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, and performed by Samori Etienne, Maya Margarita, Christina Catherine Martinez, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Isa Spector, and Alex Tatarsky.

Camille Henrot is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. Inspired by literature, secondhand marketplaces, poetry, cartoons, social media, self-help, and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s works capture the complexity of living as both private individuals and global citizens in an increasingly connected and overstimulated world. Her acclaimed film Grosse Fatigue (2013), created during a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, layers anthropological archives, natural history collections, and cascading desktop browser windows into a dense audiovisual meditation on excess, categorization, and the human impulse to construct meaning. The film was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale and was recently ranked #7 by ArtNews in its list of the 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century. Henrot is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award, and has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including at LUMA Arles (2026), Munch Museum, Oslo (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017), and the New Museum, New York (2014).

Commedia dell’arte is directed by Camille Henrot, with a script by Camille Henrot, Estelle Hoy, and Justine Gelfman, and music composed and performed by Mauro Hertig and Aaron David Ross. It features set design by Adam Charlap Hyman of Charlap Hyman & Herrero in collaboration with Louisa Nolte of Charlap Hyman & Herrero, choreography by Sigrid Lauren, costume design by Sandra Berrebi, and lighting design by Dan Stearns. The work is performed by Samori Etienne, Maya Margarita, Christina Catherine Martinez, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Isa Spector, and Alex Tatarsky. It is produced by Eliza Ryan (Aspen Art Museum) and Julia Simpson (Performa), with assistant production by Dria Brown, technical direction by Ryan Jenkins, and stage management by Philip Trevino. Additional support is provided by Henrot Studio Director Léa Trudel, Henrot Production Manager Anna Cano Girones, and Henrot Studio Assistant Morgan Connellee; Wheeler Opera House Executive Director Mike Harrington, Production Manager Michael Baca, Assistant Production Manager Cody Kosinski, Audio Engineer Iurii Kozin, and Theater Technician Matt Thompson. Set and prop fabrication by SAFCORE, JoJo Li, and Camille Henrot Studio. Costumes fabrication by Rae Swon, Tony Peto, Alder Beghma, Soven, Véronique Boisel, Loucas Chabot, Branica Sanadrovic, Martha Grauer, Anna L’Hostis, Mylo Coustures, and Kate Williams, with styling outreach by Myssia Ghosn. Make-up design by Ayami Nishimura. Textiles generously provided by Kvadrat.

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.

Commedia dell'arte is made possible by the Tisch Discovery Series. The Tisch Discovery Series—a dynamic selection of commissions, performances, and dialogues presented throughout the week—is made possible through a generous gift from Steve Tisch and Jamie Tisch.