980 until a couple of months ago.
In a signature work called “2x2x4,” he used 14 two-by-fours to dance around, to build a wall he could sleep behind, and to construct the frame of a house that he could sit inside or collapse with an impish touch.
“He was extreme, but it had a lot of humanity and always had an element of wink and humor,” Sal Cataldi, who accompanied Mr. Dennis on guitar for that piece and others, said in an interview.
“Recycle Me,” a lament over the environmental impact of plastic waste, left Mr. Dennis covered in mud, as if in hope of primordial renewal. In “cityanimal,” an exploration of what he called the thin line between civilization and barbarism in urban living, he portrayed a character at once urbane and feral, gnawing on a turkey leg from a garbage bag and lapping water from a bowl.
“I’m not interested in a purely abstract dance, but in making a living, breathing, passionate personal statement,” he told Dansechange Montreal/New York, a dance exchange program, in 1984.
Charles Cheney Dennis Jr. was born on Feb. 4, 1949, in Manhattan, one of three children of Charles C. Dennis Sr., a magazine distributor who worked in market research, and Margaret (Hull) Dennis.
He attended Drew University in New Jersey, but dropped out to work and tour with Mr. Wilson, receiving his bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary arts from Empire State College (now SUNY Empire) in 1988.
In 1989, he began producing “Alive and Kicking,” a public access television show that documented the New York performance scene.
A decade later, Mr. Dennis began experimenting with new-media technology in his solo performances. In “Me & My Dad & TV,” he conversed with his father, who was seen on a monitor at the side of the stage. In “Mr. Remote,” he played a character obsessed with home electronics, dancing with a martini as images of himself were projected on a wall.
The critic Jennifer Dunning wrote of those two pieces in The New York Times in 1999 that Mr. Dennis was “appealingly serene and something of an enjoyably naughty child.”
The next year, Mr. Dennis made “Homecoming,” a documentary about the history of P.S. 122 that premiered in 2004.
A brief first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Banzer, whom he married in 1987, Mr. Dennis is survived by two sisters, Margaret and Faith Dennis.
In the mid-1980s, he began making short experimental films. In “New York 1985,” he and another character carried on with everyday life in a postapocalyptic Manhattan, wearing hazmat suits and gas masks as they carried briefcases, traveling by bus and subway to the financial district.
Mr. Dennis moved to the Hudson Valley in 2019; he brought Avant-Garde-Arama upstate and, in his later films, began using drones. In “Onteora Ice Dance,” he wore hockey skates and, with a drone overhead, carved striking patterns on a frozen lake.
He also continued to write the absurdist sports columns he had begun writing for Public Illumination Magazine, an artists’ periodical, in 1979.
In 2024, as Chuck Tennis, he covered the imaginary Catskill Mountain Nothing Competition, in which “nothing happened, nobody won, all the contestants were full of almost nothing and the audience was thrilled.”
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