Anne Imhof’s ‘DOOM’ Trades in Americana

Anne Imhof’s scenography for her much-anticipated Park Avenue Armory commission, DOOM: House of Hope (2025), is American to the max. Inside a semi-dark Wade Thompson Drill Hall, viewers are confronted with rows of gleaming black Cadillac Escalades. The immense hall, made to resemble a high school gym, features black barriers that cordon off the space at first and are subsequently pushed around to guide the audience’s movements (Imhof’s work notoriously lacks traditional seating). To one side, a prom scene has been set up; silver balloons float above clustered chairs and tables beside a wall of mylar streamers. A glance to our right shows the entrance to a row of antechambers styled as locker rooms. Overhead, a jumbotron counts down the three-hour duration of the performance, occasionally switching to poetic excerpts and livestreams of the different scenes. The German-born artist has clearly set her mind not to repeat her 2015 experience, when her performance work DEAL at MoMA PS1, which involved live rabbits, didn’t land all that well with American audiences. A decade later, with a Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale for Faust (2017) under her belt, Imhof intends to meet New Yorkers where they’re at – and has left her most extreme ritualistic props at home.

DOOM is both an extension of and a departure from Imhof’s widely heralded operatic work. Here, she has set the stage for a ‘superscore’ – a multiplicity of movement and sound scores executed by a cohort of about 50 performers, many of them local, ranging from skateboarders to actors to classically trained ballet dancers. The work pivots from the organic collaborations that characterized past performances, such as Angst (2016), Faust and Sex (2019), which featured a core group of friends, musicians, models and dancers. In New York, most of those familiar faces are absent, with only a few veterans like Josh Johnson and Eliza Douglas making small appearances.

In DOOM, Imhof ventures into new territory with a fractured reinterpretation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), which unfolds in reverse with multiple performers embodying the same character – a continuation of her fascination with the doppelgänger motif. A surprising addition is the classical ballet, integrated into the performance in a way that both contrasts with and complements Imhof’s hallmark vocabulary of deconstructed movements. Scenes from Shakespeare’s tragic romance, selected and recited by a strikingly affectless cast, are interwoven with live music, dance and even recitations of cultural criticism. The haunting musical score, directed by Ville Haimala, includes mesmerizing industrial distortions of Bach and Mahler. Classical piano accompaniment by Jacob Madden and animated performances of multi-lingual rap songs by Arthur Tendeng punctuate tableaux vivants marked by Imhof’s signature imagery: performers with impassive expressions vape, text, stare into space and perch on luxury cars while resisting any eye contact with the hundreds of people hovering around them.

These lulls in the performance, often requiring audience members to jostle for a better view, can feel frustrating but are very intentional. Imhof is masterful at (live) choreographing these extensive, idiosyncratic scores – tempting us to drift, linger and observe different corners of the sprawling space – then injecting a sudden burst of movement or song, urging us to rush to the next scene. While the artist is known to test and frustrate the limits of the audience’s attention, the work is not made with the intention to exhaust us, but as an invitation to move in and out of concentration as we witness her layering of ideas, gestures and feelings. Much has been made of Imhof’s ability to instil a sense of alternate temporality, using absurdly stilted scenes and slow-motion movements that evoke unpredictability and risk. In DOOM, that technique sometimes rubs against the relatively digestible temporality of the less deconstructed and filmic scenes and songs.

I’m left with an overriding excitement that an artist of Imhof’s calibre is willing to move away and expand her work from her past formulations in such a highly visible arena. There is plenty to rejoice over in this bursting-at-the-seams epic, much of which unfolds for an audience patient enough to stick with it until the third hour when her performers start losing their cool and disaffection. There’s a visceral shift, in the final 45 minutes, when Devon Teuscher performs a ballet solo; the crowd is so engrossed you could hear a pin drop. At the end, as Douglas belts out her originally composed song ‘We Can’, it receives an ovation so loud it makes her break character and smile.

With DOOM, Imhof maintains her resistance to offering the audience the direct political relief they might be seeking. Instead, she delivers an unapologetic tribute to dance, music, theatre and literature – imbued, as always, with youthful defiance. Rather than surrendering to expectation, she shapes a world that demands patience, attention and surrender to its shifting rhythms. The result is a work that refuses easy resolution, leaving us suspended in its resonance long after the final note fades.

DOOM: House of Hope runs at the Park Avenue Armory, New York until 12 March

^{Main image: Anne Imhof, DOOM: House of Hope, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers and Park Avenue Armory; photograph: Nadine Fraczkowski}