L’Alliance New York and Performa announce 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. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit https://lallianceny.org/event/commedia-dellarte/.