Anito – a performance blending dance, puppetry, experimental music and fantastic costumes created by Justin Talplacido Shoulder. Photo / Ismael Quintanilla III
PUBLICITY HANDOUT Anito at Q Theatre. Photo / Alex Robertson
Anito – a performance blending dance, puppetry, experimental music and fantastic costumes created by Justin Talplacido Shoulder. Photo / Ismael Quintanilla III
PUBLICITY HANDOUT Anito at Q Theatre. Photo / Alex Robertson
An extraordinary blend of dance, puppetry, experimental music and fantastic costumes opens tonight at the Q theatre as part of the Pride Month celebrations in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Anito is the brainchild of Filipino-Australian artist Justin Talplacido Shoulder, the product of three years of research and subsequent refinement since itsdebut in Sydney in 2024.
It explores and reimagines myths and legends rooted in Filipino animistic, pre-Christian stories, connecting ancient belief systems to contemporary concerns.
“For Early Filipinos, and many still today, it is believed that a life force or soul inhabits all entities, animate or inanimate,” explains Shoulder.
“These spirits are called Anitos … ancestors and nature spirits.”
Anito blends dance, puppetry, experimental music and fantastic costumes in a show created by Justin Talplacido Shoulder. Photo / Ismael Quintanilla III / Alex Robertson
Shoulder describes Anito as “collaborative storying, weaving diverse cultural stories that attest to the natural world” and says audiences should expect “a theatre of the senses … to feel the sound in your body, a flickering in the shadows … to experience creatures both alien and recognisable”.
References to animism and the spirit are suggested as a guide, Shoulder says, to a journey that explores beliefs ranging from the ancient tree house of the spirits, known as Balete, where ancient birds, megafauna and Queen of the Night Cacti reside, to shadow-realm figures formed in the ideas of folk-Catholicism.
The resulting pageant aims to help viewers associate with the natural world.
Anito blends dance, puppetry, experimental music and fantastic costumes. Photo / Sarah Walker/ Alex Robertson
“Connection and respect to land and ecology wherever you are,” Shoulder suggests, adding that we share the world with other organisms and that these systems form a reciprocal exchange.
Shoulder teams up with Eugene Choi, transforming into human-animal-plant-machine hybrids to create a world of terror and beauty with an underlying interrogation of “colonial wrongdoing and queer ancestral mythologies”.
The costumes, co-designed by Shoulder and Matthew Stegh, are made to be wearable, flexible and malleable but are also very hot to work in.
The music is based on field recordings in the Philippine archipelago made by Corin Lieto and Shoulder, hybridised and augmented to make chimaera, or hybrid creature, calls.
“There is a simultaneous birth for sound and movement where we do a series of improvisations to discover what responds to what form,” Shoulder says of the creative process. “And then we refine the work from there as we find what resonates.”
Shoulder says every performance is unique and continues to build on previous shows.
“The structure of the work is framed in a way that there is always possibility to evolve and grow – just like ecologies,” he said.
“Each show we discover something new to add to the possibilities of each creature and world [and to bring] some wonder, joy, mystery and longing, perhaps.”
Anito is on at the Q Theatre until Saturday. For more details and tickets, go to www.qtheatre.co.nz
