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In the 1990s — that retrospectively innocent time of self-expression — my parents would host crazy tableau vivant parties each New Year’s Eve.

The typical Harding song is not a legible narrative so much as a tableau vivant, with strange, unknowable characters posed in the middle of a scene that is fully realized if never entirely explained.

The guests, several of whom described the gathering for this article, played tableau vivant, an old-timey version of charades, in which participants enact famous paintings.

After all, close scrutiny of a painting or a sculpture is not the aim of a tableau vivant.

Pageant of the Masters This annual presentation of tableaux vivant — life-size re-creations of famous paintings using living, breathing humans — is back.