Gilgamesh
adapted from the ancient epic poem (with playwright Kira Obolensky) – In Development

The Epic of Gilgamesh, called “Humanity’s First Story,” was carved into 11 clay tablets nearly three millennia ago around 1700 BCE—a thousand years before the Iliad. Unknown until 1853 when the tablets were discovered in Nineveh, its cuniform language remained un-translated for some 40 odd years until the end of the 19th century.  Based on a historical King who reigned in Uruk (present day Iraq) the story of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu is well known.  Their intimate friendship and their various heroic adventures together (including attacking the monster Humbaba, rebuking Ishtar, and killing the Bull of Heaven), are followed by Enkidu’s tragic death.  The result is a grief-induced obsession with finding the key to immortality that takes Gilgamesh to places no human is meant to see.

Novi Most's adaptation is both a reliving of the great story of Gilgamesh and an examination of human limits as we experience them here and now.  At the center of the story are essential questions of how to define, and live, a human life.

Our Gilgamesh "drops in" on contemporary wall street in crisis, the sexually charged relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in ancient Uruk, the Sumerian underworld (containing mythic beasts, rivers of death and the worlds first bar tender), the study of Victorian archaeologist George Smith who first transcribed Gilgamesh (and the true story of how he took off all his clothes when he did so),  and the contemporary world of Green Zones, military incursions and video games where we live out the themes of this ancient epic, subconsciously and daily...

A fusion of original music and invigorating physical theatre, this project resurrects a long ago "time before time" letting it pulse and live in front of us, reminding us of truths about ourselves we've perhaps forgotten.

This work in progress had a showing in Dec 2008 following a period of research that was a collaboration between Theatre Novi Most and the University of Minnesota department of Theatre Arts and Dance.  Photos from Dec 2008 workshop.

Created/Directed by Lisa Channer in collaboration with playwright Kira Obolensky, composer/sound designer Vincent Olivieri, designer Adrian Jones, and director Vladimir Rovinsky.

It continues in development and will premiere in 2010 in Minneapolis and New York.