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What's On

ANITO

Justin Talplacido Shoulder

Wednesday 5 – Sunday 9 June 2024 
Wed – Fri, 7.30pm  
Sat, 2pm & 7.30pm  
Sun, 5pm  

60 minutes  

Post-show artist talk   
Thu 6 June for all ticket holders  

Tactile Tour and Audio Described performance
Sat 8 June, 2pm  

General Admission $49   Concession $44   Child $25   BLAKTIX $25   A small transaction fee will be charged per order.  

Presented by Arts House and RISING 

Warnings 
Suitable for ages 12+ 

ANITO contains nudity, haze, loud music and sudden loud noises, abrupt lighting changes, low lights and lights that change colour and intensity. 

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Audio description
Assistance Animal
Assistive Listening
Aural Rating 50%
Companion Card
Quiet Space Available
Visual Rating 50%
Wheelchair Accessible

A mythic world of hybrid creatures comes to life through dance, theatre, installation, visual arts and elaborate costumes.  

Ancient Filipino ritual and funerary gold objects were melted down by the Spanish colonisers and moulded into their crucifixes.

ANITO speculates a Future Folklore where this raw material is remoulded into new animist forms both sacred and profane.

Miraculous ecologies emerge from a fertile and evolving landscape crafted by hands and activated by bodies. Megafauna dance deep time. A figment appears charting the trajectory of humanity and setting it in a reverse spiral. Roots from the ancestral underworld create cracks in colonial foundations. Seasons change, in a world of sheer terror and tremendous beauty.

Honouring their roots in Sydney’s underground queer and diasporic club scenes, the collective behind ANITO build on their shared histories of costume, puppetry, drag, dance, and experimental electronic music to re-imagine myths and stories for the now.

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‘Shoulder is at the top of his game as a performances and costume artist.’ – The Monthly (for Carrion)

‘Shoulder’s performance has an astonishing intensity, a sense of ritual and precision of movement that reaches deep into the subconscious.’ – Alison Croggon, Witness Performance (for Carrion)

‘Shoulder revels in the carnivalesque: his forms are monstrous and creepy, mesmerising and seductive.’ – The Review Board

 

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About the artists

Justin Talplacido Shoulder
Justin Talplacido Shoulder is a shape shifting artist and storyteller, working primarily in performance, sculpture, video and collective events. 

Also known as Phasmahammer, their practice is an eco-cosmology of alter personas based on queered ancestral myth. Creatures birthed are embodied through hand crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. 

The artist uses their body and craft as an instrument of metaphysics towards a queer Filipinx Futurism. Shoulder believes in performance and shared ceremony as communal medicine for difficult times.  Shoulder is a founding member of queer artist collective The Glitter Militia (Monsta Gras 2008-20, Pink Bubble) with partner and key collaborator Matthew Stegh and co-director of collective Club Ate with artist Bhenji Ra. Shoulder’s theatre and visual art works have been presented across Australia and Internationally where they work between gallery, nightclub, and theatre contexts.  

Highlights include: La Manutention performance artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2019, The Prague Quadrennial of Stage Design, 2019, Premiere of theatre work Carrion, Performance Space, Sydney (AUS) + subsequent tour to Artshouse, Melb (AUS), Fusebox Festival, Texas (USA), Museum Macan, Jakarta (IDN), Roskilde (DEN), Kampnagel, Hamburg (DE), Fierce Festival (UK), MAI, Montreal.  New work has been commissioned recently for NIRIN Sydney Bienalle 2020, The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2021 and film work Ang Idol Ko, for MCA, Sydney / UCCA DUNE, Beidaihe, China 2022.  

Matt Stegh 
Matt is Wiradjuri/Croatian/Austrian interdisciplinary artist, activist and community organiser. His design and craft focuses on costume, regalia, textiles and inflatables for dance, performance, theatre, film and immersive community engagement. 

Matt Stegh has been instrumental in Eora’s underground queer clubbing and activist communities, as a key collaborator on parties such as Monsta Gras and Pink Bubble and the infamous Glitter Militia events.  He has built a reputation as a deep listener and respectful collaborator which has lead to co-creating powerful syncretic work with artist and partner Justin Shoulder, Lisa Reihana, Latai Taumoepeau and dance company Marrugeku. 

Recent collaborations include Lisa Reihana’s video work “Ground Loop” for the new wing of the AGNSW and this years First Nations Float for Mardi Gras/World Pride. 

Corin Ileto
Corin is a Filipina-Australian electronic producer, composer and performer working in the field of performance art, sound design, theatre and club spaces. In her compositions, traditional forms merge with hyper-digital sounds to create new imaginary realms. 

Compositionally, she is interested in creating a sonic space in which western classical music can be hybridised with contemporary electronic music production. Each release is thought of as a speculative fiction drawing influence from sci-fi, classical music composition, contemporary club culture and ancestral myths connected to her Filipino heritage.  

As a composer, Ileto works across a broad spectrum ranging from video to theatre. 

Recent commissions include Club Ate's video work Ang Idol Ko  (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2022), Justin Shoulder’s theatre work AEON†  (Liveworks Festival, 2020) and  Sky Blue Mythic  theatre work by Angela Goh (Sydney Opera House, 2021).  

Eugene Choi
Eugene is Sydney-based artist makes performances that integrate dance, video, sculpture and installation. Her work evolves around self-made systems or sets, such as scaffolding or the family home, where improvised action often occurs. More recently, the focus of Choi‘s work is the role of language and the possibility of creating gestures and actions that communicate what spoken or written language cannot.  

Alongside her own art practice, Choi has also worked as a performer for artists, choreographers, musicians and theatre makers, such as Xavier Le Roy, Tino Sehgal, Adam Linder & Lynsey Peisinger & others.

Victoria Hunt 
Victoria is an Australian-born (Yugambeh / Kombumerri Country / QLD) artist whose ancestral affiliations include Te Arawa, Rongowhaakata, Kahungunu Māori, Irish, English, Finnish. She works as a director, dramaturg, dancer, choreographer, photographer, & filmmaker.    Victoria’s work delves into Indigenous epistemologies within diasporic concepts of identity formation and belonging. Her work is liminal, inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary and reinstates the power of Indigenous creativity within the politics of Rematriation – inserting the body into frameworks of power, for future ancestors. Central to this is Whakapapa (kinship/genealogies), Mana Atua Wahine (feminine principle), Body Weather and IndigiQueer revitalization within creation practices. Her work is a gradual binding of intimate collaboration between artists, Elders and communities. 

Victoria works with a core team of artists, namely Boris Bagattini and James Brown and their award-winning works, Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka and Tangi Wai...the cry of water has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Their recent work KŌIWI, commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW, premiered at Sydney Modern in July 2023.  

She is a founding member of De Quincey Co. Australia’s leading Body Weather dance compan, performing in over 50 productions. Victoria has performed with MAU (Requiem), Charles Koroneho (Ko Te Akau) and with many others. She was awarded the Rex Cramphorn Theatre Fellowship, and is a featured artist in the Biennale of the Arts of the Body, Image and Movement (Madrid). She is co-founder of the Weather Beings collective with 2Spirit Metis artist Moe Clark, based in tio'tia:ke / Montreal, Canada. Her film TAKE, in collab. with Margot Nash, won the Mana Whenua award at the Wairoa Māori film festival and has screened extensively across six continents.

Fausto Brusamolino 
Fausto is a lighting and visual artist currently living on Darug land, Australia. 

Fausto devises lighting and generative visuals for live performances and filming, creates his own lighting art installations, and provides visual design consultation for other artists' artworks and exhibitions. 

Fausto has lit productions in traditional venues like theatres, concert halls and art galleries, alongside less conventional locations like multi-level car parks, roof tops, outdoor & remote locations and abandoned sites. 

In his work, lighting and video are dynamically manipulated in real time, following, supporting, gauging, enhancing the performance and the entire space as they happen, shift and unravel during each unique show. 

Fausto's approach to lighting design organically embraces a wide range of visual and video techniques and uses Creative Coding to build custom made software, allowing a creative, engaging and unique control over the aesthetic of the work.  

Fausto has designed shows and worked for: Sydney Festival, Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Festival, Rising Melbourne Festival, City Recital Hall, MCA, Biennale of Sydney, Opera Australia, Australian Ballet, New Zealand International Arts Festival, Post, Victoria Hunt, Lewis Major, Roslyn Oades, The Cad Factory, Urban Theatre Projects, Teatro Stabile di Torino and many more.  His works and lighting installations have been presented and toured extensively over Australia and Europe.  

Producer
INSITE ARTS, established in 2008, is a multi-scale, multi-genre creative producing company for independent Australian artists with a reputable niche in Australia’s performing arts industry and export marketplace.  

We create, produce and tour multi- genre, adventurous and innovative creative projects that contribute to Australia’s contemporary cultural identity and reflect the rich cultural roots of Australia’s First Nations’ people and the continuously evolving multicultural diversity of contemporary Australians.  

We connect innovative artists and their work with wide-ranging audiences and marketplaces across the globe through professional and sustainable practices.  

To date Insite’s programs have involved 750+ independent artists in 208 presentations across Australia; and 153 international presentations of more than 75 Australian works. In addition, Insite has produced festivals and events involving over 1300 artists and creatives.  
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Artistic credits

Directed, Performed and Co-conceived: Justin Talplacido Shoulder
Production Design: Matthew Stegh and Justin Talplacido Shoulder 
Costume Design: Matthew Stegh, Anthony Aitch, Justin Talplacido Shoulder
Sound Design and Live Score: Corin Ileto 
Performer and co-generator: Eugene Choi 
Mentor and Collaborator: Victoria Hunt  
Lighting / Vision Design: Fausto Brusamolino
Costume Design Technicians: Brenda Lam, Anthony Aitch, Luna Aquatica  
Produced by: Jason Cross at Insite Arts
Special thanks: Marrugeku, Carriageworks & Talking Bodies 

ANITO has been supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative; Create NSW; the Australian Government’s Major Festivals Initiative, managed by Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, in association with the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals Inc., commissioned by RISING, Sydney Festival and MONA FOMA. 

Details

Wednesday 5 – Sunday 9 June 2024 
Wed – Fri, 7.30pm  
Sat, 2pm & 7.30pm  
Sun, 5pm  

60 minutes  

Post-show artist talk   
Thu 6 June for all ticket holders  

Tactile Tour and Audio Described performance
Sat 8 June, 2pm  

General Admission $49   Concession $44   Child $25   BLAKTIX $25   A small transaction fee will be charged per order.  

Presented by Arts House and RISING 

Warnings 
Suitable for ages 12+ 

ANITO contains nudity, haze, loud music and sudden loud noises, abrupt lighting changes, low lights and lights that change colour and intensity. 

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Audio description
Assistance Animal
Assistive Listening
Aural Rating 50%
Companion Card
Quiet Space Available
Visual Rating 50%
Wheelchair Accessible

Image credit: Liz Ham

Image description: Two performers lie entwined in the tendrils of an elaborate costume. The performers are wearing bright purple and are dappled with light.