When Robots Come for Dance

Earlier this year, I watched a video that caught me entirely by surprise: A clip from the CCTV Spring Festival in China, in which more than a dozen humanoid robots performed an intricate martial-arts routine. They backflipped. They high-kicked. They wielded swords and dropped into potentially pant-splitting lunges. A side-by-side comparison with their movements just the year before was astounding: The robots, made by the company Unitree Robotics, could now move with a fluidity that looked less like the archetypical “robot dance” and more like ballet, albeit a dead-eyed version.I was impressed, but—I must admit—a part of me felt threatened. And jealous. Despite my more than two decades of dance training, those robots could perform moves that I never could. (Like backflips! I cannot backflip.) The video plopped me back into a time of complicated emotions, when I was enchanted by dance but constantly saw it as a catalog of tricks I had largely failed to master.My early days at a preprofessional ballet school were joyful. I craved the weightlessness of a jump. I wanted to stretch my body to touch as much of the world as it could. But with time, this joy curdled into a sense of ineptitude and dread. Afternoons of practice resulted not in perfection but in painful pointe-shoe blisters. Twice a year, I nervously awaited a report card that graded me on categories such as “body type” and “musicality” and that often made me feel that I’d come up short. One night, I dreamed that I completed a triple pirouette—a spin that eluded me most days—which turned into a quadruple turn, then a quintuple, and on and on until I was the ballerina in a music box. A robot. I awoke the next day feeling betrayed: Why could my mind dream this up, yet my body seemed incapable of making it happen? Soon after, I quit ballet.“China’s dancing robots,” as coverage of the Unitree humanoids called them, stirred up those old feelings of incompetence. But they also piqued my curiosity—and skepticism. It w