Bots Do Ballet in Brooklyn, and the Crowd Goes Wild

A Nao robot shows off its dance moves.
The audience was rooting for the little guys right from the start.
On Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a human-robot ballet got a classy New York City debut. The piece, which is simply called “Robot,” featured seven cute little Nao humanoids from Aldebaran Robotics, who danced with—and often upstaged—eight excellent human dancers.
Don’t get me wrong, the bots weren’t about to win a dance-off against the professionals. They were only ocassionally graceful, and fell down fairly often (there’s a lot of that going around these days). Instead they won the crowd over through emotion, appealing to the capacious human heart.
The first Nao made his initial appearance on stage in a dramatic unboxing. A dancer opened the front of a knee-high crate to reveal the bot (apparently named Pierre) standing inside. The human took hold of Pierre’s outstretched hands and helped him take his first halting steps onto the stage, and the audience reflexively let loose with a loud “awwwww ” as if we were watching a chubby toddler.
These hesitant first steps led to a sweet pas de deux, with the human slowly teaching Pierre how to dance. The synchronized routine, with the human’s expressive and expansive actions crudely mimicked by the bot, played up the teacher-student or parent-child relationship, and made modified Whitney Houston lyrics run through my head: “I believe the robots are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”