Excerpt:

When the world went into lockdown last March, most dancers despaired. But not Merritt Moore. The Los Angeles native, who lives in London and has danced with Norwegian National Ballet, English National Ballet and Boston Ballet, holds a PhD in atomic and laser physics from the University of Oxford. A few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, she came up with a solution for having to train and work alone: robots.

Moore had just come out of a six-week residency at Harvard ArtLab focused on the intersection between dance and robotics. "I knew I needed something to look forward to, and thought how bizarre I'd just been working with robots," she says. "Who knew they'd be my only potential dance partners for a really long time?" She reached out to Universal Robotics and asked them to collaborate, and they agreed to send her a robot to experiment with.