Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Crowds peered in between a phalanx of Cadillac Escalades parked inside the Park Avenue Armory, greedily searching for clues for what was about to unfold. It was the premiere of Doom: House of Hope, an ambitious performance by the celebrated German artist Anne Imhof, and the audience was ready to be shocked. Awed. Disturbed.Over the past decade, Imhof, 46, has gained a reputation as the Beethoven of Vibes, the Pied Piper of Cool. She and her army of svelte, square-jawed Gen Z performers have taken over institutions from Tate Modern to the Hamburger Bahnhof with loud electronic music, vape smoke and a potent cocktail of dread and malaise. As audience members looked on, recording with their phones, the performers shaved their arms, handled live hawks, and lit fires. What edgy shenanigans would they get into this time?The answer was more earnest than anyone expected: they fell in love. Imhof’s three-hour extravaganza is loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, that famous tale of adolescent infatuation. Her version unfolds in reverse, beginning with the death of the star-crossed lovers and rewinding through the rest of the action. There’s a showdown between warring factions, illicit nocturnal rendezvous, a blowout concert, and, of course, that fateful first encounter, where the titular couple spontaneously finish one another’s sonnet. Doom shares many hallmarks of Imhof’s oeuvre. Everyone is impeccably dressed in high-low fashion: many wore beaded bracelets popularised at Taylor Swift concerts while one performer sported a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace worth thousands of dollars. Fomo, or fear of missing out, remains key to the format: it’s impossible to see every piece of the action, and audience members frequently elbow one another to get a better view and skitter across the room to chase after the performers. The barrier between actor and audience is intentionally porous. At various points, a cast member joined the rest of us in filming the drama on an iPhone. (The footage was projected live on to a Jumbotron in the middle of the space.) For Imhof, who has lived in New York and Los Angeles for several years, Doom is a response to, and a reflection of, American culture. She transformed the 55,000 sq ft former drill hall into a funhouse high school gym with a floor reminiscent of a basketball court and the kind of metallic fringe backdrop typical of teenagers’ prom photos. One dancer appears in a full-body bear suit like a school mascot. On my way out, a colleague described the production as “High School Musical goes to Berghain.” The 26 black Cadillac Escalades parked around the space add a touch of presidential pomp and a sense of foreboding surveillance befitting a tale of illicit romance. (They are also practical: equipped with ladders and railings, performers climb all over them, allowing them to be better seen.) The durational element does immerse you in Imhof’s world, though that could have been accomplished just as well, if not better, in 90 minutes. At the beginning of the evening, I found myself straining to make out recognisable snippets of Shakespearean dialogue to locate myself in the story. By the second hour, I magnanimously offered to split my granola bar with a ravenous publicist as people began muttering about how much their backs hurt (the performance can’t be fully experienced sitting down, although there are a few chairs along the sides). By the third hour, even Imhof gave up the pretence of narrative, embracing increasingly showy dance numbers, including a ballet scored to distortion-filled electronic music. The movement, text and music draw from a wide variety of sources. Snippets of Jerome Robbins’s choreography from West Side Story and Radiohead’s mournful tune “Talk Show Host”, made popular by Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet adaptation, nod to the long cultural history of remaking this Shakespeare classic. (In Doom, the Radiohead song is performed, like much of the music, by Imhof’s impossibly charismatic longtime collaborator and former partner Eliza Douglas.) Other references layer in queer histories, including movement sequences drawn from a long-banned erotic film by the French writer Jean Genet from 1950. (The production features multiple Romeos and Juliets of various genders.) New York’s dance culture is present in the form of “flexing”, a style of rhythmic contortionism that became popular in Brooklyn in the 1990s. Imhof became an international sensation at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where she represented Germany and won the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion. For that five-hour performance, Faust, Imhof installed barking Dobermans behind a wire fence, filled Germany’s Nazi-era pavilion with the smell of disinfectant, and had her performers loom over on platforms, or prostrate themselves beneath a glass floor. The display — which viewers could enter and exit at any time (if they were willing to wait in the snaking lines) — made some ask whether she was critiquing the aesthetics of fascism or embracing them (Imhof has said that her “background is very much an anti-fascist one”.) Perhaps to avoid any confusion this time — particularly in a country facing a constitutional crisis and enacting executive orders limiting the rights of trans people — there is a pile of cardboard signs on the ground that read things like “You Can’t Control My Body” and “Don’t Take My Tits Away.” Yet Doom feels considerably less urgent than Imhof’s Venice presentation, where performers’ tortured movements more directly explored the feeling of grasping at or surrendering power. Some have also wondered whether Imhof is critiquing the trappings of adolescent angst or embracing them. The electricity of her work often comes from her refusal to answer that question. In blowing up the scale of the production and drawing on perhaps the most famous story of adolescent angst in the western canon, it feels as if she is moving towards a more clear-cut embrace. Even if the viewing experience is pointedly subjective and partial, this feels like a production about the big feelings — love, fear, desire — that have inspired art across time but often become less intense as we age. Performance art is at its best when it makes you uncomfortable in a way that reveals something to you about yourself. Whether you find this work thrilling or tedious may depend on how comfortable you are with Imhof’s more earnest turn (as well as with standing for three hours). I found it tedious for about a third of the time. The aesthetic pyrotechnics are memorable, but they offer little fresh insight about the US, especially at this factious moment. More American than anything else, perhaps, is the fact that a branding opportunity did not go to waste: the performance is sponsored by Cadillac. ★★★☆☆To March 12, armoryonpark.org
