Sunrise Sunset
Sunrise Sunset departs from the scattered archival materials revolving around the life and work of American dancer and choreographer Fred Herko. A forgotten member of Judson Dance Theater and an amphetamine-driven frequenter of Andy Warhol’s Factory, he famously ended his life with a flamboyant grand jete out the window of an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York.
Sunrise Sunset revisits Herko’s forgotten and incomplete archive and body of work that sat between the theatrical and the quotidian, between the balletic and the unfinished. Yet, it always carried the excessive, the campy and the neo-romantic at its core.
Sunrise Sunset draws a speculative horizon on which different materials, references and accounts by his peers like Andy Warhol, Jill Johnston, Elaine Summers, Diane di Prima and Herko himself are brought to life, extended and reimagined. Together they form an impressionistic portrait that revisits Herko’s queer utopian spirit of the unfinished, the too-late and the not-yet-there, all between sunrise and sunset – a stretch of radiant glow.
During the performance, I am like a child, mesmerised by colour, by movement, by skill, by the sheer materiality of the event.
Jana Perković, Witness
I don't need to be able to decipher every little biographical detail of the collage (...) in order to immerse myself in the beautifully luminous images created by the light, costume and movements. The memories of Herko, which are processed here through dance, are themselves only fleeting snapshots, which in turn refer to fleeting and selective aspects of the past. In other words, a dance performance that reflects on its own history without claiming to be complete.
Jette Büchsenschütz, tanzschreiber.de
Sunrise Sunset
2022, performance, 65 min
Choreography: Przemek Kamiński
Creation & Performance: Angelo Petracca, Adam Russell-Jones
Outside Eye: Julia Plawgo
Set Design: Cee Füllemann
Textiles: Ayscha Zarina Omar, Nicolas Navarro Rueda
Costumes: Sarah Effenberger
Sound: HAUT
Poems: Diane Di Prima
Voice: Melanie Jame Wolf
Video: Janne Ebel
Technical Direction: Hanna Kritten Tangsoo
Production Management: Ben Mohai
Production: Przemek Kamiński
Co-production: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Pawilon, Korporacja Teatralna
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe
Further development supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance
Support: Tanzfabrik Berlin, TATWERK | Performative Forschung, Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH
Special thanks to collaborators who contributed to the development of the initial version of the performance: Tom Engels, Martin Hansen, Imogen Heath, Jacqueline Sobiszewski.
Further thanks to: Ricardo Carmona, Alice Heyward, Maria Molko, Ania Nowak, Peter Pleyer, Diane Di Prima, Sheppard Powell
photos: Dorothea Tuch