Musée de l’Orangerie features contemporary performance
Paris's Musée de l’Orangerie is currently offering English-language tours of its Monet-to-Picasso collection. The museum is also hosting contemporary performance art, including Tiran Willemse’s “Dance among the Water Lilies,” which uses site-specific storytelling. These events offer cross-disciplinary inspiration for campaign concepts and set design.
- The "Dance among the Water Lilies" series, initiated in 2018, transforms the museum's iconic oval rooms into a stage for live performance, placing contemporary choreography directly within Claude Monet's immersive paintings. - Tiran Willemse, the featured artist, is a South African choreographer and 2022 Swiss Prize for Performance winner whose work explores constructions of race and gender. His piece, *Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3)*, juxtaposes the 19th-century ballet *Giselle* with urban African dances like Kudoro and Alanta. - The 2025-2026 program also includes performances by other choreographers such as Dovydas Strimaitis, a dancer for (La) Horde at the Marseille National Ballet, and Armin Hokmi, a young Iranian choreographer based in Berlin. - This integration of performance into a classic art space mirrors a broader trend in fashion, where designers like Alexander McQueen and Iris van Herpen have famously blurred the lines between runway shows and performance art. - The performances are staged against the backdrop of Monet's eight monumental *Water Lilies* panels, which are housed in two oval rooms built to his specific designs and are considered a founding masterpiece of abstraction. - Beyond dance, the Musée de l'Orangerie's "Contemporary Counterpoints" program invites living artists, such as the upcoming Alexandre Lenoir, to create works that enter into dialogue with Monet's masterpieces. - The museum's permanent collection, known as the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection, also features works by key figures who influenced 20th-century aesthetics, including Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and Modigliani.
