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Perhaps there is something to ballet that I just don't understand. I have been to at least one, nutcracker, and... it's just people dancing to music. Difficult I'm sure, but sublime? Different people find different things sublime, I love my city, I'm in awe at what our engineers, architects and laborers have built - my culture is more powerful and dynamic today, not in some idealized past where pain stakingly perfecting choreography was the peak of human ambition. Maybe this is what you feel when you see ballet, but it is no universal experience.
For what it's worth, I also like ballet and think it's sublime. I even consider dancing and engineering to be related, because the human body is like a machine. Programming robots to be able to do what humans can do is a cutting edge field of research.
My favorite ballet is the Triadic Ballet, produced out of the Bauhaus school. The costumes worn by the dancers show different aspects of the human body's geometry. The ballet is divided into parts based on various mechanical motions of the body. It's not just a demonstration of painstakingly perfect choreography. It demonstrates ideas and principles that can be generalized to other fields of knowledge.
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