It’s all about connecting to other people, sharing emotion.” “Sure, the internet is the future,” she said in a 2010 interview, “but what we do on the internet is still very primal. Robyn was, constitutionally, not doing it for the likes, which could have felt paradoxical on an album so concerned with the aesthetics of technology. “I came to dance, not to socialize,” she sings on another song from that record, “Dancehall Queen.” It’s a sentiment that might seem prickly and isolationist compared to the communal spirit of mainstream American pop. The album it appeared on was titled, fittingly, Body Talk.

The comedian Taran Killam has performed a lovingly observed parody, and YouTube is cluttered with step-by-step homages and tutorials (“Robyn’s ‘Call Your Girlfriend’-Learn the dance!”) which is at once apt and entirely beside the point: The power of the choreography and the one-take video itself comes from how personal, singular, and idiosyncratic these moves feel, like a spontaneous overflowing of Robyn’s strange heart. As she sings, her accompanying movements are at turns aggressive, humorous, and unabashedly sensual-at one point, aided by her moon shoes, she does a fluid backward somersault that ends with her humping the ground and then, in the next moment, rolling across the ground like a playful child. She is dressed, in the video, like the world’s most stylish bird: fluffy cropped sweater, twiggy printed leggings, and platform sneakers that make her seem to hover a few inches above the ground. In the back of the bus, in the desolate corner of the dance floor, and-in “Call Your Girlfriend,” one of the best and most iconic music videos of the century so far-in a cavernous abandoned gymnasium, illuminated by pulsating light that changes colors according to her feelings like a giant mood ring worn on the heart.

Robyn dancing on my own album video