«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/11858
Sulla scia delle proteste globali che hanno segnato l’estate del 2020, come quelle di Black Lives Matter e dell’abbattimento delle statue negli Stati Uniti, questo contributo ripropone l’idea della danza nei musei come forma di “archeologia radicale”. Essa è presentata come una storiografia radicale per quei corpi di colore che, in precedenza, sono stati resi invisibili, o solo parzialmente visibili, dall’opprimente autorità della storia. L’articolo esamina un caso centrale dal punto di vista degli studi accademici sulla danza, il video musicale APESHIT (2018) di Beyoncé e Jay-Z Carter, girato al Louvre, e ne offre un’attenta analisi coreografica tra movimento e immobilità, al fine di sostenere la danza nei musei come forma metaforica di “abbattimento di statue”, una forma che può sfidare con forza lo status quo della storia dell’arte.
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Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre
Text.Serial.Journal
https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/
Dossier - Danza e museo
2020-12-31
2020-11-29
2020-12-31
2021-01-05
283-296
danzaericerca
Marie-Louise Crawley
2020/12/31
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/11858
283
Centre for Dance Research (CDaRE), Coventry University, UK
2036-1599
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«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre
https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/article/download/11858/12133
Marie­Louise Crawley *

«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre
31 dicembre 2020, pp. 283­296
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036­1599/11858
Section: Dossier [peer reviewed]


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Abstract
Sulla scia delle proteste globali che hanno segnato l’e­      In the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests
state del 2020, come quelle di Black Lives Matter e           and the statue­toppling that marked the summer of
dell’abbattimento delle statue negli Stati Uniti, questo      2020, this article reappraises the idea of dance in the
contributo ripropone l’idea della danza nei musei co­         museum as a form of “radical archaeology”. It presents
me forma di “archeologia radicale”. Essa è presentata         dance in the museum as a radical historiography for
come una storiografia radicale per quei corpi di colore       those bodies of colour previously rendered invisible,
che, in precedenza, sono stati resi invisibili, o solo par­   or only partially visible, by an oppressive curating of
zialmente visibili, da una pratica oppressiva della sto­      history. From a dance scholarship perspective, the ar­
ria. L’articolo esamina un caso centrale dal punto di vi­     ticle examines a central case study, Beyoncé and Jay­
sta degli studi accademici sulla danza, il video musica­      Z Carter’s music video APESHIT (2018), filmed in the
le APESHIT (2018) di Beyoncé e Jay­Z Carter, girato           Musée du Louvre (France), offering a close analysis
al Louvre, e ne offre un’attenta analisi coreografica tra     of its complex choreographies of movement and still­
movimento e immobilità, al fine di sostenere la danza         ness to argue for dance in the museum as a metaphor­
nei musei come forma metaforica di “abbattimento di           ical form of statue­toppling, one that can powerfully
statue”, una forma che può sfidare con forza lo status        challenge the art historical status quo.
quo della storia dell’arte.

  *   Centre for Dance Research (C­DaRE), Coventry University, UK.
                                            Marie-Louise Crawley


             «This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre




Introduction: A Story of Falling Statues
      It is June 2020: I am writing this article in the same week that a group of protestors in Bristol (UK)
pulled a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston 1 from its pedestal and rolled it into the harbour waters;
the same week that the streets of Oxford (UK) resounded with renewed calls that “Rhodes Must Fall”
and the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes be removed from the façade of one of its Colleges;
the same week that the statue of the West Indian merchant and enslaver Robert Milligan was removed
from the West India docks in London (UK); and the same week that, across the Channel, a statue of
Léopold II was toppled in Antwerp, Belgium. These calls and actions for colonial statues to fall have
come in the wake of global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of an unarmed black man,
George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis (USA) on 25th May 2020. In the UK, much of the
public and, particularly, the right-wing media discourse on this statue toppling, monument removing
and renaming of buildings has focussed on what this might mean in terms of erasing, re-writing or even
– and here, the irony is astounding – “white-washing” history 2. Yet the historiographical argument is
clear: while the toppling of statues does not erase but rather highlights history, it is statues themselves
that have contributed to the erasure of specific stories of people and cultures for centuries. As historian
Tanja Bueltmann reminds us, statues are often far less historical than they are ahistorical, as they are

   1. Edward Colston (1636-1721) was a Bristol-born merchant, philanthropist and Tory member of parliament who
was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, eventually becoming Deputy Governor of the Royal African Com-
pany (1689-90). His legacy in Bristol has long been debated with repeated calls for his statue to be removed. Cf.
Olivette Otele, Slavery and Visual Memory: What Britain can learn from France, in «Open Democracy», August 29th
2016, online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slavery-and-visual-memory-what-britain-
can-learn-from-france/ (accessed 24/10/2020). On 7th June 2020, Colston’s statue was finally toppled by Black Lives Matter
protestors and thrown into the harbour. The statue has subsequently been removed and will now be placed in a museum,
along with the ropes that were used to topple it, and placards from the protest.
   2. See, for example, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statements on Twitter following the toppling of Colston,
where he wrote that «to tear [statues] down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations
to come», as cited in Peter Walker – Alexandra Topping – Steven Morris, Boris Johnson Says Removing Statues is to Lie About
our History, in «The Guardian», June 12th 2020, online: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/12/boris-johnson-
says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd (accessed 19/6/2020).




                               «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno XII, numero 12, 2020
                                                                                                danzaericerca.unibo.it
                                                                                 DOI: 10.6092/issn.2036­1599/11858
284                                                                                                      Marie­Louise Crawley




selective in their historicising 3. Statues are about who has the power to select what, and whom, we
remember, and whom, and what, we forget. This is a matter of who is held up on a pedestal and who
has the power to put him there.
      The actions of those protestors on a summer’s Sunday afternoon in Bristol should not cause us,
as historian Charlotte Riley puts it, «to worry about “re-writing” history [because] it’s literally what
historians do» 4. As Riley points out, historians are constantly engaged in the process of re-evaluating
and reinterpreting the past: she reminds us that while «the past may be dead […] history is alive, and it
is constructed in the present» 5. As such, the Black Lives Matters protestors in Bristol, Oxford, London
and Antwerp are not only history-makers themselves; they can, in fact, be seen as historiographers, and
their actions as publicly debating, questioning and re-writing history. Through such actions, at least in
Britain, the lines of public debate about heritage and racism are now being decisively re-evaluated and
redrawn. The context of the Black Lives Matter protests have enabled citizens to powerfully use statues
and museums as public spaces to re-frame how we think and feel about difficult and uncomfortable
histories of colonialism, slavery, oppression, and about anti-blackness and social justice in the twenty-
first century. In Britain, they are becoming places where the public can assemble to acknowledge the
on-going nature of the country’s colonial past and together work for collective, transformative action.
Sometimes, bringing a statue down with ropes and rolling it into the harbour is part of that action.
In statues and in museums, historically, we see a tidy, if subjective, curating of the past. Both are sites
of public memory, of common remembering; they are where we come together to remember (or to
forget) and where what we remember (and what we forget) is very often decided for us, where the past
is neatly boxed into a glass display case, curated and framed for us in a very specific way. However, the
past cannot always be so tidily enclosed, framed and mummified. Sometimes the glass of the vitrine
must be smashed and the statue must fall as we confront those difficult and uncomfortable histories.
      However, it is important to note that due to the institutional developments brought about by
the movement of the “New Museology” 6, museums have gradually become – and are still becoming –
much more fluid, transient spaces where the historicized past meets the present moment. Even if we
believe that Colston’s statue should remain lying at the bottom of the Atlantic, its removal and the plan
to eventually place it in a museum along with the ropes that toppled it and Black Lives Matter placards

   3. Cf. Tanya Bueltmann, Twitter thread, June 9th 2020, online: https://twitter.com/cliodiaspora?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle-
%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor (accessed 19/6/2020).
   4. Charlotte Riley, Don’t worry about “rewriting” history, in «The Guardian», June 10th 2020, online:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/rewriting-history-historians-statue-past (accessed 24/10/2020).
   5. Ibidem.
   6. Since the 1970s, museums have undergone significant and radical changes, with political and economic pressures leading
to a shift away from collections and towards a more viewer-centred ethos. This self-reflexivity that attempts to ensure greater
accessibility to these public spaces and to put an end to the traditional elitism of the museum has become known as a “new
museology”.
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                           285




becomes an important action too. Significantly for my argument here, it is within such a framework
of the historicised past meeting the present moment that performance has entered the museum. As
museology scholar Helen Rees Leahy suggests, it is «the inherent transience and fluidity of performance
that confronts the apparent solidity and stasis of the museum» 7. Performance in the museum can be
part of a confrontation with the past: not only smashing through the glass of the vitrine, but also
finding ways for that fragmented and fragmentary past to be reassembled in different ways. Through
performance, history can be re-membered differently and previously erased or deliberately forgotten
histories can resurface 8.
      In witnessing the collective protests and statue toppling that have been occurring, I have been
prompted to think again about dance in the museum and what I have elsewhere termed dance’s poten-
tial in the museum to be a means of «radical archaeology» 9. Following archaeologists Michael Shanks
and Christopher Tilley’s groundbreaking argument, I have previously argued that the dancer in the mu-
seum is navigating past and present. Like the Bristol protestors, in her own way, she is statue toppling;
she is “doing” history, remembering, story-telling. For choreography, like archaeology, continually
inscribes «the polyvalent qualities of the past» 10 in its present-ness. However,

            whereas archaeologists aim to survey, excavate and produce texts, and there is rarely recourse
        to an empathetic (or bodily) understanding of the past, in my own museum practice, the dance
        aims to communicate the emotions and sensations of [female] bodies from the past to its viewers
        and to encourage in them an empathetic, visceral connection to the past 11.

      This “radical archaeology” that takes place in the bodies of both the dancer and the viewer, is an
essential principle behind my own dance practice in the museum where the choreographic reassembly
of fragments of bodies, stories and perspectives (akin to an archaeological re-piecing together of broken
shards) points to a mode of dismembering and remembering history 12. As a white feminist scholar, I

   7. Helen Rees-Leahy, Watching Me, Watching You: Performance and Performativity in the Museum, in Tony Jackson – Jenny
Kidd (edited by), Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, Manchester
University Press, Manchester 2011, pp. 26-38: p. 28.
   8. On notions on the dismembering and remembering of history through performance in the archaeological museum, see
further Marie-Louise Crawley, Likely Terpsichore? Dancing in the Museum of Ancient History and Archaeology, in «Performance
Paradigm», n. 13, 2017, pp. 66-79; Marie-Louise Crawley, «The crafted body»: Thoughts on Dancing, Viewing and Remem-
bering, in Simon Ellis – Hetty Blades – Charlotte Waelde (edited by), A World of Muscle, Bone and Organs: Research and
Scholarship in Dance, C-DaRE, Coventry 2018, pp. 59-75; Marie-Louise Crawley, Dance as Radical Archaeology, in «Dance
Research Journal», vol. LII, n. 2, 2020, pp. 88-100.
   9. Marie-Louise Crawley, Dance as Radical Archaeology, cit., p. 88.
   10. Michael Shanks – Christopher Tilley, Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London 1992, p.
20.
   11. Marie-Louise Crawley, Dance as Radical Archaeology, cit., p. 93.
   It is worth noting that there is some overlap with my own propositions in the field of sensory classical archaeology (e.g.
Eleanor Betts, Senses of the Empire: Multisensory Approaches to Roman Culture, Routledge, Abingdon 2017) but sensory classical
Roman archaeology has, to date, mainly focused on the sonic and haptic rather than the kinaesthetic.
   12. My idea of dance as radical archaeology also chimes with work being proposed in the fields of both
phenomenology and sensory studies in archaeology. I am indebted to the Sensory Studies in Antiquity network
286                                                                                                   Marie­Louise Crawley




have always thought of dance’s radical potential in the museum for doing historiography in terms
of revealing previous unrealized female histories in a traditionally patrilineal space. In the wake of the
Black Lives Matter protests, my attention has turned once again to the “whiteness” of the marble statues
in the archaeological museum – and indeed my own white body and the white mask that I wear in my
museum dances 13 – and I have begun to think about the potential for dance as radical historiography
for bodies of colour rendered invisible (or only partially visible) by a tidy and oppressive curating of
history. In this week of statue toppling, I have thought repeatedly of one very striking museum dance
that deserves another look in the light of black lives mattering: APESHIT, a 2018 music video by
hip-hop artists the Carters (otherwise known as Beyoncé and Jay-Z).



APESHIT (2018): The Carters’ Louvre takeover
      Directed by Ricky Saiz and choreographed by Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherka-
oui, APESHIT was the first music video to be released from the Carters’ album Everything is Love
(2018). Filmed inside France’s Musée du Louvre over two nights in May 2018, the video was released
on June 16th 2018. As concerns how radical dance can be in an art history and archaeology museum,
APESHIT is quite the statement. With their chorus of dancers, all men and women of colour, Bey-
oncé and Jay-Z stage a take-over of the museum and, in doing so, powerfully dance, rap and sing,
underscoring themes of cultural ownership, protest and the resistance of black bodies and histories in
whitewashed spaces and, by extrapolation, throughout History. As art historian James Smalls has writ-
ten, this video is «all about bodies […] about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and
command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typ-
ically marginalized» 14. Indeed, as Jay-Z raps in a lyric that repeats throughout the track, the perspective
on how this performance work presents black history and the representation of bodies of colour is clear:
«this a different angle». This is a work about reimagining history, and about reassembling “collections”
so that they include, and focus on, black bodies 15.
      Above all, it is important to note the high and complicated stakes of the video’s location given the
Louvre’s status as one of Europe’s most famous art and history museums. On one level, in a track that

(www.sensorystudiesinantiquity.com) for pointing me towards the current promotion of the study of senses in the ancient
world among archaeologists and ancient historians.
   13. See my performance in Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (UK),
2018, online: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work (accessed 19/6/2020).
   14. James Smalls, Crazy in Louvre how Beyoncé and Jay-Z Exploit Western Art History to Ask Who Controls Black Bodies, in
«Frieze», 29th June 2018, online: https://frieze.com/article/crazy-louvre-how-beyonce-and-jay-z-exploit-western-art-history-
ask-who-controls-black-bodies (accessed 19/6/2020).
   15. Throughout this essay, following definitions outlined by Reni Eddo-Lodge, I use bodies of colour to describe bodies
that are not white; and the word black «to describe people of African and Caribbean heritage, including mixed-race people»,
cf. Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Bloomsbury, London 2017, p. xvi.
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                         287




speaks of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s fame, wealth and having “made it” despite the odds – «I can’t believe we
made it», as they rap throughout – that the Carters can afford to hire out the Louvre for two nights
to make a music video in which the first and last shots of them show them in a private audience
with Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda (c. 1503-1506) is a clear demonstration of their wealth. Yet
the choice of location for this particular video goes deeper. Indeed, it is about status in all senses of
the word. As I have outlined above, museums are where we come to remember our past, and our
art and our cultural history. Furthermore, they are complicated spaces where not only is culture and
history displayed but where it is curated. They are public archives in the ancient Greek sense of the
home of the ἄρχων, the tyrant who holds the power – and it is those in power who choose what is
displayed in, and excluded from, museum collections. As classicist Helen Morales is quick to point
out, the Louvre museum houses about six thousand paintings, «but only twenty-one women artists
have works in the collection, and none are identified as women of colour» 16. In addition, there are few
works in the collection that feature people of colour who are not slaves 17. Originally a royal palace and
a private art collection, the Louvre was turned into a national, public and free space in 1783. Its layout
– and the layout of the galleries that are principally featured in APESHIT – was originally designed
to show France as the rightful heir to the traditions of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Italian
Renaissance. However, like many other archaeological and art history museums that face accusations
of theft, unethical acquisition and cultural appropriation, the Louvre’s is a murky history with many
“masterpieces” stolen by Napoléon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Stories of plunder and of cultural
appropriation lie at the very heart of the Louvre’s transition from private palace to public museum. As
Morales outlines, further complicating matters is the vision of Napoleonic France as the “new” Rome.
The Louvre’s foundational narrative is that of classical antiquity as the basis for Western European
civilisation, «a by-word that is once more becoming code for white Euro-American superiority» 18. The
Napoleonic galleries of the Louvre are whitewashed spaces. What is significant in Beyoncé and Jay-Z
Carter’s “takeover” of the Louvre is exactly that: theirs is a takeover of a traditionally white space with
bodies of colour. However, not only does APESHIT «criticise the exclusion of black people and culture
from the Louvre […] it also goes beyond that, by reimagining the space and its collections in ways that
create new icons, perspectives, and priorities. It acts as a kind of restorative myth-making» 19.

  16. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths, Wildfire, London 2020, pp. 99-119: p.
110.
  17. Most of the art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas is housed in another of Paris’ museums, the Musée du
Quai Branly; and only a very small collection is displayed in the Denon wing of the Louvre.
  18. Ivi, p. 108. Recent classical scholarship (Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the
Digital Age, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2018; Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit.) has pointed out that this may
be partly due to the current rise of online “red pill” communities who appropriate ideas from classical antiquity to justify
misogynist and racist narratives.
  19. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 111.
288                                                                                                        Marie­Louise Crawley




      As such, APESHIT is quite clearly dance performance as radical historiography. The title of the
work itself is indicative of this: “apeshit” is a North American slang term for “expressing wild excitement
and anger” 20. When the Carters sing here about the «crowd going apeshit», they mean it in a double
sense: not only in terms of excited audiences enjoying their performances, but in terms of a crowd of
angry protestors. While protest and social consciousness are not new themes in hip-hop culture 21, a
hip-hop protest in such a space as the Louvre is a new development 22. Beyoncé, Jay-Z and their dancers
are indeed raving in the Louvre, in both senses of the word, and they have every cause to do so 23.


Re-framing History
      APESHIT opens reflectively, in relative silence, which might be likened to the ambient silence of
the museum, bar the noises of passing traffic, a church bell tolling and the wail of a police siren denoting
the sign of things to come. It is night and outside the museum a black male dancer with angel wings
(reminiscent of a figure from director Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, 1987) crouches on the stone
steps of the Louvre’s parvis, clasping his hands in a gesture of prayer or even, perhaps, wringing them
in anguish. The video then cuts to a shot of the ceiling of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, bathed in pink,
blue, green and yellow light. There is a series of fragmented close-ups of a painting of the Virgin Mary,
perhaps holding the body of Christ, once taken down from the cross in some sort of Pietà, a motif that
will later be repeated in the video with a woman holding a male body close to her. We hear the sound of
footsteps on the museum’s marble floors drawing closer and as soon as the beat begins, an establishing

   20. Nor can we ignore the title’s allusion to the racist trope of comparing black people to apes, an idea that is also clear in
Jay-Z’s final solo verse («I’m a gorilla in the fuckin’ coupe/Finna pull up in the zoo/I’m like Chief Keef meet Rafiki, who been
lyin’ “King” to you?»). Furthermore, at various points underneath the beat, there is a sample of the sound of apes screaming.
In the Eighteenth Century galleries of the Louvre, these lyrics and sound effects resound loudly: we cannot help but be
reminded of racist Eighteenth Century anthropological studies of racial difference.
   21. Since its origins in the Bronx, New York City (USA), in the early 1970s, protest has been a motif running through
hip-hop culture and hip-hop has spoken loud to racial inequity. Early examples include Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five’s The Message (1982) and Public Enemy’s Fight the Power (1989).
   22. However, as Alicia Caticha has pointed out, rap has been performed at the Louvre before: in 2006, writer Toni
Morrison invited slam poets from Paris’ suburbs to perform in front of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, the same paint-
ing we see Jay-Z rapping in front of in APESHIT ; cfr. Alicia Caticha, Madame Récamier as Tableau Vivant: Marble and
the Classical Ideal in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apesh*t, in «Journal 18: A journal of Eighteenth Century Art and Culture», 27th
January 2020, online: http://www.journal18.org/nq/madame-recamier-as-tableau-vivant-marble-and-the-classical-ideal-in-
beyonce-and-jay-zs-apesht-by-alicia-caticha/ (accessed 19/6/2020). On the 2006 performances, see further Alan Rid-
ing, Rap and Film at the Louvre? What’s Up With That?, in «New York Times», 21th November 2006, online: ht-
tps://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/books/21morr.html (accessed 19/6/20).
   23. While the analysis that I offer here is predominantly from a dance perspective and a musical analysis is beyond my
intention, it is worth noting APESHIT ’s connection to trap music, a sub-genre of hip-hop that emerged in Atlanta (USA) in
the 1990s. APESHIT adheres to common trap conventions, alternating between sung and shouted moments, the rapid triplet
flow of the rapping punctuated by vocal adlibs and noise elements. As such, the song itself is «a sonic palimpsest» (Gabriel
Ellis, On APESHIT’s Trapness, in «Journal of Popular Music Studies», vol. XXX, n. 4, December 2018, pp. 22-24: p. 23),
a complex layering of musical and verbal fragments, marked by striking antiphony that serves to both express individuality
and affirm collective identity (cf. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University
Press, Boston 1993, p. 79).
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                                289




shot shows Beyoncé and Jay-Z in his and hers pastel suits standing in front of La Gioconda and looking
directly to camera. A tracking shot pulls focus away from the famous painting to the figures standing in
front of it: the famous white face fades away, as the famous black faces come into view. More than the
white face figure fixed in pigment on the canvas, the Carters’ are living, breathing faces and bodies. The
shot that follows sees the Carters standing at the top of the museum’s famous Daru staircase, standing
underneath the winged Nike of Samothrace, a chorus of female dancers wearing flesh-coloured bodysuits
in a variety of skin tones lying on the staircase. As the first lyrics begin, the dancers rise up in unison
in a series of Graham-style “pleadings” (a series of repetitive contraction and release movements lying
prone). With this movement, and the still, sculptural bodies suddenly stirring into dance action, a
collection of statues come to life, so begins the Carters’ fast-paced museum tour which throughout
combines striking juxtapositions of movement and stillness, interspersing Cherkaoui’s choreography
with still images from the museum collection. As such, this is a (art) history tour being re-written in
the moment of performance by the bodies of colour occupying the traditionally “white” space 24. As
several commentators (Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, 2020; James Smalls, Crazy in Louvre, 2018)
have pointed out, throughout the video, there is a vibrant juxtaposition between the sculptural or
painted white bodies in the museum and the dancing black bodies, between the stillness of the white
marble sculptures and the mobility of the black dancers: «There is a sheer joy in the contrasts here:
between the white bodies on the walls and the black bodies in front of them, between the powerful
movement of the dancers and the stillness of the artwork, between the reverent silence of the museum
and the exuberant sound of the music» 25.
      However, from a dance analysis point of view, I would argue that the relationship between stillness
and movement here is yet further meaningful and complex. It is more than a simple juxtaposition of
“white” fixity and “black” mobility. At several points, as I will argue further below, it is the shifting of
the dancers themselves between stillness and movement that is perhaps more significant.
      Throughout, the Louvre’s collection becomes the backdrop for the dance and the music; the
viewer’s focus is consistently drawn to the dancing, singing bodies in the foreground. This shift in focus
points to the Carters, and not the Louvre collection, as the real artwork 26. In another shot that occurs
later in the video, a chorus of dancers positioned on plinths supplant the museum’s white classical
sculptures. Here, I am reminded of the Bristol protest where, once Colston had been toppled, black

   24. Interestingly, following the video’s release, in July 2018 the Louvre began to offer ninety-minute guided tours based on
the works featured: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/louvre-beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-video-696636/ (accessed
19/6/2020).
   25. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 112.
   26. This is not a new approach for Jay-Z, who used a similar technique in the video of his single Picasso Baby (2013),
which was filmed at New York’s Pace Gallery (USA) and inspired by the work of performance artist Marina Abramović (in
particular, The Artist is Present, 2010). In the video, Jay-Z is positioned on a stage as the “artwork”, and gallery visitors queue
to have the opportunity of him performing the song directly to them as a one-to-one experience.
290                                                                                                           Marie­Louise Crawley




activist bodies took up the empty space on the plinth to further protest. By their action of taking up
Colston’s place on the plinth, they could be seen to be “re-writing” history, their bodies supplanting
his. In APESHIT, the Carters and their dancers quite literally step into the museum collection, and
through such an action, they ask the viewer to reflect upon how the art collection – and history – is
being re-framed. Choreographically, the apotheosis of this re-framing comes with Beyoncé’s powerful
dancing as she agitates swathes of white material in front of the winged Nike of Samothrace. The headless
body of the sculpture is here eclipsed by the vibrancy of the live dancer: the classical “white” Nike (the
ancient Greek goddess of Victory) is eclipsed by a victorious and famous black woman, re-making
herself into a living mythological heroine, framing herself as no less than a living goddess 27. At another
moment in the video, Beyoncé stands in front of the famous Venus de Milo sculpture – the first time
she is in stillness, at two later- points she is dancing – and both her still pose and then her movements
echo the statue’s form and point out its fragmentation. Beyoncé’s arms “complete” the fragmented
statue and, as such, the dance does the work of the restoration and the reworking of history. For me,
both these examples of Beyoncé’s dance in the Louvre work as examples of what I call the “fragmentary
monumental”, an action that – by “completing” the fragmentary presentation of monuments in the
museum, through the dance, present a different angle of the collection and might thus be able to
resituate oppressed bodies on the inside of power but on their own terms, and, eventually, to enable an
alternative means of viewing history.
      Furthermore, as she dances in front of both of these classical sculptures, the juxtaposition of Bey-
oncé’s «black body with the white marble challenges long-held assumptions about whiteness, antiquity
and beauty» 28. It reminds the viewer to question the power of the “whiteness” that is at stake in the
museum. Indeed, as recent classical scholarship 29 has reminded us, not all ancient statues were white.
They were polychromatic: they were brightly coloured, and they did not always portray white people.
The striking way in which the statues in APESHIT are lit – particularly the blue light cast on the white
Venus de Milo and on Hermes Tying His Sandal – points out this forgotten polychromy. The lighting
of the statues and the dancing bodies in front of them remind us that history is not always what it
seems; it is not always what those in power have told us it is. The juxtapositions at work here again

   27. It is important to note that Beyoncé has a history of reworking mythical heroines and goddesses into her imagery and
her performances: she has previously cast herself as Venus (in a series of photographs on Instagram in 2017 to announce
her pregnancy), Nefertiti (Coachella performance, 2018), and as the Yoruba goddess Oshun, Venus and the Virgin Mary
(Grammy Awards ceremony, 2017). On this, see further, Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., pp. 104-109. As Helen Morales
points out, in this, Beyoncé is part of a wider tradition of black activist feminist art – see Kara Walker’s installations A Subtlety,
or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) and Safety Curtain at the Vienna State Opera House (1998-1999); hip-hop artist Monae
Smith’s work as Medusa, “the lyrical seducer”, Dorothea Smartt’s poetry collection Connecting Medium (2001) and Robin
Coste Hughes’ poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus (2017).
   28. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 113.
   29. Especially Sarah Bond, Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color, in «Hyperallergic», June 17th 2017,
online: https://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ (accessed 19/6/2020).
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                     291




point out how the traditionally curated vision of European history has, like its classical statuary, been
whitewashed. Throughout this video, it is the power and “liveness” of the dance that helps the viewer
to see this.
      One of the video’s most powerful dance sequences sees Beyoncé in the centre of a chorus-line of
female dancers in their nude bodysuits, positioned directly in front of Jacques-Louis David’s Sacre de
l’empereur Napoléon Ier et couronnement de l’impératrice Joséphine dans la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris,
le 2 décembre 1804 (1807). In the way that the shot is framed both choreographically and cinemato-
graphically, it appears that Napoléon is crowning Beyoncé rather than the Joséphine. The black Creole
woman 30 replaces the white Creole woman, just as «Beyoncé and Jay-Z become the new royalty of the
Louvre» 31. The choreographic crowning physicalizes the motif of the couple as Twenty-First Century
royalty taking over the Louvre “palace”, a space previously denied to bodies like theirs; a motif that
echoes throughout the song in the recurring lyric, «I can’t believe we made it». This same lyric takes on
greater significance when it occurs first with the couple’s sculptural stillness in front of the sculpture of
the Great Sphinx of Tanis, and then again with the group shot of the crowd of dancers moving furiously
and “going apeshit” in the same location. For while the Louvre displays ancient Egyptian art along with
the ancient Greek and Roman art, and can thus be seen to be appropriating and claiming African art as
part of a Eurocentric art history, this lyric sees the Carters claiming this heritage back: the line «I can’t
believe we made it» here speaks to African artists and their descendants. There is something significant
in the stillness within the dance at these moments, in the ways in which Beyoncé, Jay-Z and the dancers
shift from sculptural stillness into sudden, vibrant motion. For me, this speaks back to performance
theorist André Lepecki’s reading of anthropologist Nadia Serematakis’ concept of «still-acts» 32 as the
moment of the refusal of «the sedimentation of history into neat layers» 33. It is that moment of stillness
before the eruption into movement where the layers of history come crashing away, that «moment of exit
from historical dust» 34. In such moments, the stillness in the dance allows for a different temporality, a
new relationship with the time and space of history, one that is no longer chronological, but unstable,
contractile and fragmentary, one that is no longer diachronic but synchronic, allowing different angles,
different stories, different bodies and different histories to emerge.
      As such, APESHIT consistently reframes European art history and thus also reframes perspectives
on race, bodies and power. Not only is background is swapped for foreground, but tiny details in
paintings are focussed on and positioned in sharp juxtaposition with the dancing, moving bodies, so

  30. Beyoncé makes claim to her Creole ancestry in her song Formation (2016). Joséphine de Beauharnais was born in Les
Trois-Îlets, on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
  31. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 113.
  32. André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, Routledge, Abingdon 2006, p. 15.
  33. Ibidem.
  34. Nadia Serematakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago 1994, p. 12 (my emphasis).
292                                                                                                      Marie­Louise Crawley




that bodies that have previously been hidden or rendered invisible in the art-works themselves are
revealed. While several art historical studies have already to date examined this in detail 35 and the
close focus of this article is on the choreographic, I do want to cite one example here and that is Paolo
Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana (1563). In this canvas, the black bodies of servants are present in the
painting, but they are hidden in corners and easily overlooked; juxtaposed with the vibrancy of the
dancers’ bodies, they are suddenly thrown into sharp relief. The viewer is called to do the work to
see the bodies that have historically been overlooked: it is the dancers’ dancing bodies that offer the
lens through which we might re-view these painted bodies, and begin to reassemble bodily histories
previously rendered invisible. This re-viewing becomes yet more pressing as, throughout the video,
there are significant allusions to artworks by artists of colour that have, until now, been “invisible”
in such a canonical space as the Louvre. For example, the hair-styling scene in front of La Gioconda
echoes a painting from Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the hand-holding dance
of Beyoncé and her chorus in front of David’s Coronation is reminiscent of Faith Ringold’s story quilt,
itself significantly entitled Dancing at the Louvre 36 and from which I have borrowed the title for this
essay. Through such rich visual allusions, akin to the culture of inter-textual and musical sampling in
hip-hop, the Carters can be seen to be reclaiming a space for artists of colour in the “white” space of the
Louvre: and it is both the positioning and movement of the dancers’ bodies that enable this powerful
re-visioning. APESHIT ’s visual and choreographic call to review received historical narratives gains
in urgency throughout its six minutes: however, it is particularly potent at the moments where the
choreography becomes explicitly one of protest.



Broken bodies, protesting bodies
      It is undeniable that protest is a central theme of APESHIT. At times, the crowd «going apeshit»
is an angry, dancing crowd. This anger is no less eloquent, but arguably more so, for the shifts between
the fluidity and vibrancy of the choreography and the stillness at work within it. As I have pointed out
above, sometimes this is a shift between the still images of the artwork and the moving, dancing bodies;
sometimes, it is the stillness within the choreography that does the work of protest. In the following
section, I want to offer a close examination of three striking examples of where in the video this can

   35. See especially Constance Grady, The meaning behind the classical paintings in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit, in «Vox»,
19th June 2018, online: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/6/19/17476212/apeshit-video-beyonce-jay-z-carters-portrait-
negresse-benoist (accessed 19/6/2020); Ariel Lebeau, An Art History Expert Breaks Down Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s APESHIT
Video, in «Fader», June 18th 2018, online: https://www.thefader.com/2018/06/18/beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-art-history-expert-
louvre-mona-lisa (accessed 19/6/2020); Carol Vernallis, Tracing the Carters Through the Galleries, in «Journal of Popular Music
Studies», vol. XXX, n. 4, December 2018, pp. 11-70.
   36. See Dan Cameron (edited by), Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts, Uni-
versity of California Press, Berkeley 1998.
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                           293




be seen to be happening. The first is the inverted still image of the still bodies of the dancers on the
Daru staircase mentioned above. Following the shot of their bodies moving in bursts of contraction
and release, in convulsive Graham-style pleadings that, traditionally in Graham-based technique, can
express moments of extreme emotional power, the dancers’ bodies become quiet and motionless. Here,
the shot is inverted and we see the still bodies of colour seemingly suspended or hanging upside down.
There is a clear visual and spatial allusion to historical drawings of enslaved bodies in the hold of a
slave ship. It is perhaps the first indication in APESHIT of the oppressed black body 37. Furthermore,
commenting on the Daru staircase sequence, Cherkouai states how he felt that this moment was «my
way of paying homage to the contraction of Martha Graham. I made it my own, so it had this kind of
crunch effect, yes. You pull inside and then back, like you’re broken and then returned to stillness» 38.
      Cherkouai’s image of the contraction and release movement here being a moment of the body
breaking, fragmenting, and then returning to sculptural stillness, in addition to the stillness of the
freeze-frame on the suspended “broken” bodies on the staircase, can be seen as another moment of the
“fragmentary monumental”: it is a moment of not so quiet protest.
      Similarly, another striking moment of stillness is the lingering shot of two dancers seated in front
of David’s Portrait de madame Récamier (1800). The dancers are connected by their heads to the same
length of white cloth turban, which prefigures the white wrapped head-cloth in Marie-Guillemine
Benoist’s Portrait d’une femme noire (1800), formerly known as Portrait d’une négresse, which appears
towards the end of the video. The dancers’ connected bodies echo the composition of the painting:
there is no dancing, singing or rapping at this point, just a moment of quiet stillness between the
dancers’ bodies and the painted body on the canvas. However, in its choreographic composition, this
is a moment of choreographic quietness that speaks volumes. As art historian Alicia Caticha has argued,
the image can be seen to be reworking the tableau vivant tradition of the Eighteenth Century, with
the Carters appropriating «this self-referential parlor game as a visual analogy for their own success in
a culture of systemic racism» 39. While art historian and curator Georgina Downey 40 has noted how

   37. The suspended, “hanging” image is perhaps also reminiscent of the «strange fruit hanging from poplar trees» that Billie
Holliday sings of Strange Fruit (1937), a song protesting about the lynching of black Americans in the American South.
   38. Cherkaouai cited in Michelle Kim, The Choreographer for the Carters’ APESHIT Video on Being Inspired by Mythology
and Martha Graham, June 21st 2018, online: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/choreographer-beyonce-jayz-apeshit-video-
interview-inspired-by-mythology-martha-graham/ (accessed 19/6/2020), my emphasis.
   39. Alicia Caticha, Madame Récamier as Tableau Vivant, cit. This is not the first time that performance in the museum
has used the idea of reworking the tableau vivant to make a political statement – see further Manuel Pelmus and Alexandra
Pirici’s Public Collection (2016) where, through what the artists term «continuous actions», performers in the museum use
their bodies to re-enact artworks on display, and physical, bodily enactment becomes a strategy to attempt to (re)-claim
history. Another example might be the museum dance works of choreographer Alexis Blake such as Allegory of the Painted
Woman (2012-2015) and Conditions of an Ideal (2016).
   40. Georgina Downey, Beautiful No-Bodies? The Dancers in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit, August 6th 2018, online:
http://www.georginadowney.com/writing-and-art-a-blog/2018/8/6/beautiful-no-bodies-the-dancers-in-beyonc-and-jay-zs-
apeshit (accessed 19/6/2020).
294                                                                                           Marie­Louise Crawley




this scene may also have echoes of Ulay and Marina Abramović’s performance Relation in Time (1977)
where the two artists knotted their hair together for seventeen hours, Caticha points out how the long
white headscarf more significantly makes reference to photographer John Edmond’s 2017 series, Du-
Rags. The du-rag itself has its origins in headscarves of enslaved women and so the dancers in front
of the Récamier portrait through their «bodies […] make present what is absent: the slave labor that
was responsible for the consumerist luxuries in David’s Portrait de madame Récamier and Eighteenth-
Century French culture writ large» 41.
      Furthermore, the du-rag is a motif that is positioned in opposition to the white ideal of the neo-
classical dress of Madame Récamier and in its sculptural folds, it also stands in opposition with the
marble statuary that we see throughout the video. Beyoncé too embraces this artefact as an object of
resistance and re-appropriates it: at another point in the video, we see her reclining in the gallery, in a
pose not too dissimilar from Madame Récamier’s, wearing a silk headscarf.
      In fact, perhaps the most striking still image is the video’s final cut to Benoist’s Portrait d’une
femme noire, the sitter recently renamed through research by Anne Lafont (2019) and, in some way,
rescued from the erasure that comes with anonymity. As art historian James Stalls argues, of all the
art-works re-appropriated in the video, this

           highly complex painting with many things happening in it across the realm of politics, race,
       gender, class and strategies of looking and being looked at […] is the […] one that most significant
       to Beyoncé’s strategic manipulation of the bodily presence and absence of black women [in the
       museum collection] 42.

      Significantly, the portrait is never directly visually paired with Beyoncé. The painting is cropped
so that we only see the sitter from the neck up and the camera lingers on her facial expression. This has
two effects: first, we are forced to confront her gaze; second, her exposed breast (which is in the full
portrait) is strategically removed so any opportunity for the “traditional” objectification of a woman
of colour in Western art tradition is also removed. In such a way, the black woman is given back her
body; and that black body is one that is not longer objectified, subjugated or oppressed, but that is
celebrated by the bodies of Beyoncé and her female dancers moving powerfully through the museum,
dancing a dance of resistance.
      However, perhaps the most explicit choreographic reference to resistance and protest comes later
in the video where there is a shot of young black men outside the Louvre “taking the knee”. This pose
is a direct allusion to the physical gesture of kneeling during the national anthem that marked the
National Football League (NFL) player protests against police brutality and the killing of unarmed
black men, first started in 2016 by player Colin Kaepernick. It is a pose that has also marked the most

  41. Alicia Caticha, Madame Récamier as Tableau Vivant, cit.
  42. James Smalls, Crazy in Louvre, cit.
«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre                                                                295




recent Black Lives Matter protests; and it is a gesture that can now be read as horrifyingly similar to
the police officer’s pose as he knelt on the neck of George Floyd. In APESHIT, the shot of the kneeling
protestors directly follows a shot of a classical statue, a Roman version of a Greek statue by Lysippus
of Hermes Tying His Sandal, which is in a similar pose. It occurs on a lyric where Jay-Z is critical of the
NFL («I said no to the Superbowl / You need me, I don’t need you / Every night we in the end-zone
/ Tell the NFL, we in stadiums too»). This is the concluding criticism of a verse that may also allude
to Donald Trump (as the 45th President of the USA). As Jay-Z warns, change is coming: «4-5, I got
change for you». As Morales has noted, the juxtaposition between the kneeling statue and the kneeling
protests is striking:

            The juxtaposition of the image of Hermes with his knee bent inside the Louvre with that of
        the kneeling protestors outside the Louvre co-opts the statue, bringing the ancient god on board
        as part of the modern protest. Hermes becomes an advocate for black lives mattering; he is given
        a better purpose than fiddling with his footwear. The modern ennobles the classical (a reversal of
        the expected dynamic) 43.

      What Morales does not further unpick here is the relationship between exterior and interior.
While “white” Hermes is inside the museum, the black male protesting bodies remain, at least mo-
mentarily, on the outside. However, the exterior shot is followed by an interior shot of Jay-Z, having
«made it» and rapping in front of Théodore Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (1818-19). As art
historian James Smalls has commented:

            This painting contains three black men among the human debris who are used emblematically
        by the artist to relay the story of a human tragedy. The most visible black figure is located at the
        apex of the composition. He is energetic and heroic in his display of a muscular back […] at one
        brief moment, Jay-Z is caught gazing up at the black Hercules who constitutes the focal point of
        the drama and symbolizes black people as both survivors and saviours 44.

      This theme of survival, despite oppression and restriction, continues choreographically through-
out the video. It is visible in a powerful montage that includes shots of bone-breaker and hip-hop dancer
Nicholas “Slick” Stewart contorting his arms in front of La Gioconda, his limbs seemingly breaking;
in the recurring motifs of the coiling, twisting arms of the female dancers juxtaposed with still shots
where the camera zooms in on close-up, detailed images of the coiled ropes of Le Radeau de la Méduse,
and of dancers’ hands apparently bound in rope, and the liberating, invigorating «cross-cut breaking
free of ropes; a black female dancer vigorously dancing; the same dancer in full flexion with her hair
thrown back» 45. This is a danced and sung story about the survival of oppressed and broken bodies;
about how we might re-assemble them those broken bodies through revisions of history, and about

  43. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 116.
  44. James Smalls, Crazy in Louvre, cit.
  45. Carol Vernallis, Tracing the Carters Through the Galleries, cit.
296                                                                                                   Marie­Louise Crawley




how that necessitates a deep work of protest. What APESHIT reveals is that through such protest,
spaces and history can be re-appropriated, and previously invisible or partially visible bodies be made
more visible. Such “statue toppling” can be a cause for celebration: at such a time, the dancing crowd
can indeed «go apeshit».



Conclusion: «this a different angle»
      Re-viewing this video in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests and the calls for colonial
statues to fall, I am struck by how vital APESHIT is for thinking about how dance in the museum
can be a mechanism to give a space for previously invisible or erased bodies to resurface and tell their
stories. Perhaps the dance is, in fact, more than “metaphorical” statue toppling; for it also does the work
of protest, reassembling broken bodies into an alternative fullness. It does the work of re-constructing
history; it is historiography in artful action. In APESHIT, the protest seeps through most powerfully
in the choreographic juxtapositions of movement and stillness, where the layers of history fall away
and the statues crumble, until life and movement emerges anew from the historical dust. Here, we
can read dance as the “fragmentary monumental”, an action for re-assembling the fragments of bodies
that History has broken, that does the vital work of remembering the deliberately forgotten, lost and
erased 46. Piecing together the fragments and recognising who and what has been made to slip through
the cracks is where we, the viewer, have to do the work:

            It is not just the content of APESHIT (the lyrics and the things featured in the video) that is a
       form of protest, but also the process in which it engages the viewer and the listener. The insistence
       that the viewer makes connections, the refusal to simplify, and the sheer richness of historical,
       artistic and ideological textures created: all this is a form of cultural resistance 47.

      In re-examining the particular ways in which the stillness and movement of both the choreography
and the cinematography are woven together in APESHIT, as well as how bodies of colour surge into
a public space that has historically been denied them in a dance that is simultaneously protesting
and celebratory, we can make a claim for dancing in the museum as a radical means of powerfully
challenging and resisting the art historical status quo. Through dance in the museum, we can begin
to call History to account and look at it from a “different angle”. In the public spaces where we come
to remember uncomfortable and difficult histories, the ground is shaking. In Paris, the crowd is going
apeshit; in Bristol, a colonial statue comes crashing down. From the dust, previously invisible bodies
rise up, and as they do, they dance.


  46. The way in which APESHIT ’s complex sonic layering re-assembles fragments of song, shouts, noise elements and vocal
adlibs (see above, footnote 23) reinforces this idea of the “fragmentary monumental” musically as well as choreographically.
  47. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising, cit., p. 116.
