Dance is often thought of as the most ephemeral of the arts the moment of its performance is also the moment of its disappearance. And unlike music, dance does not have a system of notation that is widely understood by practitioners and that is learnt as a matter of course by students. Even film and video recordings, if they have been made and if they have survived, have their limitations as documentation, limitations that are associated with a variety of issues including the validity of using a single recording as documentation when in fact performances vary from night to night. Dance is often thought of, too, as the most trivial of the arts, one without even fundamental records.
Dance does have, however, an ever-growing presence on the net.
Such a presence has, in many instances, a purely practical function. Paris and a host of venues round the world. But the online presence of dance also reflects the burgeoning interest in dance as an area for research. While it is rare, at least at the moment, to see moving images on a dance site, there are growing numbers of web sites that provide information about the dance resources of large public institutions. Others are sites representing projects initiated by clusters of organisations that have grouped together for the benefit of dance.