Review: 24.01.23 - 25.01.23
Gabriella Imrichova | Gertrude Glasshouse, Wurundjeri Country | 01/2023.
Increasingly, dance is becoming the genre of anxiety.
When framed as a textual position, anxiety permits a certain neuroticism. It is a position that theorists — perhaps most famously Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — borrowed from psychoanalysis, and it seeks to circumvent danger and neuter surprise. Anxiety, here treated as a simile for paranoia, evokes a need to know: an urge to preempt horror.
In contrast to the more popular depressive-reparative position, I have reason to believe that anxiety is necessary to the field of dance. Indeed, Gabriella Imrichova seems familiar with this mode of metabolising the terrors of the world — her choreography being a testament to this.
Part of Gertrude Contemporary and Performance Review’s Contact High programme, 24.01.23 - 25.01.23 is performed by the agile and slinky Sophie Gargan, Anika de Ruyter, and Mara Galagher. It is a self-described ‘live lab’ and festival of nerves; of enteric intelligence, and the chewing and digesting of ideas. 24.01.23 - 25.01.23 is delightful, then: a playful experiment that speaks to anxiety’s utility, while also circling some heavier questions for dance aesthetics.
The dancers wear black, subtly-sequinned shifts, body contoured to grip the legs; black mambas. Their grey sneakers, with fluorescent green laces, offer a normcore contrast and evoke the late 2010s Melbourne contemporary dance ‘uniform’ (everything Adidas all at once). The floor is divided into corridors by black electrical tape, and microphones hang from above like bats. Boxes of dairy-free UP&GO hide behind a gunmetal grey cube.
Performed across six hours, split over two days of repeating cycles, the vocabulary is oriented towards objects in relation to the body and its facilities. Index fingers are licked, gently plucked from wet mouths, and circled behind the back like the orbit of an erotic comet. In its anxious preoccupation, we might describe 24.01.23 - 25.01.23 as a ‘hydra-choreography,’ with a new head exploding into view (running, vase-smashing, tripping) just as another falls to the imaginary sword (cigarette smoking, gyrations, speech).
To my claim that dance is an anxious genre, this is especially clear in Imrichova’s drop and change approach. No stone is left unturned, no ‘threat’ unconsidered.
The dancers are steadfast across their many tasks and states. Gargan flies sideways through the space, suspended briefly as her arm punctuates each bounce with a slice across the chest. A master of earnest expression, as evidenced by her own solo work in the previous session of Contact High, Gargan melds her signature, natural presence with lucent intensity. de Ruyter equally charms, and their undulating abdominal rolls show a serpentine control. Dancing atop the grey cube to Ravel’s Boléro, they stamp and fold — a poised, Kate Bush figure parodying Maurice Béjart. Meanwhile, Gallagher, bright like an ember, darts and thrashes with mosh pit vigour. Extinguishing herself with the splash of a steel water bucket, her spine warps with sensuous power.
Anxiety might be understood as a reaction to a lack of control, and as such a kind of management of the abject. Ours is a world full of violence, monstrosities, and half-formed realities. Naturally, we are eager to soothe our passage through this, even at the cost of quickening heart rates, ground teeth, and possible collapse.
As should hopefully be clear, I think this anxious dimension to Imrichova’s work is compelling, especially because it partly challenges something we often take for granted in dance: uncertainty.
Ephemera are those things that exist only briefly: contained to a mayfly instant. Beyond our control, and often beyond our sense of time and continuity, ephemera have a privileged relationship with Western theatrical dance. Many view the dancing body as mercurial in its live performance and translation of ‘the work,’ and thus an uncertain, ever-changing factor in our encounter with dance.
Graham McFee, an aesthetic philosopher of dance, is especially interested in this notion of ephemerality. Like many dance theorists, McFee’s concern is with this intra-dance philosophy of ephemera — the idea that dance is unique in its transience as a form, or that it is totally mutable and only exists in the moment of its performance.
This, the ephemerality question, is redundant in McFee’s opinion — he is an analytic philosopher, that said, and is interested in the codification and capture of the ‘work.’ According to McFee, dance cannot be ephemeral because, even in banal ways, it can be ensnared, via notation for example.
Regardless of the salience of his argument, McFee and others at least draw into question whether ephemerality is real, and irresistibly beyond our control.
While ephemerality slips away, the anxious position demands survey and certainty. As such, I believe that the anxious position, as evident in Imrichova’s work, may provide insight into where dance is, if not lost to the moment. Though I cannot answer this question here, 24.01.23 - 25.01.23 provides some thoughtful prompts.
When black dye is added to bottles of spring water in this piece, the vessels are shaken with sudden, violent intensity. And then, stillness. Near a microphone, artfully placed to capture the clucking throat of the dancer, a sip of black fluid is amplified, augmented dreadfully to reveal an internal choreography of nervous swallowing. And then quiet. Until against a wall, a dancer retches and vomits watery blackness — splattered now as a gelatinous, Gigerian mess upon the polished concrete floor.
Pause, and action — every possible preemption, and every plausible reaction. The dreadful is highlighted and disarmed in a kind of checklist for surviving disintegration: the dancing prepper’s guide to living through hell.
Not that the work is certain, or even demands certainty, really. It is a lab, after all. But, it does hint at a relationship between anxiety and reality — a relationship between dancers and the dancework that upsets the idea that the art is lost once the performance ends. The durational format draws this into question, as does the cyclical, repeated nature of the piece, the use of props, shattering objects, ruined floors, and water-marked garments paired with wet, tangled hair.
A work of control; a work that rehabilitates anxiety in a rejection of the temporary. The dance lasts, not only in memories of vomit and clay, but through the frisson they compel in contemplation, and the stains they leave in their use. ▮
