dance

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 says in a Zoom interview. “I look at, like, a video of a hydraulic press crushing something, and I see choreography.”

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 (NGV) in Melbourne. (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, says it felt akin to the Dada antics of the artist Marcel Duchamp.

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

McCreanor says that before the exhibition, she hadn’t thought to take her videos seriously. (She still doesn’t, really: the goal, she says, 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 five, 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 says. The number proved so popular the studio began bringing it to local dance competitions. “We won every single one,” McCreanor says. “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 says. “His timing!”) She also identified a kindred spirit  in Mr Bean, aka Rowan Atkinson, whose wordless buffoonery is deceptively well choreographed.

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

At 18, McCreanor left university 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 says.

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 says. “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.

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 says. “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 says — 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, says 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 says.

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-wardrobe costumes and plenty of bloopers. “It’s all very high school drama department DIY,” McCreanor says. But her obvious skills as a performer bring a degree of integrity to the silliness, says Sophie Prince, a curator at the NGV. “It’s held up by what you can just tell is 10,000 hours of experience,” Prince says. When McCreanor makes her body into various logos for her blithely ridiculous “logo performance art” series, for example, the angle of her Nike Swoosh 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 says her “mind was blown” by the NGV 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 realise that the tools that she was using might be perceivable and appreciated by the art world,” Prince says.

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 got the better end of the deal.

“She didn’t need us,” Prince says. “We’re lucky to have shown her work.”

The professional dance scene can get mired in its own earnestness. Baker thinks many dance artists would be happier if they followed McCreanor’s example, using humour to pop the balloon of self-importance. “Dancers tend to make themselves miserable because the stakes get so high, and they’re so critical of themselves,” she says. “Not taking herself seriously has really become Smac’s superpower.”

There’s an innocence to that lack of self-seriousness, too. McCreanor’s videos are aimed at a general audience, but her NGV exhibit pulled in children like a magnet. “It’s that Mr Bean thing,” McCreanor says. “There are no words, it’s just a body, and so it’s global — everyone understands, everybody gets the joke.” She envisions herself moving into children’s entertainment. Whatever the audience, McCreanor’s work is going to be physical, and it’s going to be funny.

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

This article originally appeared on The New York Times.

Jeff Dunne was just 16 when he learned he would be competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics, on August 9–10. The then Year 10 student, who’s known in breaking circles as B-boy J-Attack, beat 36 other hopefuls in the B-boy category of the Oceania Breaking Championships last year at Sydney Town Hall. Since discovering breaking, aged seven, when he was dragged along to his sister’s hip-hop dance classes, Dunne has been obsessed, training up to six hours a day, balanced with school on New South Wales’s Tweed Coast. Dunne recognises breaking is as much a mental sport as it is a physical one.

“Before I go into any battle, I’m always super nervous just thinking about what I’m going to do,” he says. “But as soon as I step on the floor, I feel extremely high. I’m just excited. My confidence level just sort of rises as soon as I take one step on the floor.”

It’s an equally exhilarating experience for Australia’s other breaking representative, Rachael Gunn, aka B-girl Raygun, a 36-year-old university professor who spent years researching the theory of breaking — also known as B-boying, B-girling and, among outsiders, breakdancing — and lecturing to students while herself setting new records. “I won the Oceania Breaking Championships [B-girl category] in October, which was a direct qualification to Paris,” she says. “As soon as the results were live on the screen, my crew rushed at me, lifting me up and hugging me. My parents were also in the audience and were crying. It was such a special moment.”

Breaking is thought to have originated in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s, and is twinned with the emergence of hip-hop. A local DJ known as Kool Herc was playing funk, soul and disco music at neighbourhood parties and noticed how whenever the “break” of the tracks came in — when the vocals and other instruments dropped out, leaving only drums and percussion — young people would go crazy, dancing with more energy and athleticism, incorporating moves from martial arts and gymnastics. He began to play two copies of the same record on two turntables, using a technique he called the “merry-go-round” to extend the break and give dancers more time to showcase their moves.

Olympic breaking comprises two events (one for men and one for women), where 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls face-off in one-on-one battles. It’s widely regarded by those in the know as a kind of performative game. “It’s a dance, it’s a sport, it’s an art form, it’s a culture, it’s a community, it’s a lifestyle,” Gunn says. Competitors take to the floor to battle, improvising moves to the beat of a DJ’s tracks (in Paris, the competitors won’t know beforehand what the DJ will play). Judges will assess five criteria: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality.

The standing part of a battle is known as “toprock”. “That’s usually how you start a set,” Gunn says. “You go out there and you show your style, you show your musicality and show how confident you are at the start of a round.”

Next come the power moves, like headspins and “windmills”, when a breaker rolls their body in a circular motion on the floor while twirling their legs in a V-shape, and the “6-step”, which “starts out like a push-up and ends in more of a crab walk,” Dunne says. “You have to do, like, really high-level, intensive moves,” he continues. “But at the same time, you have to make those high-level, intensive moves look cool and artistic and truly effortless.” A “freeze” is when a B-boy or B-girl halts their body in an interesting or intense position and balances as if frozen solid in ice, often to a big beat. “Doing a freeze on a big beat is just like, wow,” Gunn says. “Then you’ve got the more technical footwork, which, you know, looks easy but is actually really, really hard.”

There’s also a fair amount of trash-talking, when competitors shout insults at one another to mess with their concentration. And a whole range of “burns”. “A burn is a certain gesture that we use against opponents,” Dunne says. “So you might, like, pretend to be punching someone: ‘I’ve just knocked you out and I’ve won that round.’ Another one is, ‘I’ve just smoked you.’ And some are really, really, really rude,” he says with a laugh. B-boys and B-girls need to be careful, however, in Olympic competition. If they cross a line, judges can deduct points by pushing one of three “misbehaviour buttons” according to the severity of the action, which can range from having an unnecessary bad attitude to making inappropriate gestures and comments.

To qualify for the Olympics, a breaker needs to be an all-rounder: good at all of the above, as well as adept at working the crowd. In Paris, there will be MCs to further hype the spectators gathered at the open arena venue La Concorde, in Place de la Concorde. The square is a popular destination for the hordes of tourists who flock to Paris each summer to soak up culture at the nearby Musée d’Orsay and Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre; breaking’s first foray onto the Olympic stage is expected be equally sought after.

How will it feel to be out there performing for the crowd? Because Gunn is a scholar of the sport, she’s asked many breakers that question. “People have told me they feel free,” she says. “There is this kind of letting go and just expressing yourself. That adrenaline rush, that excitement, that hunger, it’s so much. That’s why I love battling, because the feeling you get when you’re up there, when you step out on the dance floor and show everyone what you’ve got, it’s electrifying.”

This article first appeared in print in our twenty first edition, Page 18 of T Australia with the headline: “Make or Break”
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When the curtains rise on “Horizon”, the new cross-cultural work from Bangarra Dance Theatre, it might take you a moment to process what you’re looking at. A dancer curled into a ball held aloft by the group, while a ceiling mirror creates the illusion of additional dancers or upside-down performers. This mirror proves crucial in narrating parts of the production, and in bringing to life the stories of the First Peoples of the Oceania region (the set design is by Elizabeth Gadsby).

“Horizon” explores the different meanings of “home” through the voices of three choreographers: Sani Townson, a descendant of the Samu, Koedal and Dhoeybaw clans of Saibai Island; Deborah Brown, an alumna of Bangarra and a descendant of the Wakaid Clan of Badu Island and the Meriam people of Murray Island; and Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, whose roots stretch from Turangi, near Lake Taupō, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Together, they lead an ensemble of 16 First Nations dancers who tell a story of resilience and the cultural forces that bind First Peoples together.

The production opens with an expanded iteration of Townson’s acclaimed work “Kulka”, which debuted as part of “Dance Clan” in 2023. Townson vividly portrays his deep respect for ancestral lineage in the dance “Koedalaw Awgadh” (Crocodile God). It is represented on stage through the “ancestral” crocodile in its predatory mode, which is projected atop the dancers, creating a powerful and evocative illusion.

This is followed by “Danalayg” (Life), concluding act one. It nods to the belief that the universe is the ultimate mother, guiding people to their heritage and clan. Strategic lighting (designed by Karen Norris), when amplified through the mirror’s reflection, creates a scene in which the dancers appear to be in a twinkling universe. The act concludes dramatically with the dancers lying on top of one another, a symbol of interconnectedness.

When the curtain rises for act two, “The Light Inside”, the mirror has been replaced by a mountainous backdrop. The first section, titled “Salt Water”, pays homage to Deborah Brown’s motherland, the Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait), which she describes as an “amazing archipelago united by its water currents”. Brown explores the idea that in contemporary society, culture is never completely lost, but is continuously shared through song, dance and cooking — symbolically represented on stage by dancers adorned in traditional pieces, offering leaves and seeds to one another.

In the section “Fresh Water” of act two, Moss Te Ururangi Patterson delves into his cultural roots, emphasising the importance of upholding cultural connections and stories across generations. He achieves this through the retelling of traditional stories through a modern lens. In “Makawe Tapu” (Sacred Hair), Patterson references two traditional tales: the attainment of the three baskets of sacred knowledge; and the story of Maui’s attempt to tame the sun, Tama-nui-te-rā. Maui’s task was only successful when his sister gifted him sacred strands of her hair, providing him with the knowledge, strength and courage to complete his mission.

On stage, the interaction between Maui and his sister is depicted through the dancer harnessing the woman’s hair, pulling her back and forth. The dance transitions into the next tale, the attainment of the three baskets of knowledge, where three dancers braid their hair together, underscoring themes of strength, wisdom and the divine feminine.

The final moments of “Horizon” showcase Hokioi, a spiritual warrior leading the ensemble into a future of love and resilience, complemented by a soothing sound of trickling water, reinforcing the interconnections that run through the entire production.

Bangarra’s decision to showcase this cross-cultural production not only helps to preserve the stories of First Peoples, but also highlights their pivotal role in shaping the present and future of the Oceania region.

“Horizon represents a fresh and dynamic new chapter in Bangarra’s artistic and cultural Songline by building relationships with international First Nations artists to share story, song and dance,” says Bangarra Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Frances Rings. “I believe that opportunities like this open us to a broader global First Nations perspective on issues that impact our People and Country, and the responsibility we carry to give a platform to the uniqueness of our stories through contemporary and cultural expressions.”

Tickets for “Horizon” are on sale now. 

Sydney Opera House, until July 13
Canberra Theatre Centre, July 18–20
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, August 7–17
Arts Centre Melbourne, August 28–September 7

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