Christodoulos Panayiotou's 'Dying on Stage' at Musée d'Orsay

Christodoulos Panayiotou presented the performance 'Dying on Stage' at the Musée d'Orsay auditorium in Paris on October 19, November 23, and December 14, 2019, as part of the Festival d'Automne. The two-and-a-half-hour (six-hour for the third) work examines systems of representing and narrating death on stage, using YouTube videos where the actor-spectator-character triangulation is disrupted. Notable clips include Nina Simone under the influence of psychotropics and Slovak tenor Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne singing Schubert's 'Gute Nacht' during awake brain surgery. Panayiotou also speculates that Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Theorem' is a remake of 'Mary Poppins,' having asked Terence Stamp in Venice. No actual deaths are shown, though Molière's is mentioned. The performance originated as birthday gifts for friends, evolving into a perpetually fluid work. It accompanied the exhibition 'Degas at the Opera' (September 24, 2019 – January 19, 2020) and Panayiotou's fifth contemporary artist invitation to engage with the museum's collection, resulting in the exhibition 'LUX S. 1003 334' (October 19, 2019 – January 19, 2020). The artist's dualities of heaviness-lightness and gravity-agility are more alive in his retrospective at Camden Arts Centre in London through January 5, 2020.