No Body As It Was

Christine Matschke
Dance journalist

If there were to be a phenomenon for Postmodern Dance similar to that of the infamous “27 Club”, which includes celebrities who died before their 30th birthday, then Fred Herko would indisputably be included. Herko, key figure of the New York underground of the 1960s and star of Andy Warhol’s first films, jumped out of the window of a Greenwich Village apartment with a Grand Jeté at age 28. Whether intentionally or accidentally is still unclear today. In “Sunrise Sunset” choreographer Przemek Kamiński now steps away from the fragmented image that remained of Herko and reassembles it in a choreographic speculation for two dancers’ bodies. In the historical juxtaposition of the everydayness of Postmodern Dance and the extravagance of Camp and neo-romanticism, Herko’s excessive and unorthodox approach to work and life could be read as resistance expressed in utopian embodiment, according to Kamiński’s hypothesis.