Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous.
But last week, at her first rehearsal for “DOOM: House of Hope” at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight.
There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory’s rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — the new project’s starting point.
Belying her works’ fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal.
“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” the 46-year-old Berlin-based artist told me. “There has to be enough openness to it that the performers have agency.”
Imhof burst onto the scene at the 2017 Venice Biennale, when her unsettling installation in the German Pavilion won the coveted Golden Lion award. “For those of us not living in Germany, or Europe, she came out pretty fully formed with that piece,” said RoseLee Goldberg, the founder and director of Performa, the New York biennial that has been evangelizing performance art for more than 20 years. “It was a powerful takeover — she grabbed the reins of what’s possible in performance in a large setting with a big audience.”
Starting March 3 through March 12, New York audiences will have a rare opportunity to see Imhof’s work when she stages her biggest performance to date in the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall.
Despite the amorphous vibe of the rehearsals, there was a subterranean feeling that something big was emerging. Around 50 performers will reimagine Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy over the course of three hours. It will feature 26 Cadillac Escalades parked on a floor designed to resemble a school gym, a Jumbotron with a countdown clock and a pirate radio station playing on the vehicles’ radios. The performers include skateboarders, dancers from the American Ballet Theater and “flexers” — practitioners of a form, part dance hall, part hip-hop, that emerged in Brooklyn in the late ’90s.
Imhof, known for her deep commitment to collaboration, sees her role as providing a scaffold for creative types, many of whom she’s worked with for years, to make their own decisions. Instructions for performers might be: “Hold a pose until you are bored with it,” or “move until the gesture is pathetic or ridiculous and then push on further past that point.”
For all the uncertainty built into Imhof’s method, it is remarkably intricate, even more so in this cavernous space. “This time we have a script, we have a show book, we have a dancing score, we have a ballet score, we have a score that looks insane because it’s just my drawings of where everyone is supposed to be,” Imhof said. “It’s very much a score, like it’s a SUPER score, like it makes me crazy how much score there is,” she added, laughing.
Multiple performers will take on the roles of Romeo and Juliet simultaneously, and the casting is pointedly gender bending. “I’m making images that I actually want to see,” she said. “I want to see two women dancing the parts of Romeo and Juliet. I want to see a gender fluid ballet.”
In another twist, the piece will start with the main characters’ deaths and move toward the beginning of the story — “I like that we are turning the whole thing around and making the dynamic something more hopeful,” she said.
That hopefulness is certainly a departure from the mood of “Faust,” her Venice Biennale piece. Viewers entered the 1938 Fascist-coded German Pavilion through the back door, flanked by those infamous dogs. Once inside they encountered performers enacting strange, ritualistic activities, setting fires, masturbating, singing or engrossed in their cellphones beneath the glass and steel floor. At points during the five-hour event, they emerged from the claustrophobic space to walk, sing, and scream among the crowd, with industrial music pounding in the background — what one critic described as a “catwalk show from hell.” The aesthetic drew from corporate architecture, Balenciaga and the Berlin nightclub scene; it was filled with a distinctly 21st-century youthful malaise.
The pavilion was packed during its run; lines were up to two hours long. Critical reaction was wildly enthusiastic, though some were put off by the photogenic quality of the work — was it too Instagrammable to be serious art? — while others were skeptical of its refusal to make a clear political statement. As Judith F. Rodenbeck, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, recalled in a conversation, “It was hard to tell if the alienation and aggression was supposed to comment on fascism or what have you, or if it was just borrowing its aesthetic.”
In 2021, Imhof’s “Natures Mortes, Tableaux Vivants” turned the massive Palais de Tokyo in Paris into a multilevel concert stage. She filled it with her own paintings — her devotion to the medium continues to drive her work — as well as work by other artists, from Théodore Géricault to Rosemarie Trockel.
“DOOM” is not Imhof’s first foray in New York — she presented “Deal” at MoMA PS1 in 2015, in which figures performed abstracted, physical “transactions” involving a vat of buttermilk and 10 rabbits, surrounded by Imhof’s etchings and a video piece. (Klaus Biesenbach, who was the director of MoMA PS1 at the time, is the curator of the Armory show.)
“It was somehow too early for me to face the U.S.,” Imhof said. “If I had known America better, I would never, ever have done a piece like that. It flew in Europe and in France — they were like, oh, rabbits — but here animal rights activists were putting my name all over the internet.”
This time she hopes will be different, not least because she has lived in New York and Los Angeles during the past several years. She has also done research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Getty Research Institute, where she dug into American ballet, the city’s dance scene, performing arts history, and dance criticism, all of which has shaped “DOOM.”
The “Americana” factor is turned up to eleven. Posters promoting the project around town represent the star-crossed lovers’ families as high school mascots — a tiger and a wolf in team hats. The set design evokes a prom that has been crashed by a phalanx of tanklike SUVs, a vehicle that Imhof associates with presidential motorcades and U.S. car culture. At one point, the corps de ballet will be line dancing. The music will echo and quote from Bach and Mahler but also rap, Jim Morrison and Frank Sinatra, in a score composed by Imhof and her collaborators.
Despite the title, which seems to point to the anxiety many Americans feel now — Imhof insists that it’s not a direct response to President Trump, not least because she began working on the piece more than three years ago. “The wolves and the lions were originally going to be dressed in red and blue, and I realized, no, that’s not going to work, it’s too strong of a statement. I don’t want to come to America and be loud about American politics.”
That said, she added, “I’m pretty aware that I’m a woman in a privileged position in terms of my career and the opportunities that are open to me, but American politics still affects me in very specific ways,” especially in the administration’s repressive actions toward the trans and queer communities, to which she and many of her collaborators belong.
Imhof has developed deep relationships with those collaborators scattered across Europe and the U.S., including Ville Haimala, a veteran of the electronic music duo Amnesia Scanner; the multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Jerome AB; the actor Levi Strasser (from “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”); Sihana Shalaj, a model based in Stockholm and Paris; and Josh Johnson, a William Forsyth dancer and choreographer.
New faces include Talia Ryder, who starred in “Matilda” on Broadway; Jacob Madden, a classically trained pianist; and Devon Teuscher, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater.
And then there is Eliza Douglas, the American painter, Balenciaga model and former romantic partner of Imhof, who has been integral to her work for the past nine years — as performer, musician, singer and composer, costume designer and casting director. Her own paintings have been prominently displayed within Imhof’s installations. (Not in “DOOM,” though, which doesn’t include any art or sculpture — “I didn’t want objects,” Imhof said.)
Douglas and Imhof met in Frankfurt in 2015, when Douglas was a student at the Stäedelschule, the art academy from which Imhof had graduated. She invited Douglas to her show “Angst” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. “I had this funny feeling that I was auditioning,” Douglas told me. The two started dating, and the collaboration developed organically. “It was so woven into our life. We would be sitting around in our living room, and I would do something strange, and she would like it, and it would become part of the work,” Douglas said. “I was always kind of performing for her.”
The intimacy of their connection even when their romance ended allowed Imhof to remove her own body from the stage, she said. “Eliza basically took my part, and she was so good,” Imhof explained, “it shifted for me — I could give away the idea of being this figure inside of the performance.”
She is happy to hand over the reins when making her work, a quality that results in a remarkably non-hierarchical environment where performers decide their own path forward. “Why should I insist on being some singular artistic genius?”
David Velasco, a writer and the former editor of Artforum, says a strength of the work is how the performers seem to relate to one another. “I can always tell in Imhof’s work that they are in actual communion,” he said. “What’s revealed is cool to watch unfold.”
Perhaps that notion of collectivity is the political thrust of Imhof’s art: “I’m working with people as I dream the world would work,” she said. “I don’t think a performance can effect a total paradigm shift, but I think it can open up the possibility for people of seeing themselves as part of something.”
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