I spent a day examining recently, and I came out of it thinking about vocabulary instead of technique.
The dancers were good. Free, flexible, well-balanced, with correct body action through the legs and feet. What differed wasn't the movement. It was the framework — the directions, the timings, the names for things. They built a working sense of what they were doing that mostly produced the right result, but it didn't line up with the syllabus they were supposed to be using.
That happens constantly, and many times we paper over it. The examiner knows what the candidate means. The candidate thinks they know what the examiner means. Everyone nods. But when I try to have a real conversation with a colleague about why the first step of a bota fogo is forward and not crossing, or what an overturned rock step actually costs you, I discover that we are not using the same words for the same things, and the conversation quietly stops being about dancing and starts being about definitions. I can count on my digits the number of people with whom I can actually have a substantive conversation about the way the manuals are written, and I might not even need to get down to my toes for that.
That's the problem I want to name. It's not that dancers are getting it massively wrong — although pretty much every candidate that I've examined in the last ten years could do with some training from a disciplined source. It's that we no longer have enough shared language to establish what “right” would even mean.
The vocabulary is thinning out.
There are very few people left who can talk about dancing in a technically precise way.
I don't say that to be grim about the state of the field, and I'm certainly not claiming the good old days were better — plenty of the old guard disagreed violently with each other, and some of them were wrong. But precision was a common professional skill in a way it now isn't. You could assume a certain floor. You could say alignment and be confident it landed as alignment, not as a general gesture toward facing somewhere. This was one of the great things about the heyday of going to London for dance lessons. There was a vibe that matched the analytical side.
When that floor drops, something specific breaks: you lose the ability to move the discussion forward on the basis of existing terminology. Every technical conversation has to first rebuild its own foundation, which means most technical conversations don't happen. We end up with a lot of teaching that is transmitted by feel and imitation, which works beautifully in a studio between two people and travels almost nowhere beyond it.
If we can't agree on the same terms, all of us are operating at a deficit. Not just the students. Us.
The temptation is to rewrite everything.
One obvious fix is to write better books. And a lot of good people are doing exactly that right now — modernizing the language, systematizing forms that were never systematized, cleaning up definitions that were vague or self-contradictory or simply written for a body that danced in 1955. The International styles get modest rewrites as different organizations take them up. The American styles are being overhauled drastically, from several directions at once, by people with real credentials and good intentions.
I think that work is invaluable. I've been part of some of it. But rewriting alone doesn't solve the problem I'm describing, and it can make it worse.
The old terminology is rooted deep in the consciousness of a great many working dancers. When you replace a term, you don't erase the old meaning — you create a population where the same word means one thing to the people trained before the change and another thing to the people trained after. You've taken one shared vocabulary and produced two private ones. Everybody is still saying alignment. Fewer people than before are hearing the same thing.
The new manuals are not the villain here. The gap between the manual and the profession is. A definition that lives on a page and not in the room where two teachers are arguing is a definition that hasn't actually been adopted; it has only been published.
Resurrect the meanings, then teach the additions.
So I don't think the answer is to abandon the inherited language wholesale in favor of whatever gets written down next. I also don't think it's to defend the old books line by line as if they were scripture. I've said before that all models are wrong and some are useful, and I meant it about the manuals too.
The path I see is narrower and less satisfying than either. First, resurrect the old meanings — actually teach what those terms meant, precisely, to the people who wrote them, including where they disagreed with each other. Then teach what has been derived from them, added to them, or deliberately changed, and say plainly which is which. A dancer who knows that a term was revised, and why, can hold both meanings and translate between generations. A dancer who was only ever taught the new one can't, and doesn't know they can't.
That's re-education, and it's slower than publishing. It means retraining examiners and coaches, not just authors. It means new crops of examiners coming in already fluent in both the inherited vocabulary and its revisions. It probably takes a generation or two before real community uptake, which is an unglamorous thing to sign up for.
Make it broad, and get it reviewed.
The other half of this, and the part I push on hardest with anyone who will listen: these efforts have to be broad-based, and they have to seek peer review.
A rewrite produced by a small group — however expert, however well-intentioned — inherits that group's blind spots and doesn't carry authority or good will. What gives a definition force is not the eminence of whoever wrote it. It's the number of qualified people who examined it, argued with it, and agreed to use it anyway. Words mean things because we agreed they would, and agreement is a fight you actually have to have, not a status you can assert on a title page.
Broader uptake means better understanding. Better understanding means a stronger teaching base. A stronger teaching base is the only thing that eventually puts a candidate in front of me who moves freely and can tell me exactly what they did.
That's what I'm after. Not compliance with the book. A profession that can still hold a technical conversation.