- Title:
- “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, Gabriella Imrichova
- Author:
- Helen Grogan
- Date:
- 22.06.23
“24.01.23 - 25.01.23” (2023) is a durational work by Gabriella Imrichova written for performers Mara Galagher, Sophie Gargan and Anika de Ruyter for Gertrude Glasshouse. It was presented as part of Contact High 2023, curated by Anador Walsh and presented by Performance Review in partnership with Gertrude. Two public performances, each four hours long, took place on Tuesday 24 January and Wednesday 25 January. This text draws from both, as well as a closed ‘learning’ session on the afternoon of Saturday 21 January.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation from the 21.01.23 learning phase, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
A network of objects, materials, and equipment expands through Gertrude Glasshouse, overlaying the room. The set-up has a post-dance post-minimalist feel, with items constellated across the floor and walls and suspended from the ceiling - pulled together in a tight palette of black, white and beige. Black tape in straight lines delineates a central field for performers and a peripheral channel for the audience. This threshold is continually punctured as the sounds and movements of the audience mix with that of the work, implicating the context of the space. Gargan is supine by the wall to my right. Galagher switches outfits with an offstage-like nonchalance. Imrichova passes through to adjust a power cable.
condenser mic, plinth, trench coats, plastic water bottle, tripod, speaker, cables, cigarette, trainers, mint gum, ceramic props, cling-wrapped sandwiches, handbag, drink boxes, food die, mobile phones, tape player, glass vessels, tape, pin tack, wireless headset microphone
In some places, the manner of arrangement implies a spirit of the incidental, such as a cling-wrapped sandwich by the door and cigarette buts collating on the window ledge. Yet, the overall configuration reads as the road map for task-based actions within a cyclical system. Representing these iterations are prop multiples, pragmatically set out in rows.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation from the 21.01.23 learning phase, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Spanning four hours, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23” simultaneously accumulates and collapses. Networks of relations and actions stack up in the room while unraveling upon themselves in variable loops. Acts transform. Scenes disintegrate. Nothing arrives. A kind of tumbling of events ensues, each barely beginning before being disrupted by some other incoming drama.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Imrichova’s practice is first and foremost concerned with formal enquiry, with the primary instruments being contemporary performance techniques. This approach expands on histories of experimental dance and theater wherein formal rules are tools employed to get to something other, extra or in between. Those other/extra/in between things emerge as consequences of the material application of the rules, via the doing. They spill out over the equation set.
Imrichova’s rule-setting targets a specific state of doing. Complex techniques, restrictions and conditions are applied in layers (upon layers) of instruction written into each dancer’s score. This fills up and overloads the doing, bringing an intensity of execution that reverberates through all activities in the work. It overrides intention and interpretation, and kills affect. It fills up the actions and thickens the images.
Notes for context: Alongside this written response, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Gabriella Imrichova, Anador Walsh and photographer Machiko Abe, on an approach to photographic documentation for “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, in my capacity as Open Practice Studio. This has informed my understanding of Imrichova’s process, practice and ethos. At the same time, it complicates my capacity to reflect/respond from the situation of live witnessing - not least because we have been actively working on ways to translate that experience into something it’s not - an account in images. Prior to publishing this piece, Imrichova and I got together to discuss documenting practice through writing. We spoke about how words can “fuck up” our performance thinking and how words can trap performance someplace it’s not - in language.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation from the 21.01.23 learning phase, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Gabriella Imrichova with performers Anika De Ruyter, Mara Galagher and Sophie Gargan, “24.01.23 - 25.01.23”, 2023, performance documentation from the 21.01.23 learning phase, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Helen Grogan (1979) is an Australian-based artist with 20 years of practice at the intersection of contemporary performance and exhibition practices. Her installation and performance works have been presented in dance, museum,and gallery contexts in Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Georgia, Sweden, Japan, Mexico, USA and online with institutions including Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm/Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Eora/Sydney; Samstag Museum, Tarntanya/Adelaide; Galerie Stadtpark, Krems; Rijksakaemie, Amsterdam; Kontext Festival, Berlin; Netherlands Institute of Architecture, Rotterdam; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin and KNULP, Eora/Sydney. Through her enduring interest in working with others, she regularly engages with artists, choreographers and dancers on projects with varied models of co-authorship and collaboration.
Piloted in 2022, Contact High is a three-year partnership between Gertrude and Performance Review exploring the transference that occurs between performers and audiences in the gallery.
Each year during the month of January, a group of Naarm based artists are given full access to Gertrude Glasshouse as a space in which to develop, rehearse and workshop new or existing performance works, before showing them to the public.
In January 2023, Contact High’s participating artists were Sophie Gargan, Gabriella Imrichova, Diego Ramírez and Kenneth Suico. These artists presented work on 18, 24 and 25 January.
Helen Grogan writes about Gabriella Imrichova’s 24 and 25 January durational performances as part of Gertrude x Performance Review, Performance Review’s ongoing critical response to the performance elements of Gertrude’s artistic program.