They move in mysterious ways: the delirious thrill of Figs in Wigs

The identically dressed quintet combines dance, comedy and DIY electro-punk in a world they have created for themselves

How to describe the joy of watching people dancing in unison? Anthropologists talk about synchronous activities leading to a sense of collective effervescence"; that lightness we feel when we're all moving together in time - doing the macarena, maybe, or the YMCA - and trace it back to the need to bond members of a family or a tribe to one another, to reinforce the sense of unity that would have once been essential for survival.

The first thing I knew about Figs in Wigs was that they liked to dance in unison. A quintet of identically dressed performers, they appeared whenever the evening got weird enough at Latitude festival or London's Royal Vauxhall Tavern. They wore DayGlo jumpsuits and matching bum bags, deadpan stares, glittery painted-on monobrows. Watching Figs in Wigs dance was like listening to an alien language, a semaphore of hops and hand gestures that existed at the midpoint between Yvonne Rainer's Trio A and Saturday Night by Whigfield. Dances made of pixels rather than steps. And like any act of synchronous dancing, there was a satisfaction to be had in watching people moving together in unison, but with Figs, there was always something more: the thrill of how audaciously they constructed their own way of dancing, their own way of being on stage together.