Sia — the enigmatic, soulful singer-songwriter who conceals her face behind wigs while belting out lines like, “there’s a scream inside that we all try to hide” — was “expelled from ballet at age 5,” as she put it in an email interview, “for disrupting the class.”

Happily, the experience didn’t stop her from loving dance.

Over the past few years, Sia, with her choreographer, Ryan Heffington, has done more to raise the standards of dance in pop music than nearly any current artist integrating the forms. For Sia, dance is more than a way to give a music video a splash of pizazz; instead, it’s “an expression that crosses all language barriers,” she said. “If people can’t understand the words, they will understand the content.”

The Sia-Heffington approach will be on ample display in Sia’s new show, opening Sunday, July 24, as part of Panorama at Randalls Island and will tour Europe and the United States through November. Sia calls the concert, choreographed from start to finish, “performance art that is dance driven.”

That’s not a bad description of her videos and live performances on programs like “Saturday Night Live.” Raw emotion bubbles inside of stringently built movement. And the real difference: She’s not afraid of ugly. “I really like to support Ryan’s freak flag,” she said. “The weirder the better for me.”