Laurent Sebillotte, a Pragmatic Architect for Dance Archives 

Laura Cappelle

When he joined the CN D in the early 2000s, Laurent Sebillotte helped bring to fruition a brand new project: giving French dance a specialized library and compiling archives that would form a documentary legacy. A new publication, Archives de la danse (Dance Archives), chronicles the stakes of preserving dance history.

At the end of the 1990s, the Centre National de la Danse was just getting started. The Pantin building, a former administrative center, was to undergo several years of renovation before the CN D teams officially moved in in 2004. But as early as 1999, the new venue was already looking for someone to take on another project: the creation of a media library dedicated to dance.

“I think I was the right man at the right time,” says Laurent Sebillotte with a smile, as he prepares to retire this fall from his position as Director of the Heritage, Audiovisual, and Publishing Department. After studying literature and earning a master’s in information processing at Sciences Po, he founded and ran for twelve years the documentation center of a “professional organization in the insurance and pension sector,” dedicated to providing information for business leaders. He was then looking for a new challenge, and it was the Sciences Po alumni network that directed him to the CN D—which, as he recalls, “wasn’t necessarily looking for someone from within the industry.”

Unbeknownst to the hiring team, however, they had found a seasoned dance aficionado. “When I was young, I took dance classes and saw a lot of performances,” says Sebillotte. And not just any: at a very early age, his grandfather—a prominent figure in Avignon who ran a large local market—introduced him to the festival’s shows. Maurice Béjart, Félix Blaska, Théâtre du Silence, and Merce Cunningham’s performance in the Cour d’honneur were among his formative experiences. “I loved seeing bodies do things you don’t normally do—that kind of poetic freedom. I would imagine moods and expressions.”

At the CN D, his status as an outsider allowed him to take a critical approach to the documentary needs of the community. “My strategy was to say: they don’t want me to be an expert, so I’m not going to present myself as one,” he recalls with a grin. He quickly noticed a certain “vagueness” in terminology during discussions about dance, which posed practical challenged for building a media library: “What are the main categories? Theater dance, performance dance? Social dance, which sometimes becomes a performance? What do we call historical dance?”

Unaccustomed to the demands of documentation processes, the choreographic community regularly put up a bit of resistance. “When we drew up a classification plan, we decided—much to the surprise of many people, even today—to distinguish between artists and works,” Sebillotte explains. The aim was to highlight the specificity of pieces that have been revisited and reinvented by multiple choreographers, such as The Rite of Spring. 

The broader questions raised by developing a center dedicated to dance history and legacy at the CN D—which over time has borne several names, including the Department of Choreology and Choreographic Culture—deal with the preservation of dance heritage and its relationship to memory. In the 2000s, Sebillotte recalls, the very notion of archives was still far from obvious: “When it came to keeping track of the essence of art and/or its productions, we didn’t believe in it.” Video had a poor reputation, and the very idea of fixing movement seemed “unnatural” to many. “There was a kind of arrogance in saying, ‘Anyway, it can’t be fixed.’”

Asked to build archives in addition to the media library, Sebillotte remained undeterred, supported by allies such as Charles Picq, a pioneer in dance video recording. “I worked with those who wanted to and who thought it was important,” he recalls.

Several major donations—including those of Gilberte Cournand, the renowned critic and bookseller, and choreographers Francine Lancelot and Régine Chopinot—enabled him to develop a philosophy unique to the CN D, detailed in Archives de la danse. “I based our methodological choices, our way of doing things, largely on listening to others,” he says. Instead of imposing a standard plan on all the collections, he favored “respect for intention,” adapting classification frameworks to the thinking of each artist or donor. “Some choreographers make a fairly clear distinction between their creative work and their teaching work, for example. For others, on the contrary, the two are constantly intertwined. I respect their way of thinking.”

Over time, Sebillotte observed a major shift. Technological advances that now make it easy to capture and edit dance videos have made artists aware, he says, that “in the course of their work, they are producing archives. I think the very idea that you can create or deposit your archives is fairly common now.” At least for choreographers: he notes that it remains more complicated to “convince a performer that they too produce archives,” and he hopes to receive materials from other types of dance professionals, such as mediators and technicians.

As he prepares to leave his office on the fourth floor of the Pantin building, Sebillotte reflects on the “institutional achievements” of the past 25 years and praises the work of his now “fully mature” team. After this foundational phase, he says, the challenges of tomorrow will be different: the dematerialization of digital archives and “anthropological revolutions”—namely social networks, the importance of images, and increasingly shorter formats—that are transforming how the CN D’s audiences read and engage. As others to take up the challenge, Sebillotte leaves his position with a sense of accomplishment: “I was incredibly lucky to find this adventure, and to be a part of it.”

Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based journalist and scholar. In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She edited Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020), a French-language introduction to dance history, and her new book Créer des ballets au XXI^e siècle was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010 and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine.

Laurent Sebillotte 
Archives de la danse
Éditions CND, 2025
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