Yoga and Ballet: parallel lives?

I was complaining that yoga just isn't ballet, and it's not, but I'm taking this yoga class from a professional dancer/choreographer and it is totally kicking my butt. It's fantastic to watch her move through the asanas, so fluid and so light. She practices a pure, classical Hatha form, which means lots of sequences (vinyasas) that really focus on alignment and core energy. I'm hoping that a couple weeks of this will get me to a place that will benefit my dancing when classes start up again in June.

The relationship between yoga and ballet, in their modern forms as we know them in the "West" might be closer than it seems at first glance. Mark Singleton's fascinating book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice explores the "invention" of physical yoga through a confluence of Indian nationalism, western Orientalism, the physical culture movement, and other varieties of late nineteenth and early twentieth century body-based ideologies (e.g. eugenics, Muscular Christianity...). Likewise, Jennifer Homan's incredible Apollo's Angels reminds us that ballet as we know it is the strange marriage of French aristocratic court ritual, Italian folk theater, and Russian nationalism both Imperial and Soviet. Oh, and throw in some Scandinavian nationalism as well, which is also part of the whole yoga thing, according to Singleton. And then both really take off as commercial ventures in England and then, in the first blush of the modernist era, the United States, under the influence of "exotic" foreigners from the Orient (Russia, India...). Furthermore, the fundamentally Romantic core narratives of ballet seem to me linked to the romantic idea of yoga as a soul-purifying and elevating practice in which the improvement of the physical body is linked to the advancement of the spiritual self; Giselle? La Sylphide? And let's not even talk about La Bayadere (sorry for lack of accent -- not that advanced with this tool yet).

Now that it has occurred to me, I'm going to have to root around and find out if there has been any work done comparing the histories of the two disciplines and their recent histories... any comments?