Title:
T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. Gabriella Imrichova
Author:
Parker Lev Dupain
Date:
19.05.25

A bastard, by name, is an illegitimate heir.
Dance.

A towering white wall perpendicular to a white floor meets the first row of tiered seating—a formal reflection of the audience and stage. It evokes the loaded historicity of the white cube and all its indelibly inscribed legacies, including the fixed gaze that holds the art object in place. But here, something is unsettled. The intensified buzz of more than 40 spots and Fresnels, amplified by six floor-bound microphones, disquiets the—modernist, objective, and neutral—white cube. It is clear that what is to follow will carry a critique of the logic that legitimises it.

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Video Still: James Wright, NON Studio.

The Bastard enters casually from backstage, mic-in-hand, wearing a sheer white top over an equally sheer bra, pinned high to flash tits—not mirrored, but mocked. They smile: “Don’t worry, this doesn’t count. The work hasn’t started yet. You’ll know when it does.” People laugh—because, of course, it has already begun.

Even before opening night, T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance.—sometimes just Dance.—disrupted naming conventions, signalling identity as contingent rather than fixed or inherited. It was out of step, dissonant—queer. For Lee Edelman, queer is a theoretical concept that interrogates how structures of reality are built to exclude all that is non-normative, or incompatible with a logic that is upheld by the community that sustains that reality.1 Edelman claims, “queerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural position determined by the imperative of figuration.”2 In this way, queerness is not relative to being but a figure that dysfunctions the norms of a given community.3 The queer is the outsider, the monstrous, the bastard.

Their entrance stages them within a codified ideological arrangement—one that assumes the art object is to be looked at, and the viewer, passive. The Bastard addresses us and torments: charming, smiling and devious. “Don’t read into this. It hasn’t started. You’ll know when to start reading.” But we were already reading, already looking, quietly taking what was up for the taking.

Then they called us to order: “This work is called Dance.”

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, rehearsal documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lauren Dunn.

The Bastard puts down the microphone and begins a series of repeated movements along a grid that structures most of the hour-long show. The first gesture is a direct stare—still and silent—that extends well beyond the bounds of comfort. Though didactic in name, it offers an antinormative intervention into the historical trajectory of what is commonly known as dance: hand akimbo, hip to hand, a smile slowly becoming toothy, jump, knee to ground and pose, jump—an explosive final hold, wait for applause—silence, walk to place, set position, a slow-motion shimmy, core engaged, a movement uninvented, head down—head up, eye contact.

Influential cultural theorist and dancer Randy Martin wrote in Critical Moves, “Dance displays in the very ways that bodies are placed in motion, traces of the forces of contestations that can be found in society at large.”4 The Bastard’s performance becomes a site where broader social antagonisms—around visibility, legitimacy and autonomy—are made palpable, held within the rub and lilt of the brutal and the beautiful of physicality. Moreover, the Bastard implicates the audience in this field of contestation. Martin frequently returned to the question of how dance acts upon its audience, proposing that the relationship between dance and viewer—understood as an encounter—can model alternative ways of imagining or reconfiguring sociality.5 Through this lens, T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶ Dance. does not simply present movement; it choreographs a relation. The prolonged, motionless stare—thickened by the discomfort of duration—does not request a withdrawal; instead, it generates an intensified mirroring, repositioning the audience to inhabit the instability of dance.

Through every functional drift, every pause before a movement, every step taken to meet the mark, the Bastard draws us tighter into this entanglement. I noticed myself shifting my weight, touching my glass to my lips, but not too often. I wanted it to break. Each repeated gesture tightened the roles of audience-performer like a grip that swelled intense anticipation, until it was met with “dry ass humour.”6

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Video Still: James Wright, NON Studio.

“Etc, etc, etc.” (Nonchalant) (the audience laughs).
“Did you like that movement I just made for you?” (Irreverent) (the audience laughs).
“Was it appropriate for this specific set of circumstances?” (Provocative) (the audience laughs).

The Bastard rebels against the logic of a space that demands the performer be made legible, offered up to an audience that are tacitly rehearsed in silent reception. This staged site—steeped in the legacy of the white cube: MoMA-sanctioned, Hitler-approved—is inherent in the spatial logic of nearly every gallery exhibiting fine art today.7 It is a site that claims neutrality, disavows context and accommodates only the well-behaved: middle class, white.8 The white walls echo a long history of fascistic cultural mores, upheld by “symbolic capitalists,”9 who place signs at the doors that say “All Welcome.”

In Poetics of Relation, Martinican essayist, poet and novelist, Édouard Glissant critically examines a force that he refers to as filiation. Drawing on the word’s connotations of a legitimising tie between a parent and child, filiation understands the world via linear movement through the connection to a mythical origin and thus, a generalised rationalism.10 Glissant posits that the West, as “a project, not a place”,11 triumphs through structures that sustain colonialism and other forms of dominion within the parameters of the “legitimacy provided by filiation.”12 The Bastard is a tear in the fabric of legitimacy—a system that inherently positions the performer as an intelligible object before a passive audience—not as a stable resistance, but as an approach to free ourselves from singularity. In this way, the audience and performance are held in an ungovernable relation—not inert and linear but swirling around the drain together amongst so-called stable frameworks of meaning. We are people and places with no need to be fully understood or to possess—or be possessed.13 Surely, the only appropriate response to such sanctimony is not deference and reticence but rather queer revelry, ridicule and rebellion.14

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, rehearsal documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lauren Dunn.

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, rehearsal documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lauren Dunn.

“I am not Hal Foster’s little cock sucker.” The white cube kills and captures while the Bastard writes “poetry” to get closer to God (air quotes), flinging the microphone cord to allow a wandering ease. They do not seek legitimacy. They ask, “What is essential? What is important to say? Do I need to do this? Do I want to do this?” They believe in newness and want to throw Joseph Campbell from a balcony. ABBA’s Lay All Your Love on Me begins to play. The volume increases as the Bastard rants harder—yelling, punching and kicking the air—moments of ecstatic dance punctuating breathless declarations. The music is blasting and the Bastard is inaudible. I find myself smiling—the world doesn’t work. As the Bastard screams about semiotics, art theory and jazz apples at the tram stop, I find myself smiling. The world doesn’t work.

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Video Still: James Wright, NON Studio.

Gabriella Imrichova T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Video Still: James Wright, NON Studio.

I will leave you with a quote by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study:

“Illusory administrators whisper of our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us. But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are, there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t want to be correct and we won’t be corrected. Politics proposes to make us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”15

What pulses beneath the repetition, the trap, the rift, is not clarity or coherence, but relation—restless, unruly and unresolved—moving within the logics of existing structures and what it means to live.

What is essential?

“Ass.”16

  1. Lee Edelman, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), xv.

  2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 24.

  3. The emphasis refers to ontological critiques within Black studies and queer theory. See Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020); Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

  4. Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 6.

  5. Mark Franko, “Dance/Agency/History: Randy Martin’s Marxian Ethnography,” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 3 (2016): 33,

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  6. Gabriella Imrichova, “About,” Gabriella Imrichova, accessed April 14, 2025,

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  7. Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” in The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, ed. Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 64.

  8. Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” 64.

  9. Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 8–9, EPUB.

  10. Simone A. James Alexander, “Glissantian Dis/Engagements and Dis/Entanglements: Maryse Condé’s and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Narratives of Af/Filiation,” Esprit Créateur 61, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 130.

  11. Édouard Glissant, as quoted in Omedi Ochieng, “After Philosophy, Black Thought: Sylvia Wynter and the Ends of Knowledge,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 56, no. 1 (2023): 92.

  12. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 53.

  13. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 28.

  14. C. Heike Schotten, “4. Society Must Be Destroyed,” in Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 96,

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  15. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, in the chapter “Politics Surrounded” (Wivenhoe, New York, and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013), 20.

  16. Imrichova, The Bastard. Dance.

T̶h̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶s̶t̶a̶r̶d̶. Dance. by Gabriella Imrichova was performed at Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 3-5 April 2025.
Parker Lev Dupain’s review of this works has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse as part of our annual writer's program.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2025 programming. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice. Writers for this program are chosen by Performance Review for the purpose of nurturing new voices in performance criticism.

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