I don’t mean to make light of the production or my experience with it. Just the opposite. While there are lots of feats of humanity worth holding up for recognition — satellite communications, democracy, aged cheese — I think that a ballet should be celebrated alongside.

I was introduced to “Nutcracker” as the father of a budding dancer who shared my wonder and awe. Wrapped in winter coats, we opened the door to the winter season to take advantage of special Thanksgiving weekend performances of the Utah Symphony and Ballet West at Weber State’s Austad Auditorium. This is supported by many donors, public funding through RAMP and the stewardship of Onstage Ogden.

The story starts with a party, a bit of magic and transformation, an animatronic pairing of a bear and a doll dancing, mice and toy soldiers matched in epic battle, and eventually a series of dances spanning culture and cadence. There’s artistry and athleticism throughout, but also something more.

Sure, it’s easy to imagine what the physics teacher in me loves about this collection of demonstrations of the mechanics of the physical world. Dance is a dynamic display of force and motion, objects in balance and rotations that change with the simple extension of an arm. A typical running leap, a “grand jeté,” in which a dancer extends legs horizontally in the splits while in midair, is not only stunning as a physical feat. It changes the dancer’s center of mass while in flight; so, instead of the expected curved trajectory like that of a thrown ball, the dancer takes on an almost horizontal glide through the air. Essentially, dancers win at physics.

Yet this isn’t what I really love about going to the ballet.

“The Nutcracker” is based on Tchaikovsky’s well-known compositions that seep into the fabric of the holiday season. “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” sits in the background of our December soundtracks, and everything else from the swells of the opening to the last ringing note feels like the crisp winter air of Christmas Eve to me. At a live performance, strings swell from slightly left, a bassoon cuts through from the center with a solo line, and a single triangle pierces the auditorium from the right. A conductor pulls this all together, distinct lines woven in harmonic unison.

That conductor is staring beyond the orchestra and to the stage, where dancers create cues for the music and the music sets the timing for the dancers. Artists on stage demonstrate untold practice and skill, but their movement also had to be imagined in the first place by a choreographer. Not simply a collection of individual steps, the dancing is knit together with dozens of characters or an intimate pair on stage, telling a story. That weird, beautiful dream had to be written first, and the narrative inspired what would become the music and the choreography.

All that is only possible if there’s a stage, lighting, backdrops and attire. It’s easy to take that all for granted, maybe until you see backstage or visit the costume design room. There’s an entire ensemble of creative and technical work behind the scene to make each scene what it is, all braided into the overall vision and magic of the performance.

And then there’s an audience, including the graying physicist whose daughter introduced him to dance 20 years ago. With our family and so many others, we sit breathlessly as the opening notes fill the hall, and we stand and cheer as the final curtain falls. I suspect we love the beauty. Maybe more important, it speaks to what’s possible when we collectively choreograph, literally and figuratively. We humans have the audacity to imagine a nutcracker coming to life, but rather than stop there, we imagine and make real an entire collaboration, music and lighting and all the rest.

Ballet, like sculpting and birdwatching and astrophysics and so much else, is an objectively ridiculous exercise, but one that makes us human. It’s what separates us from the automatons we mimic as windup dolls on the stage. Creating such a thing makes me realize that we are so capable of working together to create something yet to be imagined, if only we are so open to ideas, possibility and, especially, one another.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah.