House of Hope’ to Park Avenue Armory

Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Anne Imhof’s new performance piece “Doom: House of Hope,” lets several Romeos answer — and leaves audiences to untangle their own “why” during the three-hour runtime.

Shakespearean characters, rendered in a stark aesthetic, appear in vignettes throughout the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, outfitted with a fleet of black SUVs parked throughout the hazy space. Early on, Romeo appears in the back of a black Cadillac pickup truck, imbibing a shot alongside Juliet, while another Romeo gets tattooed atop the neighboring SUV. Other cast members — Mercutios, Benvolios, Tybalts, dancers and other creatives — climb on and into other cars around the room, where performers hold extended dance poses, smoke and read aloud from their cell phone screens. 

The show opens with a “funeral march” for Romeo and Juliet as the ensemble cast advances toward the audience, waiting behind barricades. Once removed, guests are left to wander around the room and find their own positions to take in the performance. A jumbotron in the middle of the space announces how much time remains, ticking down from three hours in red numbers.

But “Doom” isn’t about presenting audiences a pared-down Gen Z rendition of “Romeo & Juliet,” even though audiences will be able to recognize the familiar storyline throughout the performance. 

“I tried to make a pretty plotless piece, with a strong narration of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” says Imhof of her largest performance piece to date, which pulls characters and broken excerpts of text from Shakespeare’s text.

The artist is at the Park Avenue Armory a few days before the world premiere of “Doom,” a wide-ranging work that explores themes of division and unity. The SUVs are already parked throughout the drill hall space, while Jacob Madden, one of Imhof’s many “Doom” collaborators, stands next to an upright piano on a raised stage on one side of the room.

“It’s always much easier in my head when the others are not yet involved,” says Imhof, describing a moment of creative kismet that emerged while working with Madden to develop the score for the show’s ballet, inspired by a Bach partita. “But it gets so much better when they’re involved. There’s a lot of potential because people are so extremely skilled and talented.”

“Doom: House of Hope” unfolds through spoken performance, ballet and flexing choreography, rap and song, skateboarding, drawing, photography and other creative disciplines. Imhof also incorporated inspiration from the work of Jerome Robbins, Balanchine, Sinatra, Radiohead, Jean Genet and others.

Imhof took a collaborative approach to developing the three-hour durational piece alongside her large cast of creatives. Her two “leads” — a loose designation in the context of the production, where the focal point remains fluid throughout its duration — are young actors Talia Ryder and Levi Strasser, who were given artistic license to pluck their lines from Shakespeare’s text.

In Imhof’s version, “Romeo and Juliet” becomes Romeos and Juliets. Several performers — of all genders — take on the role of Romeo. The ballet performance introduces another Juliet through dancer Remy Young, and ABT principal Devon Teuscher takes the stage as another Romeo. The production also prominently features Imhof’s frequent collaborator (and Balenciaga muse) Eliza Douglas, who serves as assistant director and oversaw costume design, in addition to performing.   

“Doom,” performed through March 12, builds upon Imhof’s canon of work, from her Golden Lion-winning “Faust” performance piece during the 2017 Venice Biennial to exhibitions that highlight the non-live aspect of her practice. A survey of her work, “Wish You Were Gay,” was mounted at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria last year.

“I think I’m always starting from the piece that I did last,” says Imhof. Her 2022 exhibition “Youth,” originally intended for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, instead debuted at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in light of the war, and inspired the spatial approach of “Doom.” 

“We did something here for the Armory that basically leaves the Armory as-is, and then pretends something happened outside,” says Imhof, nodding to the militaristic affect of a set design dominated by black SUVs. (Courtesy of Cadillac, the production sponsor for the show.)

As suggested by the title of the piece, the performance explores themes of division and opposition. Within the production, the cast is divided into different “Houses,” their affiliations demonstrated through call-and-response chants and later solidified through a costume change that evokes high school sport team uniforms. The group chants, or “drills,” underscore the similarities within opposing phrases like “I want discipline” and “I want to disappear,” which become indistinguishable when voiced concurrently. 

Within the Drill Hall, two more houses emerge: the cast and the audience. The boundary is blurred as audiences are left to wander the space as they wish and given free reign to record photo and video. The performers follow suit, recording themselves and each other via a phone that is passed around, and the intimate video footage is occasionally televised in real time on the room’s central screens. 

“ I really just want them to be able to get lost and not get frustrated about wandering around and not knowing,” says Imhof of bringing audiences into the performance. “There’s a lot of challenging aspects in this work, and I really want this to not overtake. I know I’m asking a lot from an audience that is not used to my work, and I would love them to just get lost in it, and find their own way and find their own positions to see it.”

Another grouping, House of Swans, emerges in the last-act ballet and represents a moment of unity. While “Doom” is in the show title, it’s the “hope” piece that Imhof ultimately lets linger.

 ”In this very moment, everybody just wants to really stick together and wants to make a gesture of hope,” says Imhof, reflecting on the process of working with her collaborators to bring “Doom: House of Hope” to life. “We’re here, and we know what we believe in.”