Andy Warhol frequently attended Judson Dance Theater concerts, where he first saw Fred Herko, the American Ballet Theater School–trained dancer who became his muse. Herko appeared in many of Warhol’s earliest films, including the newly digitized film reels featured here in which the dancer and choreographer skates and gazes at himself nude. This screening features Jill And Freddy Dancing (1963)—in which Herko performs with Village Voice critic Jill Johnston on a Lower East Side rooftop—and includes Warhol’s films of Johnston performing with a broom at Warhol’s Factory. The program also brings together Warhol’s Screen Tests featuring Judson participants, including the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the lighting designer Billy Linich.
Screenings:
Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Screen Test, Freddy Herko (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4:36 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Screen Test, Lucinda Childs (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4:30 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Screen Test, Lucinda Childs (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4:24 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Screen Test, Billy Linich (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4:30 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Screen Test, Billy Linich (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4:24 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
Freddy in Motion & Film Clips (1963)
Freddy in the Mirror / Not Very Good (1963)
Freddy Just Enough for 3 Minutes (1963)
Freddy Partly Dark (1963)
16mm film (black and white, silent) transferred to digital file, 12 min.
Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Billy Kluver (1963)
Jill at Billy Kluver’s (1963)
Jill (1963)
16mm film (black and white, silent) transferred to digital file, 9 min.
Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Jill Johnston Dancing (1964)
16mm film (black and white, silent), 4 min.
The Circulating Film Library, The Museum of Modern Art
On December 4, independent scholar and curator Gerard Forde will present a short lecture titled “Friends of Dorothy.”
Gerard Forde (b. 1968, London) is a self-educated, independent scholar and curator based in London and Berlin. His research over the past decade has focused on the interconnections between avant-garde visual art, theater, dance, and poetry in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. He is researching a book on the New York Poets Theatre, founded in 1961 by Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Fred Herko, Alan Marlowe, and James Waring. In 2014 Forde curated a weeklong program of events in New York to mark the 50th anniversary of Fred Herko’s death. These included an exhibition of photographs of Herko in performance at theEmily Harvey Foundation Gallery, and the presentation of a paper titled “Send Three and Fourpence, We’re Going to a Dance—Misreading Fred Herko” at a daylong symposium on Herko at the Performing Arts department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Research on Freddy Herko and Jill Johnston film shorts provided by Greg Pierce, Associate Curator of Film and Video, The Andy Warhol Museum. Digital footage courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum