Camille Henrot
Commedia dell’arte

Camille Henrot brought 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 designer Adam Charlap Hyman, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, costume designer Sandra Berrebi, writer Estelle Hoy, playwright Justine Gelfman, choreographer and rehearsal director Sigrid Lauren, and lighting designer Dan Stearns, with original music by Mauro Hertig and Aaron David Ross, 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, 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, written 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 Camille Henrot, choreography and rehearsal direction 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 stage manager Philip Trevino, associate producer Dria Brown, and technical directors Ryan Jenkins and Theresa Tomi Faison. Additional support is provided by Henrot Studio Director Léa Trudel, Henrot Studio Assistant and Scenic Production Coordinator Morgan Connellee, Henrot Studio Production Manager Anna Cano Girones, Henrot Studio Scenic Production Assistant Sonia Ruscoe; 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 and Stage Hands Mircea Oprea, Oksana Veres, Clare Williams and Sierra Williams. Set and prop fabrication by SAFCORE, JoJo Li, Rae Swon and Henrot Studio. 

Special thanks to Nuar Alsadir, Aspen Music Festival and School, Stella Bottai, Vic Brooks, Corso and Whitney Donohue, Marina Gluckman, Iddu and Sol Henrot Hertig, Koji Inoue, Dagmara Karalus, Nicola Lees, Dizzie Le-Tan, Alexis Lowry, Daniel Merritt, Alexandra Munroe and Robert Rosenkranz.

Commedia dell’arte is curated by RoseLee Goldberg, founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa and Eliza Ryan, Curator-at-Large, Aspen Art Museum.

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.

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.

LYRA Art Foundation acts as a catalyst to fund curatorial projects and productions, supporting artists to realize ambitious works and drive cultural change.

Support for this performance was generously provided by the Arison Arts Foundation.

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

Photo: Camille Henrot, Commedia dell’arte, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation. Photo: Maria Baranova. © ADAGP Camille Henrot, courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum.