A few weeks after the lockdown started back in March, Merritt Moore — who danced with ballet companies in Oslo, London and Boston before getting a Ph.D. in physics from Oxford — hit on the idea of using a robot as a partner for dance training while in isolation. So she ordered an industrial model and started programming it to do 15-second ballets with her for TikTok and Instagram. The pair has since racked up about 15 million views. (And yes, the machine’s name, which was crowdsourced, is Baryshnibot. The runner-up choice was Roboto Bolle.) – Pointe Magazine