COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE to Make New York Premiere at L'Alliance
Directed by Henrot at Florence Gould Theater, the performance blends slapstick comedy with contemporary portraiture of New York life.
L'Alliance New York and Performa have announced the New York premiere of Commedia dell'arte by Camille Henrot as part of the 2026 Crossing The Line Festival following its world premiere at Aspen Art Museum's 2026 AIR Festival. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation, Henrot's first live 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.
Commissioned in 2023 at the invitation of Performa Founding Director and Chief Curator RoseLee Goldberg, Henrot's commission has evolved over three years through expansive creative collaboration and research. Commedia dell'arte draws on Henrot's distinct visual language 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.
Commedia dell'arte will play on Wednesday, September 23, 2026 at 7:30 PM; Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 7:30 PM; Friday, September 25, 2026 at 7:30 PM; and Saturday, September 26, 2026 at 2 PM at L'Alliance New York Florence Gould Theater, 55 E 59th St, New York, NY 10022. Tickets start at $45.
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, July 30, 2026. Commedia dell'arte is co-presented by Performa and L'Alliance New York's Crossing The Line Festival.
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 Camille Henrot. Choreography and rehearsal direction by Sigrid Lauren, costume design by Sandra Berrebi, lighting design by Dan Stearns, and makeup design by Ayami Nishimura. The work is performed by Samori Etienne, Maya Margarita, Christina Catherine Martinez, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Isa Spector, and Alex Tatarsky, with music and sound effects performed by Mauro Hertig, Aaron David Ross, Chris Ferrari and Henry Fraser. It is produced by Julia Simpson (Performa) and Eliza Ryan (Aspen Art Museum), with associate production by Dria Brown and stage management by Philip Trevino. Additional support is provided by Henrot Studio Director Léa Trudel, Henrot Studio Scenic Coordinator Morgan Connellee, and Henrot Production Manager Anna Cano Girones. Set design collaboration by Louisa Nolte, Aydan Nova and Alexia Doan of Charlap Hyman & Herrero. Set and prop fabrication by SAFCORE, JoJo Li, and Camille Henrot Studio. Wardrobe by Kayleigh Snowden, and costume fabrication by Rae Swon, Tony Peto, Alder Beghma, Soven, Véronique Boisel, Loucas Chabot, Branica Sanadrovic, Martha Grauer, Anna L'Hostis and Mylo Coustures. Costume assistance by Kate Williams and Zo Roze, with styling outreach by Myssia Ghosn. Textiles generously provided by Kvadrat. The project was developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Camille Henrot is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, live performance, 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 Art News 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).
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
