«This a different angle»: Dancing at the Louvre

Abstract

In the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests and the statue-toppling that marked the summer of 2020, this article reappraises the idea of dance in the museum as a form of “radical archaeology”. It presents dance in the museum as a radical historiography for those bodies of colour previously rendered invisible, or only partially visible, by an oppressive curating of history. From a dance scholarship perspective, the article examines a central case study, Beyoncé and Jay-Z Carter’s music video APESHIT (2018), filmed in the Musée du Louvre (France), offering a close analysis of its complex choreographies of movement and stillness to argue for dance in the museum as a metaphorical form of statue-toppling, one that can powerfully challenge the art historical status quo.