ANITO

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

For early Filipinos, like many still today, it is believed that a life force or soul inhabits all entities, both animate and inanimate. These spirits are called Anitos. 

Co-Created by the multi-talented Justin Talplacido Shoulder (The Glitter Militia, Club Ate), ANITO combines collective craft, puppetry, dance and experimental electronic music to reimagine these myths and stories for the now. It’s a work rooted in Sydney’s underground queer and diasporic club scenes.

The collective behind ANITO create a “Queer Filipino Future Folkloric space of storytelling” that centres the importance of nature spirits, intuiting with them as guides towards imagining possible parallel futures. 

The ensemble transform into animal-human-plant-machine hybrids. In this world of sheer terror and tremendous beauty, they interrogate colonial wrongdoings and queer ancestral mythologies.