What about images, then? You could reduce the dance to two dimensions, represented frame by frame, using diagrams and drawings. The problem is that a dance is read by a human, not a machine. Take an instruction as simple as “lower your arm”: How would the precise angle, attitude, and displacement of the arm be explained? As an algebraic vector? And what about the hand, the fingers, the knuckles, the rest of the dancer’s body-what are they doing? Such a method would come to resemble programming code, in which reams of language and symbols come to stand for something that’s supposed to look simple and elegant.
How do you tell a person in another place or time what a dance looks like, and how it should be performed? You could use words, describing, second by second, the movements made by every dancer on stage-but inaccuracies would creep in. How can we know the dancer from the dance? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, “Flowering Trees,” a page from Remy Charlip’s Air Mail Dances.