Nicodemus
honed his performing skills with the mighty and the mad including legendary
playright and actor Steven Berkoff (London Theatre Group) Jerzy Growtowski
(Polish Laboratory Theatre) Moni Yakim (American Mime Theater) and Raphael
Kelly (New York Shakespeare School) and founded the cutting edge Sydney theatre
ensemble 'Abba Dabba', a cross-disciplinary team of performance artists, filmmakers
and
musicians staging original group penned plays in the surreal vein of Beckett and
Artaud in an abandoned Church they renovated into an arts workshop and performing
space.
Nicodemus
made several widely seen short films including the nightmarish 'Terrible Tears',
while experimenting with electronic music, painting and photography. He later
combined these diverse elements into dynamic solo multi-media installations,
performing throughout Europe and especially Berlin, his spiritual home, where
he collaborated with other filmmakers and artists including on Claudia Skoda's
epic 'Big Birds' at the Congresshalle.
While
performing in several projects in New York (among them Gena Wendkos' acclaimed
'Blue Blood') a fortuitous meeting with talented singer and dancer Anitra
resulted in their creation of 'The Elephant Of Celebes', (after Max Ernst's
ground breaking painting, so brilliantly described in Robert Hughes book 'The
Shock Of The New') wrapping an electronic soundscape around her opera vocals
and his spoken word spiked with powerful visual stimuli, incorporating slides,
films and original costume designs. During a European and Australian
tour, a line from a Yevteshenko poem and an evolution in their sound,
inspired the name change to 'Men Smash Atoms'.
Nicodemus
produced (and he and Anitra co-hosted) the cult weekly New York cable TV show
'Krash Boom TV', an alliance of state of the art technology and underground
pop culture, exploring the world of futurists, artists, musicians, cyberpunks
and computer hackers, or as Saint Jude put it 'The place where science and
art overlaps'. More recently he wrote, directed and played the lead in the
feature length psuedo-Elizabethan film noir 'Rotten In Denmark', a potent
deconstruction of Shakespeare's Hamlet, now in post production.
'Men
Smash Atoms' are currently recording songs for an upcoming CD at their own
Decoder Digital Annex, to be followed by an extensive U.S. and European
tour.
A
lifelong interest in psycho-spiritual techniques that unlock the gates
of conciousness has made Nicodemus a passionate metaphysician, a devotee
of Mahayana Buddhism, the Qabalah, through the teachings of the Hermetic
Order of The Golden Dawn and the Thelemic Ancient Ordo Templi Orientis.
