REVIEW: Justin Talplacido Shoulder: Anito
Carriageworks
Thursday 16th January, 2025
Having had it’s premiere at the Royal Theatre Hobart in 2024 as part of Mona Foma, and since travelled to the Rollins Theatre (Austin, Texas) for Fusebox Festival and to Arthouse (Naarm) for Rising Festival, Justin Talplacido Shoulder’s performance work Anito finally made it’s Gadigal Land premiere at Carriageworks last Thursday night as part of Sydney Festival.
Collaboratively imagined and developed by Shoulder and his close-knit artistic team spanning Eugene Choi as performer and co-creator, composer Corin Ileto, lighting designer Fausto Brusamolino, costume crafters Matthew Stegh and Anthony Aitch, and movement mentor Victoria Hunt, Anito is a performance work that does not so much defy genre as transcends it. Integrating movement, sound, costume, lighting, mythology, humour, and sex, the world that Shoulder builds for Anito is so compelling that the work actually does the thing that so much performance promises but often misses - it transports the viewer to another time, another place, another body.
The work begins with Shoulder and Choi laying immersed in swathes of ballooning fabric, breathing and moving slowly. This opening sequence, with Brusamolino’s expert lighting design and Ileto’s otherworldly score, lulls the audience into a gooey dreamlike state in which it is impossible to discern what is actually happening on stage. Body parts and movements intermingle with shapes of light and fabric until we lose touch with reality and enter Anito’s mystery. Shoulder’s background as a performer in the rave scene is evident here - the affect is not dissimilar to walking through a dark club and catching glimpses of impossible bodies, faces, and movements twisting and distorting in the light. In Anito’s world, all is not as it seems and anything is possible - a proposition simultaneously exciting and horrifying.
From here we go on a journey of shape-shifting characters and otherworldly forms which are both moving and absurd. Shoulder and Choi morph into dinosaur-like creatures who howl and stomp and eventually fall in love as the sun sets. A world of giant mushrooms appears, out of which crawls a shrunken witchy figure clothed in white lace and gold ornaments. She moves hypnotically and mumbles ancient secrets, then seamlessly slides into balloon gloves to become a bewitching halfnonna half-hulk who writhes like a Port Jackson Fig tree come to life.
Anito’s third scene might be described as an oceanic carnival, with the mushrooms morphing into a vacillating orgy of clowns, swaying peacefully like undersea creatures to Ileto’s eerie merry-goround jangle. This scene feels like an acid-trip of someone talking about a sexy cartoon character - all at once nostalgic, sensual, and downright freaky. Choi emerges from the bobbing mass like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the clown figures begin to look more like coral phalluses as they poke, prod, and eventually consume the docile Choi.
Anito explores the ancient Filipino belief in ‘anitos’ as spirits, life forces, or souls that exist in all animate and inanimate creatures, building a world in which dreams and reality collide and alternative futures can be imagined. Combining movement with soft sculpture and special effects, Anito flips the script on what dance can do in a theatre context - rather than focusing on the human, Shoulder and The Future Folklore collective use movement to intertwine the human and more-thanhuman worlds and reveal the natural world as abundant in supernatural possibilities.
– BELLE BEASLEY