Shammgods

The Shammgods are Matt Prest, Nitin Vengurlekar and Malcolm Whittaker.

Taking their name from 90s NBA star 'God Shammgod', famous for his footwork and dribbling skills, Shammgods involves three performers attempting to become gods on stage, only to butt up against the reality of their limitations and find unexpected means of transcending them.

About the artists

Matt Prest is a performer and director with over 10 year’s experience working across performance, theatre and live-art. Matt’s consistent focus is on the experiential nature of live performance. He holds a BFA in sculpture, performance and installation and has trained at Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Paris. Matt's work includes the tent, hole in the wall (with Clare Britton), whelping box (with branch nebula), running up a skyscraper, and the Queen St. run.

Nitin Vengurlekar is a writer and performer from Bankstown who works across the fields of contemporary performance and alternative comedy. He has performed his stories, poems and short comic pieces at various literary and alternative comedy events around Sydney, including Club Cab Sav, Parramasala, Sydney Writer’s Festival, Secret Garden Festival, Penguin Plays Rough and Fabulous Monster. In 2015 he presented his full-length nonsense epic Neville Umbrellaman as part of Bondi Feast, and a collection of his work in The Neville Umbrellaman Variety Hour Featuring Freddy Nietzsche’s Good Time Skiffle Quintet as part of the City of Sydney’s Late Night Library program. He also wrote material for and performed in Nitro Theatre/Bankstown Arts Centre’s large-scale community productions of The Prophet: Remix (November 2015) and The Night Sky (November 2016), directed by Felix Cross.

Malcolm Whittaker works as an artist, writer, researcher, performer, producer and teacher. He does this in solo pursuits and in collaborations with other artists and non-artists. His work as an artist is mostly made and executed through the engagement of participants and collaborators in the framing of play spaces that adopt social forms and rituals from popular culture and the everyday. His projects have taken the form of theatre and gallery situations, site-specific and public interventions, performance lectures, film shoots, phone calls, support groups, radio programs, elevator rides, teeth-brushing services, walks in the park, games of chess, gift shops, handshakes, newspapers, letters in the mail, digging holes in the dirt and the borrowing of books from the library.