Anne Imhof

Death came first. Love came last. Anne Imhof began at the end.

A couple of weeks ago, inside the vast and echoing Park Avenue Armory, multidisciplinary artist Anne Imhof staged DOOM, her largest and most elaborate performance piece to date. What unfolded was a radical retelling of Romeo and Juliet, set in modern times, and a slow detonation of the narrative itself. A timer counted down from three hours.

The stage was a gymnasium, a rave, a prom night, a battlefield. Bodies moved through fog, around parked SUVs, across bleachers, and into one another's arms. A performance of fracture. A ballet of resistance.

Historically, Romeo and Juliet has been predominantly interpreted through the male gaze. Directors like George Cukor, Franco Zeffirelli, and Baz Luhrmann each left their mark on the tale, staging it through their lens of desire, power, and inevitability. Anne Imhof’s rendition stands in stark contrast. While she’s not the first woman to approach the story, DOOM is perhaps the first large-scale reinterpretation to fully dissolve its patriarchal scaffolding. Anne’s version deconstructs the romantic binary and reorients the emotional architecture toward something collective, unresolved, and multiple.

Power dynamics run beneath each scene, dictating who is seen, who is moving, who is choosing not to move. Ballet and flexing, two dance forms with different roots and rules, share space and tension. The ballerina is no longer a passive symbol of grace but a charged figure of endurance. Romeo isn’t a single man but a constellation of shifting bodies. Juliet is not waiting–she is watching, resisting, shaping.

I first discovered the artist Anne Imhof in college, while I was living alone for the first time. It was a period of testing my freedom and my limits. I was drinking too much, working late, and feeling confident in my invincibility. One afternoon, in the middle of that era of newfound freedom, a professor showed me a video of Anne’s performance, Angst II. It took place in a cavernous hall thick with fog. The choreography was so still it felt seismic. A woman smoked beneath strip lights. A falcon flinched on a perch. A drone hovered low enough to be menacing.

Just like that, something shifted. I didn’t know performance art could be so cold and so intimate. I didn’t know the body could register thought, could hold tension without releasing it. I didn’t know breath could mark time. Or that stillness could carry so much intent.

I stayed a fan for over a decade, but DOOM was the first time I saw Anne’s work in person.

DOOM reaffirmed the lessons I gleaned from my initial encounter with Anne: that art is a continual negotiation with the structures that shape us—social, cultural, historical—and the possibilities that emerge when we dare to confront them.

In DOOM, those possibilities take shape through rupture. Power is redistributed. The story doesn’t resolve—it unravels. And in its place, Anne offers something more unstable, more truthful: a performance that refuses the authority of tradition and insists on the authority of the body. Below, Anne tells us about DOOM—in her own words.

Introduction by Gutes Guterman

Pre-Order The Risk Issue featuring Anne Imhof

On Reimagining Narrative

DOOM, possibility intuitively, is an address on power dynamics. It is inherently political for an artist to take the space to tell the stories differently, especially women interpreting women's roles in a more complex way. There’s a palpable shift happening in how these roles are being reimagined through the bravery of female-identifying artists. They go from interpreters of someone's vision to a creator's role.

In DOOM, we expanded that further. There were multiple Romeo and Juliets—a shadow principle that made each version a main character.

Talia Ryder didn’t just play Juliet—she authored her. She brought herself into the role and shaped it from the inside. That movement—from interpreter to creator—is where the real risk is. The reversal of events—starting with death and moving toward love—was a way of reshaping the emotional core. Sihana Shalaj, another Juliet, and Remy Young, her Romeo, performed Kiss on stage. Devon Teuscher, a ballerina, played Romeo in the ballet.

Storytelling exists in ballet, in flexing, in everything we do. We brought together ballet and flexing—two forms with wildly different histories, vocabularies, and social meanings. Ballet traditionally tells stories from inside power. Flexing tells stories from the outside—from the body as a site of resistance, discipline, survival. The ballerina is often portrayed as untouchable, but also trapped—effortless, yet controlled.

We invented new gestures, new phrases, physical ways of saying something ancient. It was a kind of embodied writing. We gave form to Juliet’s most powerful moments: “If everything else fails… I myself have the power to die.”

On Defining Risk

I am often taking risks in my life, and it reflects in my work in some way. I don’t like making compromises—at all. At the same time, my creative process is collaborative, shaped by different backgrounds and ways of making images. I take the risk of relinquishing control. It’s a risk to put my name on it. But I want to trust the process and the people I’m working with 100%. I need to believe in them as much as they need to believe in the work.

It felt like each member of DOOM took a personal risk—believing in themselves and their devotion to what they do, and to the audience. Just putting yourself on stage is already a risk. You make yourself vulnerable, and still, you have to keep the promise that comes with being seen. In my case, the more people watching, giving and receiving energy, the safer I feel. It’s not about control—it’s about presence. I give something, but I also receive something back. The piece becomes a collective act of belief. And that’s the most exciting kind of risk to take—the kind that expands you.

On Physicality and Vulnerability

Performing a piece of this magnitude has to be handled with great sensitivity. We all have to be careful, and not just practically but emotionally, spiritually. These works ask a lot of the body and mind. The contributing artists are given a set of instructions to help guide them—but they’re also trusted to move within and beyond those frames. It can be draining. It can also be euphoric.

I insist on an off-stage environment that allows for individual expression, and that caters to each performer’s needs, thresholds, and vulnerabilities. Everyone can leave the stage at any moment. There’s no real right or wrong. No expectation of suffering. The cast of DOOM was deeply connected—communicating almost without words. There was a kind of attunement between them. Dancers, in particular, are trained to read space and each other. Their awareness is microscopic, precise.

I don’t believe a performance becomes more powerful by pushing someone past their emotional or physical limits. That’s not my idea of intensity. Intensity comes from conviction, not exhaustion. The work thrives when people give what they’re best at, when they feel supported. It’s about respect—for each other and for the idea of a safe space. I’ve never stopped learning in these processes. It’s changed the way I work. I know now that building a container for care isn’t separate from building the piece. It is the piece.

On What Happens Off Stage

One of the most important aspects of DOOM was what happened off-stage. That’s where the real texture of the piece lived. The audience sees only a fragment—what’s lit, what’s framed. But the work is also in the dressing rooms, the side rooms, the bunkers. It’s in the places where people rest, change, talk, take off their costumes and selves. That off-stage life is the ground the piece grows from.

We built an environment where people could speak openly about their needs, their limits, their identities. Where consent was ongoing, not just assumed. That was the piece, too. Sometimes even more than what happened under the lights. Those side rooms became worlds of their own. We filmed them, projected them. We made the invisible visible, or at least traceable. The intimacy of those moments carried into the performance. The boundaries between backstage and stage dissolved. And when the piece ended each night, the off-stage life didn’t stop. It was still there, breathing underneath.

On the Most Significant Risk

The biggest risk I’ve taken is probably becoming an artist at all. It never felt like a clean decision. It felt like a necessity—something I had no choice but to do. There’s an urgency to it, a kind of internal pressure. The risk is waking up every day and deciding, again, to live inside that choice. It’s a financial risk. An emotional one. A spiritual one. But for me, it was the only way to be in the world.

Then there are the public risks: stepping into ballet for the first time, reimagining Romeo and Juliet, working at this scale, with this many people. I was terrified. Truly scared. But I also knew that something had to shift. I wanted to talk about love differently. About power, differently. About bodies, differently. The commitment of the people I worked with made that leap possible. They opened their worlds to me. They trusted me. And in return, I gave them everything I had. That’s the only way I know how to work. That’s the risk I’ll keep taking.