Park Avenue Armory (Manhattan, NY)

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    Anne Imhof’s ‘Doom’ at the Armory Has Everything, and Nothing

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    A Berlin nightclub habitué of my acquaintance has admonished me, more than once, not to go to concerts or parties without earplugs; too many D.J.s now crank to dangerous decibels, so have your fun and save your hearing. I forgot his advice ahead of “Doom: House of Hope,” an evening-length spectacle of attitude and abjection by the German artist and choreographer Anne Imhof, and may have developed tinnitus as a result.Your ears are not the only organs that may suffer if you come to the Park Avenue Armory, where Imhof’s massive performance work has been one of the most anticipated events of the winter season, and (thanks to its performers as well as its public) is already one of the most Instagrammed. You’ll start out in a corral with a thousand other spectators, prevented from moving forward by crowd control barriers. Expressionless, glassy-eyed performers will soon move toward you as a droning electronic score blares. You’ll be released to explore the whole 55,500-square-foot Drill Hall soon, but ticket holders should, like sensible Germans, opt for comfortable shoes: You’re on your feet throughout.Around the large hall are two dozen brand-new Cadillac Escalades, the preferred conveyance of the American oligarchy, whose roofs will become stages for limber dancers and mournful singers, and whose trunks will serve variously as pop-up bar, chess competition venue, vape break area and makeshift tattoo parlor. To follow the action of “Doom” you’ll have to chase the performers around the S.U.V.s, onto several stages, and even into the dressing rooms, while above you, on a Jumbotron scoreboard, the evening’s duration ticks down: three hours to go.The experience of “Doom” is indeed not unlike a night at the club — wending your way through a converted warehouse, losing your friends in the darkness, oscillating from moments of excessive emotion to total boredom. If you get bored, you can always look at your phone; to Imhof, your phone, and your boredom, are integral.A spectacle of attitude and abjection: the tale of Romeo and Juliet, told backward. Efron Danzig, below, and Toon Lobach.Cadillac Escalades become stages for limber dancers and mournful singers, with Lia Wang as Tybalt.This is a night of harsh contradictions, and I just can’t girdle my judgment into cheer-or-jeer format. “Doom” is narcissistic, frivolous, sometimes naïve — and still, despite all this, feels more important than a hundred cash-and-carry exhibitions in Chelsea. Its roughly 40 performers, who mutter in monotone when they aren’t just staring into space, indulge a youthful nihilism that is obvious and tiresome — until an extraordinary shift in the third hour (by which time much of the opening night’s audience had bailed), when they find grand, even Romantic purpose.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Disruptor Asks, Is New York Finally Ready for ‘DOOM’?

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      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.”“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” said Imhof, 46, who conceived of “DOOM” as a performance best suited for the Armory, rather than an artwork for a museum. She had wanted to do a ballet for a long time.Tess Mayer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Park Avenue Armory Will Host Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ and Jamie xx

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      The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new work from the Golden Lion winner Anne Imhof.The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 season on Monday, which includes the North American tour debut for the musician and producer Jamie xx’s new album “In Waves” and the largest ever North American installation of the artist Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” a grove of almost 100 trees that will arrive at the Armory for visitors to attach wishes to.“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society and visions of the future,” Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said in a news release.The season opens on Jan. 9 with “In Waves.” The show is a return for Jamie xx, one-third of the British electro-pop band the xx, after that group took over the Armory for 25 performances in 2014. “In Waves,” Jamie xx’s first solo album in nine years, was released this September, and will feature in the four-night residency along with some of his early solo music and songs from “In Colour” (2015).A “Wish Tree” installation in Germany. The ongoing work by Yoko Ono invites people to tie personal wishes to trees; 92 of them will be installed at the Armory.Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy“Wish Tree,” Ono’s ongoing participatory work where visitors are invited to tie personal wishes to a tree, will have 92 trees in honor of Ono’s 92nd birthday on Feb. 18. It will start on Feb. 14 and run for four days. A two-day symposium with panels and performances will celebrate Ono’s work during the installation.The Armory’s season will also include the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new durational performance piece from the cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 2017 Venice Biennale for her installation “Faust.” The performance, which opens on March 3 and is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, will take over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with performers, sound and scenery to explore the balance between apathy, activism and resistance.In addition to those productions, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The North American premiere of “Constellation,” an exhibition of more than 450 prints of the photographer Diane Arbus’s work, some of which are still unpublished.“The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a musical theater adaptation from the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman of a cult favorite gay liberation fantasy novel, self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell.The North American premiere of “Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow,” a hybrid work from the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell that uses the form of a dancing runway show on a catwalk to juxtapose everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture and political rhetoric. More

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      Only Connect: Meredith Monk’s Antidote to What Divides Us

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      As the story goes, Indra, the king of the gods, takes a net and stretches it across the universe. At each joint is a jewel, unique and infinitely faceted, that reflects all the others in an endless web of interdependence.This tale, from Indian myth, and shared by Hinduism and Buddhism, is the basis for Meredith Monk’s immense, interdisciplinary “Indra’s Net,” which has its North American staged premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday. The concluding installment in a trilogy about connectedness and the natural world, it arrives at the start of Monk’s 60th performance season, and in New York, where her idiosyncratic artistry has long been synonymous with the downtown scene and spirit.“I just am really grateful that I’ve had a life where I’ve done what I’ve loved all these years,” said Monk, 81, a polymathic avant-gardist who has long eluded categorization, and has composed, choreographed, directed, sung and played in her works. “I’ve held out this long, and my voice is holding out.”Listen to Meredith Monk sing a theme from “Indra’s Net.”“Indra’s Net” is preceded in the trilogy by “On Behalf of Nature” (2013) and “Cellular Songs” (2018), but it was the first to enter Monk’s mind. Nearly 15 years ago, she was working on “Weave” for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; written for two vocal soloists, an orchestra and chorus, its structure recalled, for her, the myth’s story. But the title “Indra’s Net” didn’t feel right for that piece, so she held on to it for later.Still, she was haunted by the title and the story. Monk is an artist who embraces humanity with Whitmanesque generosity, and her earlier works have shared themes with the interconnectedness of Indra’s net. It was at the front of her mind as she made drawings after the premiere of “Weave.” And then again one afternoon as she sat at her piano and came up with eight-bar themes for “jewels” in the net. But she put all that away and wrote “On Behalf of Nature” instead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Sharon Eyal’s ‘R.O.S.E.’ Throws a Rave at the Armory

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      The choreographer Sharon Eyal turns the Drill Hall of the Armory into a club at which her dancers appear at intervals, behaving oddly.In recent years, several choreographers, mostly from Europe, have tried to put club culture and the experience of a rave onto a theater stage. Sharon Eyal’s “R.O.S.E.” goes further: It is a rave.For the production’s North American premiere, the back quarter of the Park Avenue Armory’s vast Drill Hall has been converted into a club. The huge volume of vertical space and the vaulted roof, high above, suggest a converted airplane hangar or factory. Seatless risers (with a small section of chairs reserved for those who need them) surround a central dance floor. In one corner, the D.J. Ben UFO expertly controls the sonic flow, as colored lights (designed by Alon Cohen and Brandon Stirling Baker) rhythmically pierce the haze from many angles.There is a cast of professional dancers, but they don’t appear until 45 minutes into the full three-hour experience. They perform for intervals of five to 15 minutes, then disappear for similar amounts of time, leaving the audience to entertain itself until the next appearance — dancing or watching others dance, perhaps buying a drink from one of the two bars.Those performers are an odd tribe, though the oddness will be familiar to anyone who has seen the work that Eyal, an Israeli choreographer, has been creating with Gai Behar, a rave producer, for the last decade or so. Heavy eyeliner streaks down their faces, as though they’ve been weeping. Their androgynous costumes (by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior Couture) are like lingerie, lacy and artfully torn, some accessorized with matching cowls and cinch sacks.At first, they stick together in formations, opening up as rose petals do then snaking through the crowd and up and down the risers like a conga line of consumptives. Angular and so uptight they’re almost arthritic, they mince on the balls of their feet and strike mildly contortionist, Mannerist poses. They appear to have been broken and awkwardly glued back together. At one point, they do a clumpy kick line while connected hand to earlobe rather than arm over shoulder. But such flashes of wit are exceptions. Often the performers press knuckles to their cheeks, like clowns miming sadness.Like dancers in a club, they pulsate to the beat, rolling shoulders, cocking hips, pumping pelvises. But they don’t do this naturally. Rather, they resemble aliens trying imitate dancers in a club, mimicking the moves but missing the feel. Despite the lingerie and a few fetish gestures like hands on throats, they are devoid of eroticism. Even in solos, they don’t find any freedom of motion. The crowd may cheer them on, but they are trapped in Eyal’s aesthetic, unable to get down.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stockhausen’s Adventures in Space and Time at the Armory

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      An elliptical halo of thin, concentrated light floated in the capacious drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory on a recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.At the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, idiosyncratically shaped video screens faced each other across a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color as Urs Schönebaum, the designer, spoke into a headset while riding a scooter.After a brief pause, Schönebaum cued various elements: Out of darkness and silence emerged eerie sounds that traveled freely through the space from unseen speakers; the videos throbbed with the music, their brightness, with the changing lights, creating an illusion of a void beyond the circle. It became difficult to track the passing minutes. The pleasant spring morning outside might as well have been another world.Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s widow, performing his music at the Armory on Urs Schönebaum’s very lighted set.Balarama Heller for The New York TimesSuch is the effect of “Inside Light,” the Armory’s theatrical presentation of electronic music from “Licht,” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental, impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Defying simple explanation and traditional form, these works, by turns comical and mystically sublime, deal with cosmic clashes of good and evil, with intimate dramas and global politics, with the nature of music itself.At the Armory, listeners will hear five electronic pieces that make up just a sliver of the 29-hour cycle, but even that will be substantial. They will be performed over two nights, beginning on Wednesday, or as single-day marathons for those who want to get lost in the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced the likes of Kraftwerk and Björk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Illinoise,’ a Sufjan Stevens Dance Musical, Is Moving to Broadway

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      The production will make its transfer unusually fast, with an opening set for April 24, just 29 days after it wraps up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory.“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview. More

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      ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

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      Justin Peck, who directs and choreographs a narrative dance musical to Sufjan Stevens’s concept album “Illinois,” resorts to his usual standby: community.“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.Ricky Ubeda, top, and Ahmad Simmons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More