Gilgamesh project

The epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Mesopotamian founding myth, considered to be the first written text of civilisation. Cage Compagnie (current IPAC) took on the challenge of exploring how to stage this myth and developed several versions over a period of three years, going deeper and deeper into its connections with today’s world, into a stripped down cinematic aesthetics, into strategies of storytelling to convey its very contemporary themes of the human aspiration to immortality and fear of death. Across the different versions, three performers, in dialogue with an electroacoustic musician, tell the story by giving and stealing the floor to and from each other, even taking turns to breathe life into the main hero of the epic itself, regardless of gender and body type.

Gilgamesh is the arrogant king of the city of Uruk. The gods decide to teach him a lesson by creating an equal and wild opponent, Enkidu. They fight each other in a historic duel which none can ever win. Eventually, they decide to join forces and take the world by storm, in a quest for exploits, battles, success and excess. Thus, is born an unparalleled friendship that will end with the death of Enkidu, consumed by disease, because of divine intervention. Gilgamesh goes mad with grief, abandons everything and leaves on a quest to find immortality. At the end of the world, on an island inhabited by the immortal sage Utanapishti and his wife, he witnesses the sage’s account of the story of the great flood – the first written account we have. After the illusion of immortality is dangled in front of him, he loses everything and journeys back home.

This story talks about what we are and what we are made of: friendship, ambition, lust, ostentation, dreams and cowardice, clumsiness towards those we love and towards ourselves. To convey this, traditional theatre and contemporary dramaturgy, world music instruments and electronic music blend in an open, quasi-improvised circuit – an Õ: symbolic title of returning to the same point, like water (eau) and its cycle, like island in Swedish (Ö). This wave represents the story of the flood, the movement of life, vibration and transformation, like bodies, like sound.