At Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, Anne Imhofs 22House of Swans 22 stages a charged encounter between discipline and desire. Spanning several galleries with sculpture, painting, and large-scale installation, the exhibition centers on a four-act story ballet realized with dancers of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) and the Hong Kong Ballet (HKB). The work extends Imhofs ongoing inquiries from Faust (2017) at the 57th Venice Biennale and DOOM: House of Hope at New Yorks Park Avenue Armory. 22Ballet is a language that one can communicate in universally, 22 she says, describing how its constraints paradoxically expanded her expressive freedom in 22House of Swans. 22
Architecture of discipline, danced up close
Imhof fuses the rigor of ballet and contemporary dance with an architecture of confinement: crowd barriers, metal lockers, cages, chain links, and the black matte of marley flooring. As audiences take their place in a ring around the main stage, the space reads like an amphitheater where the last thing one expects is a four-act story balleta tension she pointedly embraces, merging the street energy of a dance battle with classical form. The barriers are concert-grade rather than police-issue; they function as both instruments of control and, in a twist, ballet barres. Midway through the performance, ballerinas lift the loose metal rods from mirrored structures and move with them, transforming hardware into choreography.
Elsewhere, mirror panels in aluminum and two-way glass form a room that reads like a ballet studio gone clinicala place where the dancers absent body feels more visceral. In the main performance room on the third floor, the proximity to the ballerinas body disrupts classical distance. 22To see ballet up close is fascinating and moving, 22 Imhof notes, foregrounding dancers as high-functioning athletes whose exhaustive training sustains the works inhuman grace.
Building a house, telling a story
The 22house 22 in the title draws on ballroom and queer cultures idea of community and safe expression, refracted through 19th-century ballets like Giselle (with the Wilis and their queen, Myrtha) and Swan Lake (with swans protected from Siegfried). After 22houses 22 in DOOM (2025)House of Wolves and House of Tigers, loosely based on the Capulets and Montagues of Romeo and Juliet (1597)Imhof imagines a new society here. The performance centers on a young heroine, played by Devon, seeking agency. Amalia (a fictional protagonist with traits of Devon Teuscher) meets Connie (with traits of Qingxin Wang) and Hanno (developed with Michael de la Nuez of ABT and finalized with Gouta Seki), while Toon Lobachs Vania, Remy Youngs Juliet, and Ryo Katos Angel move at the edges of life and death. Across four acts, love and power collide as Amalia navigates the Swans, the ruling Objectives (led by her brother, Egon), and a plot she ultimately chooses to defy.
Imhof involved HKB principals and corps in the creative process, developing roles with dancers in New York and in the HKB studios. The sound world is original: Imhofs song 22For Real 22 (created during DOOM) sits alongside lyrics by Levi Strasser, an orchestral score by Jacob Madden, drums by Iggor Cavalera, with Ville Haimala shaping the whole and Luke H fcls mann crafting piercing synth lines.
