Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Dead behind the eyes: Assessing Anne Imhof’s massive, immersive, and multidisciplinary DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE

• By drediman
• March 11, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to take in Anne Imhof’s highly anticipated Doom: House of Hope at the Park Avenue Armory. To be sure, Imhof’s latest project — her first in the U.S. in about a decade — is a massive yet confounding creation, lasting an intermission-less three hours and featuring a cast of about 40. The main overlapping visual motifs are a high school gymnasium — the drill hall has been overlaid with gym flooring — and a parking lot of Cadillac Escalades, both of which take up every inch of the expansive drill hall (even the dressing room area located in the side chambers are open to be explored by attendees).

Although the sprawling experience is, by design, maximalist and unfocused, it uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the central conceit for its meditation on postmodern nihilism. But it doesn’t end with the Bard — Doom is as multidisciplinary as a performance piece can get, delving also into dance (contemporary dance and classical ballet), live music (rap, emo, punk, classical music), live capture cinema (broadcast on a huge jumbotron at the center of the drill hall), and even a bit of regurgitated dance criticism. Like most immersive theater, the work rewards curiosity and movement within the space curated. Despite the constant stimuli of it all, the performers are invariably dead behind the eyes; collectively, they resemble an army of zombies numbly marching towards an abyss, stuck going through the motions until the inevitable end comes. Indeed, when the aforementioned jumbotron isn’t showing live video feeds, it’s counting down the seconds until the end of society as we know it. Boredom also frequently creeps in — as if to highlight the emptiness of contemporary life — inviting audience members to whip out their phones to engage oneself (as many of the characters in the piece often do).

But just when you thought you had the whole thing figured out — and have likely begun to take Doom‘s many episodic happenings for granted — Imhof throws a curveball, suggesting that art may still have the ability to jog us out of our catatonic state. More specifically, it’s only when the piece dances (the varied choreography is by Josh Johnson) — particularly in the last hour — does it come to emotional life. The dance ensemble is anchored by a number captivating performers (including the superb American Ballet principals Devon Teuscher and Daniil Simkin), whose last ditch efforts point to the work’s secondary title.

RECOMMENDED

DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE
Multidisciplinary Performance
Park Avenue Armory
3 hours (without an intermission)
Through March 12