From the vault 

Five Archival Dance Pieces

Juliette Riandey and Laurent Sebillotte

The Pièces distinguées (Distinguished Pieces) exhibition opens in October, offering an insight into the 250 archives and private collections held by the CN D’s media library. Among the many documents on display, five are presented in this special chapter of our “From the Vault” series. The selection, multiplied by five for the occasion, highlights the many fields of activity in which the work of the dance archivist is carried out.

First and foremost, dance archives are meant to bear witness to the works and approaches of creators – choreographers and dancers, but also associate artists, composers, costume designers, and lighting designers. The documents produced by all these artists often provide a detailed account of the various stages in the artistic process.

In her 1997 piece An H to B, choreographer Mié Coquempot reveals part of her compositional process on stage, using colored tracing paper layers that follow one another on a television screen. These layers, made from 21 photographs taken from a William Forsythe solo, enable the dancer to reveal the construction of her piece to the audience. Each image serves as the starting point for developing a 20-second choreographic phrase, ultimately constituting a solo lasting precisely 7 minutes and 20 seconds. These documents, which are part-set design, part-process archive, and part-reflection of the dancer’s admiration for Forsythe and his method of improvisation, provide us with information on the structure of the piece – broken down into the same number of layers preserved in the collection.

Choreographic works are, by their very nature, never materially fixed, and the creative processes of dance can only be imperfectly captured by video. Because what motivated and nourished a finished piece is not always made explicit, the traces and artifacts that inform us about a work’s genesis and making of are essential for the archivist.

One of the most important issues for the archivist is to clarify the context in which the archive is produced – whether we’re talking about the historical, geographic, political, social, institutional, or biographical context. Every piece of an archive can reveal a wider context

This poster from the Théâtre contemporain de la danse (TCD) bears witness to a special era in the history of dance in France. The TCD, which was a key player in the institutional support of dance creation and the emergence of the hip-hop scene in the 1980s and 1990s, was able to bring together a new audience for contemporary dance. However, the poster’s slogan, which dates back to 1998, suggests that it has also had to be careful not to seem exclusionary.

In dance, as in so many other fields, reflection, research, and memory open onto eras and situations of power, practices of circulation and exchange, public policies and institutional networks, milieus and societies. The various collections held at the CN D enable us to make incursions into a wide range of times, places, and frameworks, and to survey what are ultimately very diverse fields of action.

Beyond the approaches and contexts of the production and circulation of choreographic works, dance – the art of the body in movement – must of course also be considered for itself: what constitutes it, what makes it possible, what is specific to the dancing body. Numerous archives – sometimes even entire collections – make this possible: archives of schools and training centers, archives of pedagogues, notators and theorists, but first and foremost of dancers and people who pass on the dance to others!

In 1951, Ukrainian-born French dancer and teacher Olga Stens, who would later specialize in character dance, attended Mary Wigman’s classes and recorded her singular technique through drawing and textual description. A second-hand account of the famous modern choreographer’s technique, these notes bear witness first and foremost to Olga Stens’ view of this practice and what she remembered from it. She notes that, in contrast to classical technique, the movements proposed are “totally angular” and stresses that “everything is turned in”.

By approaching gestures and techniques, these archives reveal the transmission of choreographic knowledge.

Archives are defined as the sum of all the documents produced or received by a natural or legal person in the course of their activity, and in fact, dance archives reveal a variety of players – artists, administrators, and collaborators of all kinds from the field of creation, teaching or transmission.

The promotional documents for the Ballet de Nice presented here detail the conditions of the sale of a program in 1963. For many years, François Guillot de Rode accompanied his wife, Françoise Adret, dancer, choreographer and company director, taking charge of the administrative side of running a corps de ballet.

This type of document provides information both on the need for this position in a company and on the working conditions required at the time for corps de ballet dancers and principals. We learn, for example, that the company did not travel for a single date, since performances were sold by the week, and that 1st-class trains or planes were the preferred means of transport. Except for the principals, who only flew!

Dance as a physical practice or a choreographic work, as it results from the processes and professions that bring it forth, can be viewed in a multitude of ways. The CN D’s collections are rich in archives by viewers and ballet lovers. But we can also call on the archives of the artists themselves, when they allow themselves to be seen or when they give rise to stagings, reports, texts, or recordings.

With this series of autographed photographs of Mathilde Kschessinska’s students, the aim is not to celebrate the dancer, but to honor the beloved teacher by offering her these tokens of gratitude and attachment. In fact, this collection invites us to take a double look at the way the ballerina was portrayed in the 1930s and 1940s – with those characteristic studio poses – but it also reveals the esteem in which the teacher was held between the wars.

What’s striking about dance archives is the variety of discourses and images they produce. They are a reminder that dance creations and gestures, in order to be fully manifest and give rise to an archive, presuppose a reception. This in turn can generate a testimony, a story or the creation of another piece. The archives of choreographic art thus open onto other continents: it’s less a question of nourishing an understanding of tangible realities than of allowing ourselves to be won over by other imaginative sensibilities and approaches.

In the CN D, Laurent Sebillotte is the director of Heritage, Audiovisual and Publishing. Juliette Riandey is in charge of Collections et promotion.

Pièces distinguées (Distinguished pieces)
Exhibition
From October 14 to April 4, 2025 at CN D, Pantin
(in a reduced version from October 14 to November 8)