“Staying calm is a key characteristic,” he says. “In some ways, you have to be a psychologist, because a lot of times we’re putting people outside of their comfort zone. You need to be talking them through and convincing them that everything’s okay—even if it’s not!” And who is talking to Tourso? “I try to exercise, and I try to meditate,” he says. “It’s been my life’s work getting my energy right.”
It has also been, simply, creativity. “All I wanted to do was skateboard and write graffiti,” he says of growing up in California. “I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have the ambition of a career. I didn’t have a cell phone or a computer.” He got into graphic design and made it to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, before dropping out after three years for a job at Warner Brothers Records. “I hated it. They hadn’t really embraced digital yet, and they were just losing money hand over fist,” he remembers. “It was a very sobering experience on what the real world was like.” Tourso then moved to magazines, snagging a job at Flaunt. “That was the first time I had a creative design job where I felt like I hit the rhythm,” he says. “Again, though, I’m late to the party: It was the recession, and magazines were folding left and right. We’re making concessions to advertisers and everyone’s talking about how they were balling in the ’90s.” Finally, he made his way to working as a creative director for Lady Gaga and, eventually, Beyoncé. “It really makes me feel great to put it in that perspective and feel like I’m actually in the right place.”
Tourso and Beyoncé wanted to address the Black Lives Matter movement in her Lemonade video. “We actually flew the moms out to New Orleans,” Tourso explains. “We had a stylist put them in couture clothing, and then had them sit there and hold photos of their sons when they were young, happy, and beautiful.”
Above all, Tourso says he doesn’t have a routine because he just can’t have one. “It’s a lot of bouncing around,” he says. “If I’m going to go sit with an editor for the day or I have to be on set and working with the DP, or if I have to go to a recording studio and get an artist to approve something—it’s wrangling all of these disparate pieces and making some type of cohesion or semblance out of it. You have to really work to get everyone to play nice.” And prepare for the unexpected. For instance, Tourso never directed before Beyoncé—he helmed music videos for “7/11” and “Heaven”—and it was the artistic equivalent of going from 0 to 200 mph. Indeed, when he talks about his work, he can sound like Evel Knievel pulling a motorcycle stunt. “I’ve never had any moment in my career where the excitement was that easy to distinguish from the fear,” he says.
Tourso believes that he has to be versatile, largely because he works with the visions of others. “You’re really only a mirror for what your subject is at the moment, and your goal is to dust away all the bullshit and put a magnifying glass on what makes them special,” he says. “It has nothing to do with you. I have to remember that what we’re doing is a lot easier for me than it is for the artist. The artists are the ones who have it in their catalog for eternity. They’re paying for it out of their own pocket. Their legacy is at stake. I will never understand that risk.” He says coaching somebody through that feeling and letting them know that you’re not going to push them too far is a big part of what he does.
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Tourso says art school taught him the importance of process, critique and collaboration. He applies these concepts to everything from editing a video to making clothing.
Sometimes, he looks to fundamental experiences to make that connection: Beyoncé’s a woman making feminist art that expresses and comments on a woman’s point of view; Tourso is a man. And yet: “I was an only child raised by a single mom. I was always surrounded by women,” he says. “I think when you’re around people, you internalize their struggle a bit whether or not you want to, and I think at that point you’re not in it, but you’re not exactly outside of it.” He says we all have an ability to tap into each other’s perspective.
In his work, Tourso has had to address and navigate sensitive political topics as well, particularly on the Lemonade film, which featured the mothers of black men slain by police officers, holding photos of their sons. “It’s about taking real struggles and not using them in an exploitive way for content. Directors need to be so precious with this material,” he says, noting how his team flew the mothers to New Orleans for the stylized commentary. “The answer is to connect with the humanity beneath these situations and not use them for shock value.”
Ironically, as I get older I actually think the border between myself and my 14-year-old self is getting thinner.
In “Lemon,” for example, a recent music video that he made for Pharrell’s band N*E*R*D* (a project that he has also been creative directing), he had Rihanna, the song’s guest vocalist, shave a dancer’s head. He says it’s about “refusing all these ideas and feelings that they put on you as a girl, preparing the warrior for this journey,” adding that the journey is “not for the purpose of a man.”
If Tourso has any worry, it’s that his finger will somehow slide off the pulse as he gets closer to 40. “And it’s not just having your finger on the pulse but being one step ahead,” he says. “Ironically, as I get older I actually think the border between myself and my 14-year-old self is getting thinner. If something is cool with 13-year-olds and I don’t get it, I have to obsess on it until I understand.” He continues, “And I don’t mean it has to become my thing, I just have to understand why people like it.”
Tourso says the truth is that it usually comes down to the same reasons when he was young. “To me these core feelings that we’re trying to tap into do not change by generation. Humans are still dealing with basically the same issues,” he says. “It could be love, it could be betrayal, it could be boredom, it could be emptiness, it could be happiness, it could be confusion. It’s just the great philosophical struggles that humans have always had.” *
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Tourso has earned a handful of awards, including an MTV Video Music Award and a Peabody as co-executive producer for Beyoncé’s Lemonade and two BET awards for co-directing her “7/11” music video.
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Tourso says the principles of graphic design—“scale, contrast, minimalism”—are his bedrock, whether he’s directing videos, magazine layouts or fashion shoots.
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Tourso worked with Lady Gaga from 2009 to 2013 and contributed to some of the most iconic visuals during her Fame Monster and Born This Way eras.
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In 2008, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom presented the Mayor’s Art Award to King, calling him a “San Francisco treasure.”
ALONZO KING
LINES Ballet
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King collaborated with Grammy Award–winning musician Zakir Hussain to premiere a new work for the 35th anniversary of LINES Ballet in 2018. The two have worked together for over 20 years.
For choreographer and artistic director Alonzo King, dance is more than a discipline: it’s a letting go. It’s the search for an answer, a confession instead of a performance. King’s LINES Ballet company, which he co-founded in San Francisco in 1982, is a synthesis of classical ballet performed on pointe with modern abstraction, world dance and scorching expression. Yet he describes his work—which has become part of film, television, opera and dozens of international repertoires—as “thought structures.”
King’s training might be rooted in classical ballet, but the diversity of movement, music and inspiration in his work is radical. His ballets are choreographed to tabla, field recordings of Sephardic music, traditional gypsy songs, gospel and spirituals. They are danced to ancient Persian instruments or a mezzo-soprano standing on stage, to Coltrane and Shostakovich, Indian folk and a cappella pygmy music. Some critics see King as pulling Eurocentric ballet out of its parochial, homogeneous elitism—and increasing irrelevance—and into the real world.
My father was ready to die for what he believed in.
Born in the mid ’50s in Albany, Georgia, King found a similar struggle. His father, Slater King (whose father had founded the city’s NAACP chapter), was an activist, pioneering low-income and elderly housing while leading boycotts and enduring jail time. The family lived at the epicenter of the nonviolent desegregationist Albany Movement in 1961. His mother, Valencia King Nelson, who later founded African-American genealogical research community AfriGeneas, had studied dance and dance interpretation. The couple’s home became not just an activist hot spot but a cultural salon where Alonzo and his six siblings were exposed to guests from diverse cultures across music, dance, art, theater and performance. Slater, a follower of Rama Krishna, also kept a meditation room in the house where he would send his children to meditate for three minutes at a time, starting from a very early age.
King’s parents lived what they believed, instilling in their children a real sense of integrity, humility, courage and vulnerability—the same qualities the choreographer seeks today. “My father was ready to die for what he believed in,” King recalls. “When you’re around a community of those people, what they want to do and what they should do are completely aligned. There is no division between what they say and what they do.” To King, such people are both inspiring and intimidating, and he applies that same intersection of self-examination and total commitment in the world of dance.
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Award-winning choreographer William Forsythe lauded King as “one of the true Ballet Masters of our times.”
You’re not imitating, cloning or knocking something off. You have to step into the embodiment of an idea.
“When you see that commitment, when a person stands in that conviction, it’s not just on the day that they march,” he says. “It’s in the way they live their lives every day. And when those are your parents, they become an example of how to live in the world, of what self-examination looks like, what commitment and partnership look like.” He says dancing also requires you to be both in the moment and selfless. “You’re not imitating, cloning or knocking something off,” he says. “You have to step into the embodiment of an idea. As an artist, you’re giving your life to something, for something, and the larger community, the larger self, becomes the priority.”
One of the most transformative experiences in King’s life was his introduction to yoga by way of his father. “It means unity,” he explains, noting how its practice mirrors that of dance. In fact, yoga’s tendency to look beyond form and gender may have its analog in King’s unconventional use of gender. The director has been known to incorporate movement passages for two dancers, or pas de deux, between two men, and to create variations that privilege character over biology in his choreography.
King studied ballet as a child, moving to New York in his teens to train and perform at the Harkness School of Ballet, with the companies of Donald McKayle and Lucas Hoving, at the Alvin Ailey Dance School, and, later, at the American Ballet Theater School. Like his parents and grandparents, King attended Fisk University, but he left after a year, moving to Los Angeles to work with modern dancer Bella Lewitzky. He says Lewitzky had an integrity and honesty that rang true for him. While most people saw ballet as Eurocentric—or “taught ballet like it was a secret,” he says—King identified myriad other cultural influences such as the geometries it borrowed from the Middle East. Where others saw ballet as a style, King understood it as a language, capable of absorbing other languages, and assuming limitless expressive potential.
Early on, inspiration often came in dreams. Today, he says a ballet must generate authenticity. King asks himself: Does this have conviction? Is this real? Is this accurate? He once described attending Mass as an altar boy and watching the older members of the congregation. “Observing that mental state was powerful. It was private, it was centered, it was interior—and it was beautiful,” he remembers. “When you observe anyone really believing in something, it’s a powerful thing to see.”
King wants his dancers to dance with truth but also with feeling and intuition, which have intelligence instead of emotion, which can get in the way. “The most important thing to a dancer is how to communicate an idea clearly, whatever it takes,” he says. “We sometimes forget that the idea comes first, and techniques are employed to bring the idea to life.” King believes that each human is a tiny microcosm—“a collection of whirling forces in super motion,” he says—containing all the properties and potential of the universe. “Externally, the body inhabits a small space,” he says. “Internally, it is a vast infinity.” *
In 2017, King partnered with poetry slam pioneer and language expert Bob Holman to craft Figures of Speech, a ballet based on the concept of dying languages.
As an artist, you’re giving your life to something.
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King says he’d like to see politicians dancing in 2018. “I’d like to see the world practicing art,” he told Dance Magazine, “because the introspection from true art practice can’t lie.”
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Dercon first established his reputation as a program director at MoMA PS1 in the 1980s.
CHRIS DERCON
Volksbühne Theatre
Tate Modern
MoMA PS1
Haus der Kunst
Creativity cannot be born in a vacuum, as the career of Belgian art historian Chris Dercon attests. His curation and artistic direction at major institutions, including New York’s PS1, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Munich’s Haus der Kunst, London’s Tate Modern and the revered Volksbühne theater in Berlin, have been marked by dynamic collaborations and partnerships.
In fact, throughout his expansive career, he has spoken highly of his interactions with luminaries such as Belgian art collector Herman Daled; his former boss, Tate director Nicholas Serota; Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas; Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela, whose conceptual clothing challenges convention; dissident Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei; and the progressive German author and philosopher Alexander Kluge, whose words—“Utopia gets better and better while we’re waiting for it”—continue to strike a chord.
Dercon, who was born in the quiet town of Lier, near Antwerp, in 1958, first showed significant interest in the arts—particularly performance art—during his teens, which led him to study art history, film and theater at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. There he became infatuated with avant-garde theater and dance, and he went on to develop programs for Belgian radio and television, while also penning articles on genre-defying artists such as Karole Armitage, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
Dercon’s motto, taken from a production note he received in 1981: “Once the order has been found, everything can be changed around.”
Initially, however, he longed to become an artist or performer himself. “There is nothing more exciting than a rock concert,” he enthuses. “But I quickly figured out that I was not good enough,” he recalls, “so I became a producer and a curator instead.” By 1990, he had co-founded the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.
Between performative media and inert art history, Dercon began to immerse himself in a middle ground: fashion. He even taught courses on the sociology of fashion, in addition to architecture and graphic design, at the Modeakademie in Arnhem. From 1996 through 2003, he served as director of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, curating several fashion exhibitions, including one on Maison Martin Margiela and the exuberant Walter van Beirendonck and, in 1998, directing a radio show about feminism and fashion in Japan. During his tenure, the museum began to acquire a serious fashion collection. Dercon would focus on how history was still alive and performing. He blended garments into the department of “modern masters,” incorporating, for example, carefully selected Prada or Margiela pieces into rooms featuring Hieronymus Bosch or iconic works of Surrealism.
“Today, I am good at ge
tting my team to think big—that is, to draw broad lines that they are invited to fill in with more specific ideas, projects or names. But I failed at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen because I wanted to make all the decisions myself,” he says. Dercon had to learn to manage a team, to take responsibility, to listen, without controlling. “I’ve become a moderator, or in French, un passeur,” he reveals of his outlook, “passing ideas from one to another or connecting different ideas, making choices. This is incredibly creative. And over the years, I’ve become a better and better listener.”
In 2003, Dercon moved into the directorship of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where he championed the development of live arts through collaborations with artists like Kluge, Patti Smith, Allan Kaprow and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. Over seven years, he regained his proximity to theater through projects like Into the Night With . . . , a documentary television series.
Shortly after, in 2011, he became the artistic director of the Tate Modern and presented commercially successful, live and digital exhibitions by performers ranging from Charles Atlas, Rabih Mroué and Andrea Fraser to Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, Sung Hwan Kim and Kraftwerk. He functioned like an editor in chief, producer and fundraiser at the time, overseeing a massive architectural addition to the museum.
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As the former director of London’s Tate Modern, Dercon says the museum is truly a city within a city.
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As a teenager, Dercon bought art with wages earned from a summer job at an onion factory.
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