Fans of various arts commemorate and pass on their appreciation in various ways—ways that seem to be continuously updating. If you love an author, you buy all their books, or maybe download them on Kindle or your iPad. If you love a poem, whether Poe or Proverbs, you can memorize it or teach it to your children. Hear a song on the radio, and you can buy it from iTunes, buy the CD or—in the case of country music and kindergarten teachers—learn the refrain by the time the third verse rolls around, and sing along the next time. Even opera lovers can track down a score and translation from that pesky Italian into English on the Internet, or download the soundtrack. You can copy a work of art with a camera, or buy a print, numbered or mass-produced.
I already know certain songs from my childhood that I’m going to sing to my nonexistent grandchildren, even though I haven’t heard them in years. And if I end up not having any grandchildren, EVER, I’m coming after yours. (You’ll know me by the irresistible rampion I’ll be willing to trade you for your firstborn whatever. This works. See: Rapunzel.)
Music, song, stories and plays, sculpture and mosaics, symphonies and musical productions—you can get a copy of the screenplay, the poster, a mass-produced sculpted knock-off, the words or the music that entrances you.
Only dance can’t easily be passed on, person to person, no matter how much you appreciate it or how often you watch the film The Red Shoes. It’s one thing for Beowulf to last throughout the centuries, but what about Coppelia? How do you write down the Macarena—or historic ballets most of us have never performed like Swan Lake or Giselle? How are kinesthetic works of art passed on? Only through a long and patient exchange breaking down micro-steps combined with plenty of practice between the trained teacher and the trained student.
I asked Paul Vasterling, the Executive and Artistic Director of the Nashville Ballet, how and whether choreography is notated and was surprised that there is a way, other than film, to pass on the work of great choreographers like Balanchine. “There’s a staff,” he said, “a lot like in music, with five lines that denote movement for arms, legs, head and body.” The lay person can discern body shapes under and within the staff, but reading and applying the notation, as with music, requires study. The typical ballet student is not exposed to this aspect of dance history. Here is one example of an arabesque notation.
Now, look at the figure from a Baroque notation of a French courante, a different type of choreography notation that was commissioned by Louis XIV in the 1660s. And thank goodness, or we might never know how to perform a courante—much less a pas de bourrée.

Beth Alexander