CreepyPasta review | Dancehouse

Once confined to internet message boards and YouTube narration channels, creepypasta has steadily entered the mainstream, most recently through the release of Backrooms. These eerie tales of liminal spaces, conspiracies and inexplicable horrors have become a defining form of modern folklore. Harrison Hall's CreepyPasta draws on that tradition, using dance, sound and media to examine the anxieties lurking beneath our constantly connected lives.

CreepyPasta opens with a striking sequence. A lone performer (Nikki Tarling) is tethered to a rope that disappears into the darkness above. She moves with slow, precise fluidity under a solitary spotlight. Shiv Geaney's lighting sends red laser beams slicing through the space towards the audience, while Mat Spisbah's pulsing, heartbeat-like soundscape builds a sense of foreboding. Tarling's body is the only human presence in an environment consumed by screens, attempting to resist invisible forces pulling at her. Harrison Hall soon joins her, with the pair navigating various physical and multimedia encounters that push the boundaries between dance, performance art and digital installation.

This mood is sustained through a series of visual and sonic vignettes. In one of the work's most effective sequences, a Google Street View journey drifts through the streets of Carlton. Ordinary suburban scenes become sinister as the camera lingers on people frozen mid-motion, their surroundings eerily still. Accompanied by a distorted voiceover, the familiar is rendered uncanny, suggesting horror can emerge not from monsters but from a subtle shift in perspective.

The production then broadens its focus to digital overload and consumption. Three projection screens bombard the audience with an avalanche of images, text and noise, while an aggressive beat pounds relentlessly. Images arrive before the previous ones can be processed. Words flash across the screens, music swells, and competing stimuli demand attention all at once, replicating the fractured rhythm of an endless online feed. The result is intentionally disorienting, evoking the sensation of spiralling down a rabbit hole, overwhelmed and unable to escape.

Hall repeatedly returns to motifs of religious iconography and office culture, pointing to parallels between faith, labour and contemporary digital existence. Emanuel Zammit’s impressive wig and Andrew Treloar's costumes reinforce these ideas, from an office chair fused to the performers' body to increasingly absurd imagery later in the work. The visuals are compelling in isolation, though the relationship between these concepts and the performance's broader concerns could be more clearly articulated.

Amid the chaos, the dancers absorb the torrent of information rather than controlling it, responding through sinuous, animalistic movement that feels instinctive and resistant. The audience is not invited to watch this anxiety from a comfortable distance. Instead, Hall immerses them in the same continuous sensory barrage, gradually dissolving the line between spectator and participant.

CreepyPasta goes beyond recognisable internet horror narratives to capture the experience of inhabiting the online spaces where the blurring of conspiracy, fiction and reality flourish. It is an ambitious piece that prioritises atmosphere over narrative, leaving audiences with the lingering discomfort that its most unsettling ideas feel far closer to everyday life than they might like to admit.

SHOW DETAILS



Venue: Dancehouse, 150 Princes St, Carlton North

Season: until 8 August | 8pm
Duration: 50 minutes

Tickets: $37 Full | $32 Concession
Bookings: Dancehouse