One of the questions scholars of performance art ponder is how far back its history goes. This question could be pursued as an exploration of trans-historical similarity, but it could also be investigated as a matter of genetic kinship. No artwork looms larger in the western performance art canon in the second sense than Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896). In her authoritative book Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg traces the inspiration for the pioneering Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist performances of the early twentieth century back to Jarry’s disquieting play.11RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1979), 9–39. The founder of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, was in fact an acquaintance of Jarry’s in Paris and only narrowly missed the play’s riotous premiere at the actor Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 11, 1896.

The play was nothing like the theater of the past and, in many ways, not even a piece of theater at all. Jarry opened the proceedings by coming on stage with a glass of water and perplexing the crowd with cryptic pronouncements for ten minutes such as declaring the play’s setting to be both in Poland and “nowhere.”22Goldberg, Performance, 10. The stage set was no less confusing, presenting a pastiche of geographical and historical references—painted, collaged and built by other “enfants terribles” of the Paris art scene such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Based on Jarry’s absurdist putdown of a pompous schoolteacher, and parodying the plot of Macbeth, the play itself presented the lecherous and murderous life of a preposterous monarch figure, comically bent on self-aggrandizement, conquest, and destruction. The first line of the performance—“Merdre!”, a variant of the French for “shit” with an added second “r”—was delivered by actor Firmin Gémier, setting a confrontational tone and provoking an immediate violent outcry in the audience.

Around 4:00 pm, on March 12, 2026, I was hovering around the entrance of Ubu Painter: Alfred Jarry and the Arts, an exhibition about Jarry’s artistic life and influence at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. I was waiting for a performance billed as “Ubu Revisited: Essential Poetry 1-BU.” Ten minutes later, two performers entered the gallery carrying two black conical objects and set them on the floor. The objects were about five feet in height and stiff enough to stand up on their own. To an innocent eye, they could have resembled small tents but, through the prism of history’s burdens they evoked either the hooded silhouette of a Ku Klux Klan uniform or, closer to the Catalan context, the “capirotes” of the Spanish Inquisition.33Kelly Grovier, “This White Hood Carries Many Meanings,” BBC, April 13, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170413-this-white-hood-carries-many-meanings. The performers loudly declaimed the following message in four languages—Catalan, English, French, and Spanish—trading lines in the portentous diction of official ceremony: “By decree number X729, you have been chosen as the new Government of the nation. You did not stand for election, you did not choose it, you did not want it. That is why you will govern.”44Sílvia Ferrando, “Ubu Revisited: Essential Poetry 1-BU,” brochure, Picasso Museum, 2026. They then distributed orange leaflets among the twenty or so gallery goers, most of whom seemed to have been caught by surprise by this activation. Some shied away from the offered leaflets, which featured a prose poem, as if accepting them would further formalize the governance position bestowed upon them by the mysterious decree.55“Prohibitions—those that are not agreed upon but imposed—are often the result of poor imagination, expressions of the tyranny of reason that prevents us from conceiving other possibilities,” from the poem printed on the leaflets, written by the performance’s director, dramaturg and theater educator Sílvia Ferrando. The two performers, Sara Vinyals and Guillem Valverde, also were credited.

The performers proceeded to walk around the gallery, approaching displays and speaking about them in the tone of a didactic docent, to each other and to the rest of those present. Then, as rhythmic music piped in from a floor speaker that had been standing in a corner, they took their shoes off and engaged in a short dance routine. The dance felt dialogical, like a pas de deux in which interaction was more important than harmony. The most impressive and arduous part of this involved the two performers tumbling over one another, arms locked at the elbows, across a length of the marble floor. After the dance, they regrouped for some further conversation about the art, then donned the tent-like habits and slowly exited the space, pointy hoods bobbing in between the exhibition’s display cases.

In our polite era of museum-going, with millions of docile tourists gliding through galleries on a curated global quest for cultural osmosis, the kind of interruption “Ubu Revisited: Essential Poetry 1-BU” offered was energizing. The performance was not so much a conjuring of Ubu Roi’s incendiary energy, but an embodied evocation of its creed. The hooded habits brought back a touch of the visual grotesquery that was Jarry’s signature. The empty declaration of enthronement was a reference to the absurdity of patriarchal and monarchical power, the piece of Ubu in every father and every king. The exaggerated didactic tone acted as a sendup of the self-seriousness of art and its institutions. Most remarkably, even moments such as the dance routine, which did not seem to cohere with the rest, honored an aspect of Jarry’s work—the jumbling of the codes of existing artforms and finding generative meaning in dissonance. The 1896 premiere of Ubu Roi was the historic moment when all the arts came together only to walk away in different directions. The resulting mess would have been as good a birthplace for performance art as any.