Dance. It is emotion by motion; the physical encapsulation of the feelings swirling through your body, often unable to be expressed by words.

Where dance is motion, music must be language.

The two have met seamlessly in a new video directed by David LaChapelle, featuring Sergei Polunin, a former principal dancer with the British Royal Ballet, filling the empty echoes of an abandoned house with the stirring throes of Hozier’s ‘Take me to Church’.

The Irish singer/songwriter’s emotive song, filled with amens and reverence, is the perfect soundtrack as Polunin offers his body at the wood-floored alter of this bare space. Each movement is executed with precision and an understated strength, Polunin’s body twisting, reaching and landing with a grace that almost seems at odds with the roughly sanded environment. The light, spilling in through the empty windows and doors, tries valiantly to reach Polunin’s racing body as he is determined to fill every corner with his evocative interpretation of Hozier’s words.

As Hozier’s voice reaches guttural lows and beautiful highs, so does the dancer’s body. Each line of the song, about love and worship, is expressed through Polunin’s movements, at once beautiful and fierce, an expression of love itself. His love of dance, and perhaps his love of love, is clear to see and this performance does the song incredible justice, and vice versa.

Director David LaChapelle, known for his hyper-realistic works and images that draw heavily on pop surrealism, has stripped this video back to the bare essentials and the effect is breathtaking. The use of natural light and the muted, subdued tones of Polunin’s pale skin and nude tights encourage the viewer to focus on the dance and the music alone. Even the bare walls and pillars of the house, as beautiful as they are, only come into focus when Polunin’s body greets them in a brief embrace. This is a different direction for LaChapelle, who has directed some of the music industry’s most vibrant and gritty videos for internationally acclaimed artists such as Cher, Elton John and Christina Aguilera. Taking an emerging artist like Hozier and melding him with the niche star that is Sergei Polunin has resulted in a piece of art that is generating discussion and appraisal all over the world, for very good reason.

The haunting piece will stay with you long after the video finishes.