Camille Henrot brings her interdisciplinary practice to the stage for the first time with the world premiere of Commedia dell’arte. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation, Henrot’s performance incorporates the stock characters and comic ploys of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern day New York City apartment building. The delivery of a package triggers a cascade of uncanny events among tenants, as the tragi-comedic play attempts to make sense out of the senseless, ultimately collapsing into it.
The work draws on Henrot’s distinct visual language, shaped by her background as a cartoonist, as well as the slapstick and gestural comedy of Buster Keaton, Jim Carrey, and Tex Avery. Henrot engages and reconfigures the formal languages of film and television, media whose own structures are shaped by the conventions and performative structures of early theater. In a zany collision of mundanity and excess, Henrot constructs a portrait of contemporary life in which hustle and reflection, wealth and precarity, share a wall—bodies always in motion, in the constant performance of being.
The performance was developed in collaboration with set designers Charlap Hyman & Herrero, costume designer Sandra Berrebi, writer Estelle Hoy, playwright Justine Gelfman, choreographer Sigrid Lauren, and lighting designer Dan Stearns with original music and live sound by Aaron David Ross and Mauro Hertig.
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IMAGE CREDIT:
Camille Henrot, Study for Pantalone, the Landlord, 2025.
© ADAGP Camille Henrot. Courtesy of the artist, Mennour and Hauser & Wirth
Commedia dell’arte by Camille Henrot
Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation
The commissioning of Commedia dell’arte was initiated in 2023 by RoseLee Goldberg, founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa.
Commedia dell’arte is curated by RoseLee Goldberg, founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa and Eliza Ryan, Curator at Large, Aspen Art Museum.
World Premiere at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen as part of the Aspen Art Museum’s 2026 AIR Festival with the Performa presentation to follow in New York, September 2026.
