Meet Australia’s ‘Hydraulic Press Girl’, dancing the undanceable to millions online

Like comedians, dancers tend to be good imitators. They’re both masters of fine detail, able to pinpoint and replicate the minutiae that make a choreographic phrase, or a sketch character, click into focus.

As a dancer and a comedian, Sarah McCreanor, known as Smac, likes to up the ante. Why mimic a dance or a person when you can turn yourself into an emoji? A head-bobbing chicken? An object being crushed by a hydraulic press?

“I think one of the funniest things you can do is try to dance the undanceable,” McCreanor said in a Zoom interview. “I look at, like, a video of a hydraulic press crushing something, and I see choreography.”

Having made an art out of being squashed, Smac McCreanor’s audience is bigger than most TV franchises.Credit: Smac McCreanor

You have to go back a generation or two to find a good analogue for the 32-year-old McCreanor. Her physical comedy evokes the vaudevillian slapstick of Donald O’Connor or Lucille Ball. But she’s figured out how to translate that fundamentally retro style for a very online audience. On her TikTok and Instagram accounts, where she calls herself “a variety show,” she’s attracted millions of followers with her dancerly reproductions of the weird-yet-familiar images and memes that shape internet culture.

Recently, McCreanor even earned the endorsement of the venerable National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. (She grew up in Brisbane, though she now lives in Los Angeles.) The museum featured a large assortment of McCreanor’s social media videos in “Hydraulic Press Girl,” part of its Triennial exhibition.

It might have been the funniest Smac moment yet: austere gallery walls filled with elegant screens, on which McCreanor was turning herself into the eggplant emoji or a smushed roll of Lifesavers. Christopher Guerrero, who teaches a course on viral comedy at the University of Southern California, said it felt akin to the Dada antics of the artist Marcel Duchamp.

The Brisbane-born dancer has been a hit online, especially TikTok.Credit: Damien Maloney/The New York Times

“When you put this kind of content into a stringent museum space,” Guerrero said, “that’s so Dada.”

McCreanor said that before the exhibition, she hadn’t thought to take her videos seriously. (She still doesn’t, really: the goal, she said, remains “to crack people up”.) But they’re underpinned by serious dance technique, as well as training in theatre, visual art and comedy.

Dance came first. Her mother put her in classes when she was 5, hoping they would help her overcome her shyness. A few years later, McCreanor and a friend concocted a jokey routine for the dance studio’s talent competition. “We were bonking heads and doing slapstick stuff, just playtime,” McCreanor said. The number proved so popular the studio began bringing it to local dance competitions. “We won every single one,” McCreanor said. “And I’ve basically been making things like that ever since.”

McCreanor found that she most admired dance artists who used movement as a form of wit: O’Connor, Bob Fosse. (“Fosse is absolutely comedy to me,” she said. “His timing!“) She also identified a kindred spirit in Mr Bean, aka Rowan Atkinson, whose wordless buffoonery is deceptively well choreographed.

McCreanor skyrocketed after appearing on So You Think You Can Dance in 2019.Credit: Damien Maloney/The New York Times

As she grew up, she started performing in musicals and watching live comedy shows. In high school and college, she studied visual art. “I chose it specifically because I knew they’d let me get away with everything I wanted to do,” she said. “I could dance, write, direct, perform, and it could all be labelled ‘visual art’.”

At 18, McCreanor left college to join a touring stage version of the film How to Train Your Dragon. The tour brought her to Los Angeles, where she decided to stay — with no plans, but plenty of curiosity about the entertainment world. “I’ve never really had a dream job, except to be performing somehow,” she said.

Though she got an array of dance and music video gigs, television commercials were her bread and butter. She estimates that she’s acted and danced in nearly 70 ads, including spots for Google, Apple, Jockey, Kohl’s, Toyota, Honda and KFC.

McCreanor found a kind of freedom in the overtly transactional nature of advertising. “The whole game of it fascinates me,” she said. “When you’re in a commercial, you’re very important, and yet you’re also not at all important. Talent is so little of it. Ninety per cent is just, you had the right hair colour.” She learned how to figure out what producers were looking for, become that person if she could, and not let it upset her if she couldn’t.

McCreanor, or Smac, has attracted millions of followers with her reproductions of the weird-yet-familiar images and memes that shape internet culture. Credit: Damien Maloney/The New York TimesDamien Maloney/The New York Times

But eventually she tired of being a cog, even if a well-paid one. In 2019, McCreanor tried out for the television series So You Think You Can Dance, excited as much by the chance to choreograph her own audition solo as by the thought of reality-TV fame. Her gonzo Boogie Wonderland number — think Napoleon Dynamite’s dance performance, if Napoleon could actually dance — was completely unlike the other auditioners’ glossy routines. Though she didn’t make it to the show’s top 20, her choreography knocked the judges’ socks off. After it was posted online, it delighted a big chunk of the internet, too.

“That was my first experience going viral, which was thrilling because that solo was all me,” McCreanor said. “It was a huge motivator for me to get back to sharing my own ideas instead of working other peoples’ jobs.”

Her epiphany was well-timed. A few months later, COVID’s arrival wiped out conventional performance opportunities, and McCreanor suddenly had lots of time to play on social media. Though she wasn’t interested in the dance challenges then sweeping TikTok — “I knew early on that I didn’t just want to do other peoples’ trends,” she said — she was keen to figure out what else made the app tick.

She hadn’t forgotten the lessons she’d learned from advertising. Malia Baker, a dancer and friend of McCreanor’s, said McCreanor has a natural gift for targeting an audience. “She knows what ideas are going to hook people, but somehow it never feels calculated,” Baker said.

The dancer describes her unpolished ChickTok videos as “all very high school drama department DIY”.Credit: Damien Maloney/The New York Times

Many of McCreanor’s posts feature ingenious imitations of other, already-viral videos. The hydraulic press series, in which she mimics strangely mesmerising clips of unlikely objects being squashed, has been a huge TikTok hit. Goofy animals, one of the internet’s favourite subjects, are other frequent duet partners. Baker often pops up in McCreanor’s ChickTok series, which copies the amusingly dance-like bobs and bounces of a very popular flock of Italian chickens.

The videos are fun partly because they’re unpolished, with whatever is in the closet costumes and plenty of bloopers. “It’s all very high school drama department DIY,” McCreanor said. But her obvious skills as a performer bring a degree of integrity to the silliness, said Sophie Prince, a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria.

“It’s held up by what you can just tell is 10,000 hours of experience,” Prince said. When McCreanor makes her body into various logos for her blithely ridiculous “logo performance art” series, for example, the angle of her Nike check mark is precisely right. And her videos are in some ways museum friendly. Their clean aesthetic — simple white backgrounds, straight-on camera angles — lends them a pop-art gloss.

McCreanor said her “mind was blown” by the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition. As a visual arts student, she’d hoped for just that kind of recognition. It’s both funny and slightly subversive that she got there by making internet memes. “She didn’t realize that the tools that she was using might be perceivable and appreciated by the art world,” Prince said.

On the other hand, given the scale of McCreanor’s online popularity — her videos have collectively earned more than 1 billion views — the museum might have gotten the better end of the deal.

Whatever the audience, McCreanor’s work is going to be physical, and it’s going to be funny.

“I’m clearly biased,” she said, “but I just think dance is way better if it has humour in it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.