Mar. 31, 2025
As part of the series ‘Conversations with Cultural Icons,’ English Theatre Berlin presents ‘Pop! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground,’ a dramatic restaging of 1960s and 70s New York’s artistic and musical landscape. Following previous installments ‘Jaws’ and ‘Bowie in Berlin,’ this production delves into the brief yet influential collaboration between Pop Art’s leading figure Andy Warhol and the notorious American rock band, The Velvet Underground, placing their intertwined legacies at the center of its narrative. The show, which is directed by Günther Grosser, will run from April 11th to 19th on the main stage of the English Theatre Berlin.
‘POP! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground,’ 2025 at English Theatre Berlin // Photo by Stefania Migliorati
The band’s seminal debut album, ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ (1967), serves as the sonic backdrop for this retelling of New York’s experimental art scene, where Warhol’s mentorship played a pivotal role. Featuring Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and German singer Nico—introduced to the band by Warhol—tracks like ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Heroin’ resonate with the era’s fractured idealism and the young postwar generation’s explorations of transgression. Warhol’s hands-off approach to production allowed the band to confront themes of desire, addiction and urban alienation with unfiltered intensity.
The setting of The Factory, Warhol’s studio on East 47th Street, emerges as a central site of artistic cross-pollination where the artist “documented the human mise-en-scène” (Patti Smith) against a backdrop of glinting, aluminum-foiled walls and cluttered surfaces sprayed with Krylon paint. During this Silver Era, The Factory became both a creative laboratory and a social refuge, where artists, musicians, filmmakers and outsiders mingled in an atmosphere of radical openness. Works like ‘Blow Job’ and ‘Couch,’ in their voyeuristic intimacy and theatrical spontaneity, epitomize this creative environment, which found its most theatrical expression in ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ (1966-67), a series of multimedia performances conceived by Warhol as immersive spectacles of sound, light, film and dance. Designed as a total sensory environment, these performances integrated The Velvet Underground’s abrasive soundscapes with frenetic visuals. The album cover of ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico,’ featuring Warhol’s iconic yellow banana, would become the most enduring image of these feverish “underground years.”
‘POP! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground,’ 2025 at English Theatre Berlin // Photo by Stefania Migliorati
Yet, despite The Factory’s magnetic appeal as a social scene, Warhol’s creative output was largely dismissed by the art world, his multimedia ventures seen as crude provocations rather than serious art. The album, now hailed as a monumental achievement that shaped generations of musicians, debuted to dismal sales and widespread indifference.
Six decades later, however, these works are celebrated as cultural milestones, their influence equated with figures like Picasso and Fellini, while The Factory is now regarded as a central historical site for queer emancipation. As Arthur Danto observed, “the boundary between vernacular and high art was breached in the very early 1960s,” a shift that Warhol’s work not only exemplified but actively accelerated. Yet his transition from commercial artist to cultural icon was neither linear nor celebrated—it was, as Danto describes, “an uncertain kind of groping toward an art that did not really exist yet.”
In ‘Pop! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground,’ English Theatre Berlin aims to recreate the intensity of this cultural moment. Featuring a cast of five actors and musical performances by Fredrik Kinbom, Chris Farr, Andreas Dormann and Sonja Kessner as the band Red Largo, the production seeks to capture the creative friction and liberating potential that defined Warhol’s New York, tracing the question of how Pop became culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
Performance Info
English Theatre Berlin
‘Pop! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground’
Performances: Apr. 11-19, 2025; 8pm
Admission: € 17.60 (reduced € 11)
etberlin.de
Fidicinstraße 40, 10965 Berlin, click here for map
