Image via Getty/Wendy Redfern
As Pusha-T emerged on stage in front of 80,000 Kanye West fans to perform his “Runaway” verse on April 17, 2011, something was looming over him.
It wasn’t a figurative “looming over,” but rather a gargantuan set piece rising above him—a mural made entirely of stone (a composite of a piece from the Altar of Zeus at Pergamum) that Kanye had requested to be rigged up for his headlining set at Coachella.
“Whatever that structure was, it was so massive,” Push tells Complex on the 10-year anniversary of the performance. “I was like, ‘I hope this doesn’t fall on me.’ These were all my thoughts. It was my first time seeing a stage performance and him putting it on like this. And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. This is a huge deal.’ Watching him be obsessed… It was like, it couldn’t go any other way for him.”
The wind was fierce that day, but luckily for Kanye, it wasn’t disruptive enough to knock over any stone backdrops or spoil what’s now looked at by many as one of the best festival sets in hip-hop history. Just five months after Kanye released what Push refers to over the phone as a contender for the greatest album of all time, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezy rallied up a team of creatives from varying artistic backgrounds—some of whom he’d never worked with before—to put on his first headlining set at Coachella. He was following in the footsteps of acts like Prince, Jay-Z, and Paul McCartney, who headlined in years past, but nobody had ever done it like ’Ye.
Tapping multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Dean, as well as the show’s artistic director Virgil Abloh and musical guests Pusha-T and Justin Vernon, Kanye put together a stacked group of collaborators. And beyond the familiar names, he also assembled a dream team of new faces, including Yemi A.D. (who had recently choreographed the Runaway short film) and Laura Escudé, a music programmer with only a couple ’Ye shows under her belt at the time.
With only a few weeks to prepare, the crew created a festival experience unlike anything that had come before it, with elaborate stage designs, dance routines, and an unbelievable amount of hits. Ten years later, Pusha-T looks back at the performance as a moment when hip-hop was appreciated in its purest form.
“I was watching one of the biggest moments in touring, with the biggest artist in the world, off the best album of the year, doing the purest form of hip-hop,” Push says now. “I was like, hip-hop is being appreciated. They’re appreciating the purest form of hip-hop at the highest level. It was overwhelming. It was overwhelming to see the youngest genre of music, the music that comes under the most scrutiny, the music that wasn’t supposed to last, if you let my parents tell it… It wasn’t gonna be around for 20 years. At that point, for me, it was like, ‘Oh, we are the biggest. And we’re not [just] the biggest, we are the best.’”
Some of those involved in the production of the performance had been preparing for months beforehand—they just didn’t know it yet. Choreographer Yemi A.D. had the task of running two auditions to narrow down the ballerinas: first for Kanye’s October Saturday Night Live appearance in New York and another for Coachella in California. The Czech choreographer, who Kanye had scouted for Runaway and entrusted to direct shows, tours, and music videos, kept things low key at first.
“We couldn’t say it was for Kanye—we couldn’t say what was going on,” Yemi recalls. “So in the beginning, for the first audition, I just had 60 or 70 people show up. They were sitting on the floor and I was saying, ‘OK, so we’re gonna do the show. It’s for one of the TV shows that runs here in the states, you might know it, Saturday Night Live. They were giggling. Then I said, it’s for this rapper named Kanye West.”
Auditions would sometimes last eight hours, as Yemi was adamant on learning the backgrounds of each of his potential dancers and finding out what they had to offer. “If I’m working with someone, I want to know not only if they’re a good performer, but that they have something more from their background.” Early in his career, he auditioned for both Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, without ever getting a chance to actually dance, so he was determined to run auditions differently when it was his turn to select talent. And apparently, so was Kanye.
“I was watching one of the biggest moments in touring, with the biggest artist in the world, off the best album of the year, doing the purest form of hip-hop.” – Pusha-T
“[Kanye] would spend time in most of the rehearsals,” Yemi says. “I could see it was both ways: It was not only that his music would influence the movement, it was that the movement would influence his music. When there was a solo like for ‘Runaway’ or ‘Love Lockdown,’ he would totally connect with the dancer, play the machine, and look at the person. From a five-minute song, he’d make a 20-minute song. The dancers were always so afraid like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna play forever.’ He could see with the tension in their body, what their reaction was to the music. It’s a beautiful moment, and I don’t think it’s ever happened this way.”
Dancer Caitlin Conlon, who at the time was only 21 years old when she unknowingly auditioned to perform with Kanye on SNL, still remembers the moment Kanye walked into her audition, before she had any clue she was auditioning for him.
“We all gasped and held our breath, like, ‘Holy shit, are we auditioning for Kanye?’ Not only that, but there weren’t that many of us left, so are we performing? He sat there and continued to watch the auditions and they got us down to the last girls that would be performing.”
A few months after a successful SNL performance, Yemi got the news that he would be choreographing ‘Ye’s Coachella set and he needed more ballerinas to make it happen. That’s when a high school friend called up Cathleen Cher, a creative who had a background in dance, and asked if she’d like to help pick out some of the show’s dancers as Yemi’s assistant.
“I thought I was there to help cast the ballerinas, which, in and of itself, was a really crazy process,” Cher recalls. “But then, as everything progressed, I basically became the dance mom. I was Yemi’s assistant as well, helping him with everything that he needed. Navigating that with him was a lot of just figuring it out. You know, it’s like the ultimate fake-it-until-you-make-it. But I ended up doing anything that the dancers touched. I hired the hair and makeup team. I hired the wardrobe assistant to help finalize the costumes. I helped manage all the rehearsals, and also got their props made.”
Another Kanye team newcomer, Escudé, was tasked with manning the rapper’s vocal effects at Coachella. As the team began preparing for the set at their rehearsal space within Paramount Studios, though, she impressed Kanye enough to land another gig. Months before rehearsals, ‘Ye and Jay-Z’s “H.A.M.” had dropped, and Escudé figured the song was an opportunity to make a good first impression.
“I just wanted to show Kanye and the crew what my talents were, because I’m also a violinist,” she remembers. “I ended up doing a string remix of ‘H.A.M.,’ which was just all my violin. We got to rehearsals for Coachella, and I had this music that I created, and I gave it to them to check out. It ended up becoming the intro of the Coachella show, and then the rest of the tour.”
In that Paramount space, Conlon and her peers rehearsed for several strenuous days on cement, without any mirrors, in an area she describes as “not a dance space.” Still, Kanye’s dancers were locked in to the task at hand. Conlon was impressed with the energy ’Ye brought to rehearsals, and she still clearly remembers a message he shared while they prepared.
“He said, ‘Thank you for being here. I don’t see you guys as being my backup dancers. I wouldn’t be here and it wouldn’t look like this without you,’” she recalls. “So it was one of those moments where you’re like, man, I feel very lucky to be here. And it’s not just music. It’s not just backup. We’re not just here. We’re a part of it. We’re a part of the artwork, and it feels really special.”
Pusha-T says he was around Kanye most of the time throughout early 2011, coming off of MBDTF, even hitting the stage with him at SXSW a month before. That meant seeing some of what was going through Kanye’s head before the Coachella set, and getting a glimpse of just how important the moment was to his friend.
“Leading up to the show was crazy. It felt like a war. It was like a war zone. People were screaming and shouting.” – Yemi A.D.
“It had to be right,” Push says now. “Everybody had to be on point and on time. You know, just the musicianship of Mike Dean and the rest of the guys who were playing and shit like that. It was a very tense time in regard to everybody just practicing and making sure they were on time.”
On Sunday night, for the final headlining performance of the first weekend of Coachella 2011, Kanye’s dancers were bussed out to Palm Springs. They all entered their trailers, which had construction paper signs labeled with markers. The text read, “allerinas.” Conlon still isn’t sure if that misspelling was on purpose.
“Leading up to the show was crazy,” Yemi remembers. “It felt like a war. It was like a war zone. People were screaming and shouting. There were so many people [in the crowd]. I don’t know, 100,000 people. There was dust everywhere. There was a huge, big wind. I didn’t know it would be so huge. It was so big.”
The scenery was a lot different than what Yemi and his team were used to while practicing at the movie studios, but they were still prepared to put on a show of a lifetime. At 10:30 p.m., Kanye approached the stage on a lift—one that Mike Dean once said was used in Michael Jackson’s final tour—and the show was finally underway.
The set was monstrous, featuring 24 tracks over the span of an hour and a half. MBDTF cuts were stacked alongside classics like “Good Life” and “Through the Wire,” as the ballerinas danced and Dean’s synths gave Kanye’s most recognizable tracks a new spin. To most in the crowd, the show went flawlessly, but there were a couple minor hiccups along the way.
One moment that Yemi, Cher, and Conlin will never forget is lifting the tarp above Kanye’s head before he pressed the iconic “Runaway” keys, while “Chariots of Fire” played as an interlude. No one in the audience noticed any errors in the tarp lift about an hour into the set, but Yemi and Cher were feeling the pressure as they held it down with their bodies on the windy Palm Springs night. After all, they hadn’t yet practiced it onstage, and couldn’t account for mother nature in rehearsals.
“At the very beginning, we started to notice that it was going to become an issue, because it was already starting to get lifted up before it was supposed to,” Cher says. “And so we were really in the back, just throwing ourselves onto the tarp to resolve it getting lifted. Imagine like a parachute that you play with as a kid times 100, trying to keep that down.”
The tarp even made Yemi fall on his face, he remembers with a laugh, as he was too fearful it would knock over everything on the stage if he let go of it at the wrong time.
“In my head, I’m like, now we’re gonna release the fabric, the wind is gonna pick up, and it’s gonna create this massive bubble. It’s gonna swipe all the vents down from the stage, and they’re just gonna fall inside and it’s going to be the biggest disaster at Coachella ever,” Yemi chuckles. “So with this in my mind, the girls are picking up the fabric, they’re starting to run forward. But I am holding the fabric back in the end. I didn’t want to let go. I fall on my chin, and they are pulling me with the fabric. I’m on the floor totally full of dirt. And I’m hearing the girls scream, ‘Yemi, let go!’ I was so stressed. I thought it was the wind, but it was the ballerinas pulling the fabric in the right moment, doing the right thing.”
Another unexpected oversight has gone unnoticed by most Kanye fans for over a decade now. Escudé was tasked with manning Ye’s vocal effects, taking care of the pitch-shifting so the audience could hear him jump in and out of AutoTune during songs like “Heartless” and “Runaway.” But, unrecognizable to those running the show onstage, the crowd couldn’t hear Kanye’s AutoTune all show, as the set’s audience engineer had the wrong channel on. “We were hearing it onstage, but it wasn’t being heard out in the audience,” she says. “And the entire time, we thought that was on, but it wasn’t on. It sounded fine to the audience, but it was kind of a funny scenario. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get fired even though it’s not my fault.’”
Luckily, Escudé stayed on with Kanye for all of his following tours, and the team got a new engineer in the audience to guarantee AutoTune levels were heard each show. Even with the AutoTune misstep, however, Kanye’s emotional vocal performance added another layer of importance to the already powerful set, which he punctuated with a stirring rendition of “Hey Mama.”
“Kanye has a really great voice,” she recalls. “His passion and his emotion came through regardless. And I think what people remember about that show is just the passion that he had and emotion that he was storytelling through his music.”
Thinking about the set and its legacy a decade later, Pusha-T says getting to play “Runaway” alongside Kanye in front of a massive sea of fans was a defining moment in his already monumental career.
“I would have to say, it was a moment for me. I felt like street hip-hop and what I symbolize in the game was being recognized on such a big stage,” Push reflects. “What I represent in hip-hop, I felt like it was getting its shining moment. Uncompromised. Just having a record be so popular and be such the main event of the show.”
For Yemi, who had never seen a crowd that large before, it was the greatest Coachella performance he’d personally witnessed (although he jokes that he may be just a little biased in his assertion).
“I don’t think there was ever a show like this,” Yemi says. “I don’t know if there ever will be. Like what we did on the Yeezus Tour, it’s not like it’s served on a golden platter, or that there’s things we make sure you understand. Sometimes you might not understand every symbol. Sometimes you might not always be comfortable. But it will be very authentic, very real, very raw. You take from it what you take from it. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
To those who were part of it, Kanye’s biggest triumph on that night 10 years ago wasn’t necessarily the magnitude of hits he played. It wasn’t the enormous stone mural that hung behind him, or even the special appearances from collaborators. What really made Kanye’s 2011 Coachella set so special was the trust he put in those who helped bring his vision to life.
“The thing that I always say about Kanye is how much collaboration is a part of his legacy,” Cher points out. “Obviously, he’s super-talented as a producer and musician and rapper. But one of his biggest talents is recognizing talent in other people.”