Postings discussion This link allows you to see others thoughts on this piece and contribute to the debate yourself if you want. We look to guarantee this link for a number of years, though after 3-6 months the page may be closed to further additions. Preserving Forsythe another view on the oral tradition Susie Crow's first piece

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I currently teach ballet class to university students as part of a degree course in dance. Although largely academic and theoretical, the course includes a proportion of practical study, and ballet as a foundation technique is a compulsory module in the first year. My students are varied in experience and ability - some have attended ballet classes since they were small or have undertaken vocational training, while for others it is virtually their first exposure outside a few sessions as part of studies for GCSE, HNVQ or a B Tech in performing arts.

As assessment looms I ask myself what is it that my students can acquire in this short period, what the experience contributes to their education in dance. In the grand scheme of things the few classes that they attend with me can only address a tiny sample of the vast vocabulary of movements, shapes, steps and their variants and combinations that have crystallised as the danse d'école. We can only scrape the surface of the investigation of how their own bodies should assimilate this knowledge and reconstruct this material. More influential than specific elements, and of lasting value in whatever field of dance they pursue, is perhaps exposure to inherent characteristics of the form - the anatomical soundness of its fundamental principles, its mindset of logic, clarity and precision, its philosophical root in classical ideals.

But maybe one of the most valuable experiences they receive in practical dance classes is that of a different mode of learning, age old and fast disappearing in other areas of our lives. Engaging with a classical dance form offers one of few

Colouring and shaping my teaching is my own learning with my teachers, and theirs with their teachers before them...

opportunities in 21st century urban civilisation to experience the oral tradition, the handing on of knowledge and experience by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Colouring and shaping my teaching is my own learning with my teachers, and theirs with their teachers before them, experienced and made real in my body and my dance, almost entirely unmediated by the written word. I transmit information to my students verbally or by demonstration; they receive it by listening and looking; in assessment they neither write nor speak but must demonstrate their learning through their dance.

Like the dance itself the nature of this learning is fluid and malleable; in danger of being partial, unbalanced, corrupted, but also with the potential to evolve and renew itself in changing circumstances. It can be powerful, embedding indelible knowledge of movement and sensation in the deep memory of muscles, developing in dancers enviable skills of recall that have on occasion enabled the salvage and reconstruction of works and material unseen in decades. Familiarity with the syntax and vocabulary of a given movement language can also enable a dazzling speed of assimilation. The principal tool in this is repetition, harnessing our instinct towards the habitual to positive ends.

The practising dancer is thus the primary resource of dance knowledge - processor of information, library, instrument as well as executant and artifact. (I use the term "dancer" in the widest sense to include performers and students but also teachers and choreographers - all those who spend time in the doing of dance, and who carry a heritage of dance knowledge in the hard drive of the body.) And this is not confined to the study of technique in class but also applies to the theatre dance repertoire.

It is only in recent decades that internationally accepted forms of notation and developments in film and video technology have been able to provide and make available detailed recording of choreography, archiving and preserving in some form not only the canon of major works, but virtually all current productions. Notation systems and recording technology are constantly updating themselves. I was recently at a presentation called Software for Dancers at the Clore Studio, the culmination of a research project for choreographers and software designers. Participants had defined needs, surveyed recent developments and explored the potential for new computer plug-ins which might result in the digital equivalent of the choreographer's notebook of jottings, enabling both creative process and product to be recorded with ever greater sophistication through the cross-referencing and linking of video, animation, graphics, sound, musical score, notation and verbal notes.

Does this fast expanding capacity remove the need for old ways? I think not. The oral tradition has a ruthless element of natural selection within it, editing the greater part of previous repertoire out of our collective consciousness while reinforcing the impact of seminal works, performances and performers, down to the tiniest fragments of movement or ways of moving.

The oral tradition has a ruthless element of natural selection within it...

Though we may never have seen Pavlova elements of her quality live on in choreographic traits of Sir Frederick Ashton. We live in an age which is awash with superfluous information; the oral tradition's subconscious ability to sift and select what is to be retained was never more necessary.

And for all their store of useful factual information, can any notation system or filmed or animated record ever convey the internal knowledge of sensation and motivation experienced and passed from one individual to another like an electric current? There is a tragic loss when great artists leave or die without handing on their unique perception to feed and be reinterpreted by the next generation. Dance companies and institutions have a responsibility to ensure continuity in the flow of such experience, the very stuff of dance, be it in the form of choreographic matter or the way of performing it. The thread of the oral tradition is easy to break, and such knowledge once lost will never be recovered. Ballets uninformed by a living tradition are lifeless pointless skeletons.

If ballet is to retain its vitality and connection to our changing lives observance of its rituals cannot be a mindless soothing reiteration, but needs to be informed by observation and analysis, constantly sloughing off surface impurities to refine the essence to be transmitted. Yesterday's classroom material should be approached with as much care, alertness and imagination as if it were completely unfamiliar. Dancers need to take possession of it and find themselves within it, if they are to become able to communicate through dance either to an audience or a student. To live, the tradition must not impose on the mass but be consciously embraced by the individual.

Bombarded with external images and information we must learn to recognise what is valuable, and not just value what is written. Other types of learning now have a vital place in honing dancers' abilities constantly to question, investigate and rapidly assimilate - reading, watching, discussing, playing games, composing. Intelligent practical engagement with the oral tradition in the now is the heart of our dance; a constant reminder of the expressive essence of the art and the depth of our roots, fostering both a sense of historical perspective and an ability to project forwards with vision; seeing ourselves as streams which contribute to or branch off from a mighty flow of ideas.