Daniel Carter on recreating The Life and Death of Fred Herko for the RendezVous with Madness festival

07 Oct 2019


In 1964, 28-year-old dancer Fred Herko jetéd, naked and high on speed, out the window of his ex-lover’s apartment. Daniel Carter (Shove It Down My Throat, The Youth/Elders Project), one of the actors in The Life and Death of Fred Herko which recreates that fateful night, says there is some debate over the tragic event. "In rehearsal we talked about how he had held a similar performance on a rooftop two weeks prior. There's writing by his friend Diane di Prima that kind of questioned in retrospect if he meant to do it then. He did invite people. People understood it at the time as perhaps a happening. Whether it was a suicide or if it was a performance, it was an active decision that this is how he wanted to end his life. There's no real message from Fred Herko himself."

Carter was vaguely aware of Herko's legacy. "I studied at McGill and I took this modern dance course where we briefly talked about the specific performance where he jetéd out of a window," says Carter "But it was a very sanitized retelling and it focussed much more on the art than on the circumstances that he was dealing with in terms of addiction and mental health. When playwright Natalie Liconti talked to me about this theatre project, it was like a lightbulb, I recognized that name, but I didn't realize there was so much more to his story than was taught."

Herko became much more famous after his dramatic death than he had been as a dancer. "People did describe him as a pretty good dancer," says Carter. "He was different than his contemporaries at the time, from Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and Yvonne Rainer. There was more of a camp aesthetic to Fred's approach to dance and choreography. If he were to have survived and lived to the '70s and '80s, he would probably fit in genre wise. There's this duality of, yes, he was great but also ahead of his time."

Herko also lives on for his beauty preserved in images and on film. "He was a muse for Andy Warhol and within that sphere," says Carter. "That idea of celebrity, stardom, iconography really pervaded the atmosphere of that time. And was sort of looked at through a critical lens as in Natalie's piece. Around Andy Warhol himself, there's a sort of narrative of greatness but when you look back at people's testimonials of who he was a person . . . He promised people things, he promised celebrity, to make them great, but once he got you for what he wanted, that was it. Then he moved on to the next thing. And it was up to this person to parlay that into something else. But most of the time it didn't."

Carter plays "Johnny Dodd who was an ex-lover of Fred's and at the time was a lighting designer, a pretty big presence in the off-off-off-Brodway community. He worked alongside Andy Warhol for a few projects and was featured in one or two of his films. The person playing Freddy is an actor from Montreal, Oliver Price." So we won't see Carter jetéing naked out a window? "No, unfortunately not," laughs Carter. "But you'll see Oliver who will do it much more gracefully than I can."

The Life and Death of Fred Herko is billed as "an interdisciplinary, site-specific performance that sheds light on a footnoted figure in queer history and examines the collateral damage of art" and has a suggested dress code of "Party Glam." "The piece is actually presented as a party or a happening," explains Carter. "It's happening at Dead End Studio at 7 Fraser Avenue. It's actually an invitation into a death party in a sense. A celebration of life and death. We're hoping the audience will participate and enjoy a series of installations and engage with the artists in a personal way."

The Life and Death of Fred Herko is being presented under the aegis of the RendezVous with Madness festival. "What's really great about the festival," says Carter, "is building a container and opening our preconceptions of addiction and mental health, and providing us with a vocabulary and entry way into these conversations through art. To question and challenge our notions and understandings of addiction and mental health."

The festival is a good fit for the themes throughout The Life and Death of Fred Herko. "At this point in Fred's life, in the '60s, Freddy was addicted to amphetamines and was homeless," says Carter. "That really sets the stage of what these characters and people are walking into. Looking at biography and autobiography through various reference points, to look at cause and to question why this figure in history wasn't necessarily celebrated as a great dancer. As an amazing choreographer. Is it because his narrative dealt with addiction and mental health issues, that made him not as great, in quotation marks, as others from his time?" Carter also notes that, at the time being gay was seen as a mental illness as well as a barrier to a mainstream dance career.

The concerns of the RendezVous with Madness festival resonate with The Life and Death of Fred Herko's creative team. "Claire Burns [Retreat, I Cook He Does the Dishes, The Baby]  the director, has a real empathy and understanding of the text and creates a very warm and welcoming room to open up these very tough discussions considering the material between queerness, addiction and mental health. If you're a queer actor or have experienced any of these things, you feel compassion for this story. The intersections between queerness and mental health is such a common narrative."

Carter also sees direct parallels between the Warhol scene and today's theatre and gay scenes. "You find a group of people who are welcoming and are having such a great time," he says. "With the presence of drugs you feel a need to partake in order to participate in the community. Which is an interesting thing to say out loud when even today how much queer spaces and queer socializing depend on substance use. I feel like sober spaces are such a rare thing, especially attached to a queer space."

As well as rehearsing for The Life and Death of Fred Herko, Carter is busy with his work as general manager of the Paprika Festival and educational programming coordinator at Buddies. He's also producing Bilal Baig's Kitne Saare Laloo Yahan Pey Hain for the upcoming Next Stage Festival. However he plans to take advantage of his proximity to the RendezVous with Madness festival. "There's a lot of screenings," he says he wants to attend, "and a performance piece called Intangible Adorations: Experience the Icon that looks quite interesting, similarly looking at celebrity and questioning how the icon is created."