My Little Gem

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

My little gem

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund).

An Island Paradise, Weekend Disco Parties, Gossiping Aunties and a Cute Bedtime Story. A Father reminisces about his upbringing in a Indian family and how it has shaped his relationship with his daughter. A story of what it means to be a father and what the next generation decides to pass on their kids.

Writer: Rajan Velu
Father: Rajan Velu
Girl: Lakshmi Thangavelu
Director: Carlos Gomes
Editing/Post Production: Sam James
Music Composer: Gail Priest

Produced by Theater Kantanka

This project was supported by
Create NSW
Blacktown Arts

Theatre kantanka & Rajan Velu Collaboration 2020/21

Lenticular Realities

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

LENTICULAR REALITIES

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund).

Step into the street and gardens of Lenticular Realities. Alissar Chidiac, Bint at Khayat, remembering small stories, openning bigger ones. A personal detail, a physical place, a texture fabric.

Expanding and abstracting and disappearing. After hearing Ghassan Hage speak of lenticular reality as "the diaspora experience of being in the realm of more than one place at the same time - imagining a space of woven light, tatreez warp and welt, intersecting multiple situatedness with temporal trajectories.Family heritage intersection with our sites of contemporary political cultural heritage. Gadigal. Redfern. Tarabulus. Dharug. Burramatta. Granville.

Beyond dualities to multiple identities, layering herstories within locations.

Mundane streets with potent intersections.

A challenge 360 storytelling, can I collage and merge all these realms?

A challenge of now. the present tense, what is my voice, a woman in her sixties?

Stepping into myself. Stepping into suits and sites of lenticular realities.

Writer/Performer: Alissar Chidiac
Directro: Carlos Gomes
Editing/Post Production: Sam James
Music Composition: Gail Priest

This project was supported by
Create NSW
Australia Council for the Arts
Blacktown Arts

Thanks to:
Micheal
The Prophet Restaurant on 274 Cleveland Street
Arab Theatre Studio
Ghassan Hage's concept
My family ancestry in Redfern on Cadigal Land, especially Antoun and May Chidiac

Missing the Bus to David Jones

In ‘Missing the Bus to David Jones’ Kantanka looks to the future. Frailty, isolation, memory loss, fragile new friendships, the comfort of a woollen wrap. Your twilight years in a nursing home? It is not for everyone.

‘Missing the Bus to David Jones’ is a poetic reflection on life in a nursing home. We immersed ourselves in the surreal world of altered minds and changed bodies; at times brutal, sad, sometimes humorous… and above all, very human. This performance is provoked by a hidden universe, where memories and bodies clash with reality, time and perception.

Artists/Devisors:
Carlos Gomes
Valerie Berry
Kym Vercoe
Arky Michael
Katia Molino
Rosie Lalevich
Phillip Mills
Original Concept/Direction: Carlos Gomes
Consultant dramaturg: Annette Tesoriero
Lighting/visuals: Sydney Bouhaniche
Sound Design/Composition and Video programming: Nick Wishart
Video/Photography: Joanne Saad

“This is a wonderful show…one of the most celebratory pieces of theatre you will encounter.”
SUN HERALD

“This is a finely wrought, challenging work.”
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

“For your own sake, don’t miss the Bus.”
AUSTRALIANSTAGE

“…An important and unmissable experience.”
KEVIN JACKSON’S ONLINE REVIEW

“The cast are superb”
AUSSIE THEATRE

“Memorable and haunting”
ARTSHUB

“…Truly one of the most beautiful productions I have seen in a long time.”
JAMES WAITES’ ONLINE REVIEW

“…the performance never loses touch with the humanity of its subjects…it’s visceral, tactile and emotional.”
SOUTH SYDNEY HERALD

Supported by Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW, Performance Space and Campbelltown Arts Centre

Bargain Garden

in collaboration with Ensemble Offspring

This performance installation, Bargain Garden, seeks to examine the urge we all share “to have it all', and to explore how we use "stuff" to present our identities. We wanted to investigate the process by which objects transform us into fashion icons, experts, gods and goddesses, equipped for any eventuality. All this, despite the high environmental price. We examined the techniques of marketing and product-promotion in this consumer's paradise, and reflected upon why we respond to these techniques, and at what cost.

Bargain Garden fuses performance, life music, kinetic sculpture and multimedia installation.

"An amazing, extraordinary, thought-provoking piece"
ArtsHub

"Bargain Garden trades in sly textual and visual wit. It is weirdly joyous and unexpectedly inspiring."
SMH

Direction/Original Concept: Carlos Gomes
Performers/Devisors/Designers:
Katia Molino
Rodney Nash
Justin Shoulder
Kym Vercoe
Carlos Gomes
Mirabelle Wouters
Teik-Kim Pok
Musicians:
Claire Edwardes
Jason Noble
Musical Director: Damien Ricketson
Sound Engineer: Bob Scott
Text: Katia Molino, Carlos Gomes
Video/Photography: Heidrun Lohr
Video Programming: Nick Wishart
Video Documentation/Editing: Martin Fox
Lighting Design: Mirabelle Wouters
Lighting Operator: Clytie Smith
Production Manager/AV operator: Emma Lockhart-Wilson

Supported by Australia Council for the Arts, Create NSW, Performance Space and Bundanon Trust.

Clubsingularity

Feel like you’re alone in the universe? Anxious about the future? Witness Kantanka’s exploration of the limits of the Cosmos! A Star-studded, all singing, all dancing cosmological spectacle…with cosmic cocktails.

Kantanka’s Clubsingularity brings together a lonely-hearts club and a cosmology group as they explore questions of the cosmos and the universe – all within a contemporary cabaret setting featuring original song and dance. For director Carlos Gomes, performance art offers both artists and audiences something out of the ordinary. “It challenges the performer and the viewer, in exploring new concepts…., seeing things in new ways,” he says. “With performance, there is always surprise. The universe is like this; it’s unpredictable and dangerous and that’s what I wanted to capture in the show”.

Director: Carlos Gomes
Performers/Devisers:
Katia Molino
Arky Michael
Valery Berry
Kym Vercoe
Phillip Mills
Chris Murphy
Music Composer: Paul Prestipino

“Risk-taking…brave authenticity…humorous but also affecting.”
Syke

PLANET NOWRA

Planet nowra

An intriguing art event set in the town of Nowra (NSW, Australia), Planet Nowra engaged the skills and imagination of over 80 local makers, artists and school students on 8-9 December 2017, in the Manse Gardens of St Andrews Presbyterian Church. Planet Nowra was a free community event that explored the concept of 'place' through contemporary arts practice.

A team of artists co-ordinated by Kantanka tapped into local talent through a series of fantastic workshops in 2017. Known for creating a spectacle Carlos Gomes, Alison Clouston, Boyd, Katia Molino, Kym Vercoe and Sean Bacon brought to life a program of music, storytelling, projection and performance that took place throughout the day and evening.

Tailor

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

Tailor

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision Fund).
This film explores the art of tailoring, and its impact on the life of an immigrant tailor in Australia, as seen through the eyes of his daughter.

Director: Carlos Gomes
Video Artist: Sam James
Sound Composer: Gail Priest
Narrator/Performer: Katia Molino
Writer: Katia Molino
Animation: Carlos Gomes

Supported by Create NSW and Blacktown Arts Centre.

Garden

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

Garden

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund). ‘Garden’ was created in collaboration with artists from the Greek diaspora living in Sydney, Australia.

Immersing its audience in the garden, this film experience explores the themes of migration, adaptation, cultural memory and the power of family history.

Director: Carlos Gomes
Video Artist: Sam James
Sound Composer: Gail Priest
Narrator: Arky Michael
Writer: Lina Kastoumis
Garden Design: Katia Molino
Stop Motion Animation: Carlos Gomes

Supported by Create NSW and Blacktown Arts Centre.

Latai Taumopeau

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

LAU MANU

Lau manu is a digital fresco of a prophetic vision; when the wounded sky and sea swallowed one another and only the fragile essence of a being remained. In the not-so-distant gaze into the horizon they work and perform customs from the old world seeking the survival of the ancient song birds for future assurance of the continent. The unforeseeable healing is at an unprecedented stand still.

Lau manu means birds, plural in my indigenous language of Tongan. In this work I want to poetically identify the power of birds in Oceania as spiritual and visceral guides in the anthropogenic ecocide.

This project was supported by

Australia Council for the Arts – Resilience Grant.

Create NSW – Arts Rescue & Restart funding

Blacktown Arts

WeiZen Ho

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

The Invisibles

My home is nestled between Katoomba and Leura. I was inspired (like many) during the lockdown period to find new walks in the Blue Mountains national park, that I could do literally by placing my foot beyond the doorstep. I also wanted the experience of regularly repeating walking routes, until they were so familiar that my home space had the possibility of extending into the forest. I attempted to search with my body, the energy and form of the images I had for The Invisibles, on the sandstone rock landscapes, amidst the eucalypts, ferns and black cockatoos. This experience has added a layer of intimacy in my connection to the country of the Gundangurra and Darug people, in which my family and I live on.

WeiZen Ho 2020