Tableaux vivants, performances in the museum

The basic principle of tableaux vivants is quite simple: the idea is to physically reconstitute an existing painting. Situated between performance art, theatre, painting and sculpture, the practice of tableaux vivants is nevertheless captivating: apart from the interplay of similarities, a disturbing strangeness emanates from these living beings who come to a standstill in order to make an image, but whose bodies tremble and breathe… and so the tableau vivant unfolds, between immobility and movement.

Tableaux vivants were initially a popular tradition, embodied at Christmas by live cribs, and were also all the fashion at the beginning of lockdown via the online challenge launched by Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which invited the general public to reproduce famous paintings in their homes. Last March, we witnessed a veritable mania for domestic tableaux vivants.

While tableaux vivants became the fashionable cultural recreational activity for aristocratic society in the 18th century, and while Goethe and Hegel describe the subtle disturbance they produced, tableaux vivants in the modern era have ushered in a small revolution: situated at the intersection between stage arts and image arts, blending painting and performance, they have also fascinated stage designers, dancers and filmmakers. Today, we consider tableaux vivants to be the high point of "transmediality" and hybridity, and many artists reuse them or reinterpret this strange form. Moreover, in the contemporary era, the idea is no longer to reproduce or imitate old paintings: tableaux vivants have become a medium in their own right, a form that can be used, with the help of moving bodies and fixed images, to produce new visions. This weekend of tableaux vivants is thus devoted to the extremely lively current state of this transdisciplinary genre.