Goddess of Speed

A film titled Dance Movie appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title can be found in the collection. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko gliding on a single roller skate, was shot in 1963. Herko was a talented dancer and choreographer who cofounded and performed with the Judson Dance Theater. Herko was also associated with the Mole People, a group of queer men and women who came together to get high on speed and listen to opera. In October 1964, unhoused and strung out on drugs, Herko leapt out of an open window while dancing naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Although the current location of Dance Movie is unknown, accounts of it do exist, including Warhol’s evocative description in POPism of Herko “gliding in dance attitudes and looking as perfect as the ornament on the hood of a car.” Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the missing film.