Lindsey Stirling is an artistic chameleon, pushing the boundaries of creative self-definition and repeatedly blowing people’s minds. The same can be said about Mark Ballas, her dance partner on the current season of Dancing With The Stars, a show I would watch if it broadcast here, but thankfully there’s YouTube.

It’s a dance partnership made in heaven. Like many others, I was not expecting a sci-fi theme for their tango. I was also convinced after the first few seconds of viewing that Lindsey Stirling had special powers and had indeed turned in to a robot. I would believe it of her. And not just any robot, but one of the most stylish, disturbingly attractive and potentially menacing robots I’ve ever seen. At least on a dancefloor.

Mark Ballas is immediately recognizable as a mad scientist drilling with enthusiasm in to what appears to be a severed future robot leg, as smoke trails across the floor of the darkened stage. Three robots start to move with precise, elegant jerking of limbs a short distance away. The suave sounds of Human by Sevdaliza successfully meld with the robot’s mechanical, yet pristinely executed movements. The music matches the story unfolding – the Frankenstein and Pygmalion elements, the thrill of invention and the lines of passion, as well as the threatening possibility of machines going loose on the world.

It’s a complicated, interesting, out-of-the-box take on the passion element that is part of tango as such. It’s also simply visually stunning, as my friend @junperlu put it. Lindsey Stirling’s unwavering multicolored gaze has you hooked as she tangos her way through the number. But what sealed the mind-blowing aspect of this whole performance for me was how she nailed those mechanical movements in time with the clicking noises from the song. I’d say the head turns in the beginning win hands down.

The fact that they got a perfect score was immensely satisfying.