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Arts|Meet the ‘Hydraulic Press Girl,’ Dancing the Undanceable Online
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/arts/sarah-mccreanor-smac-hydraulic-girl.html
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Sarah McCreanor, or Smac, has attracted millions of followers with her reproductions of the weird-yet-familiar images and memes that shape internet culture.
Aug. 12, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
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.”
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.
