In the dark wooden foyer of the Park Avenue Armory on the opening night of the world premiere of Anne Imhof’s DOOM: House of Hope, a surge of uptown cultural philanthropists and downtown party gooners, all pressed together at the entrance to the Drill Hall. Brought together by a love of leather pants and the highly publicized performances this venue always puts on, the crowd’s anticipation to devour or be devoured by a three hour performance was notably palpable as they disappeared inside. In the world of performance, it’s rare to see so much hunger in the eyes of a crowd fiending to be part of the cultural conversation. Someone joked that the line felt like a cattle call.   

Just behind a barricaded holding pen for the audience, the massive former armory hall was overcrowded with 26 Cadillac Escalades entombed in platforms. A northern wing was redressed as a high school locker room with an enormous jumbotron displaying a countdown clock, several black stages set out on gymnasium flooring, and a high school prom adorned with balloons, chairs tied in satin, and a silver tinsel backdrop for abandoned band equipment. Massive, illuminated doors in the back opened from which performers slowly populated the space at a laconic pace. Different performers began to howl like coyotes, to sing, or to speak in monotone. All dead-in-the-face. The countdown clock started and the barricades were removed. The tension grew as we all shuffled forward onto the killing floor into [our?] DOOM.

Annie Imhof, Germany’s enfant terrible, has become one of the most visible artists in Europe. A veritable renaissance-frau — she won the Golden Lion at the German Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale with her opera FAUST, transformed the Tate Modern Tanks in 2019 with her exhibition SEX, and took over the Palais de Tokyo in 2021 with Natures Mortes — Imhof has spent a decade filling museums and exhibitions spaces around the world with her gesamkunstwerks. Along the way she has created fervent fandom and critical observers, in turn, through a dedicated practice of utilizing every medium at her fingertips: be it performers, music, painting, theater, dance, or installation all at once. DOOM, however, is her biggest work to date; curated by Klaus Biesenbach and presented at New York’s most impressive and spectacle-based venue.

DOOM is haphazardly constructed upon two opposing structural directions, the classic American high school romance film and the inverted story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, that scrape across one another to create a highly stylized dissonance that disorients the audience into watching an afebrile Gregg Araki movie. As a dialectic, it creates constant movement, jejune soliloquies, and opportunities for boredom and reengagement for both performers and audience members. Scenes unfold throughout the space simultaneously during the course of the three-hour spectacle, challenging audience members to catch everything. Often the viewer gets caught ambling in the dark matter between the narrative devices, searching for a clue.

Unsurprisingly, DOOM trafficks in many of the contemporary performance clichés that have become universal in the last few years. But, to be fair, many of these tropes became so wide-spread precisely because they are part of Imhof’s language. She returns to familiar devices we have all seen: vapes as prothesis for gesture, live-tattooing as transgressive wordless act, white women singing 2015 Jeremih hits, or phones as mediating apparatus by performers, set crew, and audience alike. The 40-plus performers, cast by obvious and cool model agency Midland, feature skateboarders, influencers, models, actors, musicians, and professional dancers. Greasy middle-parts abound! But indistinguishable, affectless performers can be a drag to endure, creating a textureless world without romance. Virtuosity needs passion and petulance needs humor to overcome dramaturgic anemia. Notable exceptions are performances by Talia Ryder, Vinson Fraley, Lia Wang, and Toon Lobach, whose vitality and charisma break through the confines of their thinly written character intentions. This menagerie of languor can become tiresome as DOOM slouches forward, but I can appreciate the purpose they serve.

Imhof makes work that provokes a strong sense of familiarity; it seduces the audience with a subcultural sense of place. This is, in part, due to casting and a dementedly earnest Americana. People get frustrated that this youth culture feels legible and immediate, and yet as the production trods on, the corpus of performers begin to feel like abstractions; containers that can’t hold meaning. Imhof’s alienation effect gets into the interstitial space between the surface and our projection upon it. The political thrust of her use of alienation is murkier; to what end does the creation of a critical consciousness serve? Does a discarded protest sign scrawled with “Don’t take my tits away” next to a drowsy performer do anything useful? If Romeo and Juliet is a tragic romance about social stratifications, it seems Imhof can’t quite get ahold of the inherited aristocratic strife.

It isn’t until the final third of the work, a classic prom climax where a mosh pit forms around a band fronted by enthralling performer Lia Wang as Tybalt, that the piece coalesces into something solid and moves frictionlessly towards a powerful finale where iconic ballet dancer Daniil Simkin performs excerpts of “Onegin” backed by a metal guitar riff by Korn’s James Shaffer. A corps de ballet appears and a group of other performers crawl from the center jumbotron towards the back of the stage. As the countdown clock trickles away, frequent-Imhof collaborator Eliza Douglas ballads the work to its close as the performers all leave from the massive illuminated doorway from whence they came. It’s a spectacular, melancholic, and incredibly rewarding ending for those who endured.

Not all-together convincing as a theater director or choreographer, Imhof is perhaps most successful as an experimental performance artist who creates landscapes; layering lush sonic pleasures on sutured together ballet-line dancing tableaus with Querelle-style bar singalongs, all placed and performing in different proximities to the viewer. When she allows her performers to shine, they burn bright, creating afterimages and sense memories. Her durational practice often utilizes, if not begs for, digital documentation from its viewership, but her adherence to constant experimentation is ultimately more compelling than the singular image. Is she here to entertain us or challenge us? Probably both, but she never achieves them coterminously.