A Beyoncé surprise-drop without some kind of elaborate visual component is just not her style. So naturally, the release of her and JAY-Z’s Everything Is Love this past Saturday came with a video, for the single “APESHIT.” Directed by Ricky Saiz, the extravagant clip features the Carters and a legion of black dancers posing and strutting around the storied corridors of the Louvre. The dancers, clad in flesh-colored leotards, delicately dance on top of podiums and in front of priceless works of art. They lie on the Daru staircase leading to the famed “Nike of Samothrace” sculpture, looking like statues coming to life each time they rise and fall from the marble floor. Changing styles, the bone-breaking dancer Nicholas “Slick” Stewart, who also appears on the album’s cover, contorts his arms in front of the “Mona Lisa.” Bey and Jay make a statement about black wealth with the video, but they also subvert the lack of black representation within the white, colonialist canon of visual art.
Helping to bring these multifaceted moves to life was Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a 42-year-old dancer and choreographer of Flemish and Moroccan descent. Throughout his vast amounts of work, Cherkaoui has experimented with various styles of contemporary dance, hip-hop motifs, martial arts, and even spoken word. He mainly occupies the fine-arts realm, but he does have experience choreographing music videos for the likes of Sigur Rós and folk-pop singer-songwriter Woodkid. Right now, his main project is choreographing Jagged Little Pill, the new Alanis Morissette musical.
Cherkaoui first worked with Beyoncé and her lead choreographers, Chris Grant and JaQuel Knight, for her stunning performance at the 2017 Grammys, the nine-minute Lemonade medley in which she famously levitates in a chair while pregnant. Cherkaoui was later asked to give feedback on Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s On the Run II tour routines, which quickly turned into an invitation to co-choreograph the “APESHIT” video. For the Antwerp-born artist, being brought on for a shoot at the Louvre felt like an obvious fit. “It’s a very familiar space for me,” he told me this week over the phone. We also discussed how the “APESHIT” dancers channel mythological goddesses and why he gave the nod to dance legend Martha Graham.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: You scout, you look at it with the whole team. There were some obvious places that Beyoncé and JAY-Z really wanted us to shoot, and then there were the places that [director Ricky Saiz] thought were interesting. I was the one who was scouting because [JaQuel Knight] and [Chris Grant] were still working on the [On the Run II tour]. I ended up just going, “Oh maybe this sequence would really work in this space, that sequence in that space.” We did it very quickly, just a chemical reaction of what everybody’s feelings were. It was very associative, very intuitive, but always while realizing the kind of impact [the space makes].
That’s what I like so much about the video—that it allows the paintings to speak on the music. So sometimes [in the video] it’s just the painting, sometimes it’s the painting with the two powerful artists in front, sometimes it’s a dancer, and sometimes it’s just a picture in front of another picture. It’s interesting to see how Ricky guides the viewer into different associations. There’s a lot of narrative in this clip, a lot of story being developed, and it really makes you think about history and culture and what’s actually represented in art.
Everybody has their own interpretation of how you associate yourself. I’m from Belgium, so I’m white, but I have actually North African roots. I very much care about representation and feel like we are all mirrors of one another. [I believe] there’s the capacity to see real equity and real equality—a resonance with the past that finds a way of reconciling each other’s differences.
Here, I think the dancers are just so beautiful, and there’s something very sculptural about them. When they are inside of that space—just right on the stairs or suddenly moving in the group—you have the feeling that they could be those ancient mythological goddesses of the hunt or of wisdom. My projection of that was that they were embodiments of goddesses. Of course, [they’re] contemporary bodies, [they’re] people from here and now. But [the video] speaks to something very ancient and kind of mythological.
Inside of tension there’s always release, and inside of release there’s always a bit of tension. My instinct was to connect to the softer side that I also felt inside of the music. I would not have done [it like that] if we were filming in the street. But because we were in this still space of the Louvre, I felt like this kind of movement made sense. It’s also what I could feel from Beyoncé, Ricky, and JaQuel—they all agreed that it was right to move like this in this context. I had their support in that.
Those are contractions, which the Graham technique is based on. Martha Graham was a very famous choreographer, and I worked with her company last year. I felt like [“APESHIT”] was an ode to a woman choreographer and that this 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.
These are people I connect with in some way. It makes me eager to keep exploring and to be inspired in the realm [of pop music]. I work a lot in opera normally—opera, ballet, and other contexts—so it’s extremely refreshing to be expressing myself in a more pop environment. You feel that [they make] personal stuff, that it’s not just some producer who told them what to do and that they really know what they're doing for themselves. I see commonality between these three artists: They’re truthful and they bring about such poetry, this sort of clarity that I really find attractive.
Of course, Michael Jackson. The obvious ones, Prince and Madonna. I also like George Michael a lot, especially when he all was about living without prejudice. I’m also a big Kate Bush fan.
The “Single Ladies” video, definitely. It's just perfect.
