Instagram story viewer> @megafawnx> Tagged
POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED
Thanks so much to everyone who came out to see Gilgamesh Fragments work-in-progress at @fu_ture.space NYC, and to everyone who helped us along the way, assyriologists, translators, puppeteers, musicians, our friends, and of course the @jimhensonfoundation . It was a blast to go so deep into a work. We learned so much and cant wait to keep developing it further in the years to come.
33
Atrahasis (or Utnapishtim/Ziusudra) is the primordial Noah, lifted down through Abrahamia in the story of the Great Deluge ("Amaru" in Sumerian) that flooded all the earth.

Gilgamesh becomes obsessed with death after losing his best friend and lover, the hairy wild man Enkidu, and goes in search of Utnapishtim, the only immortal human, bringing back his ancient tale to Uruk. Gilgamesh is called "He Who Saw The Deep", and this story-within-a-story is among the deepest of those seen depths, and was also one of the very earliest recovered pieces of the Epic.

When wunderkund Assyriologist George Smith first translated the Flood Tablet in 1872 after it had been lost for 3500 years, he was so shocked to find Noah's Ark (almost verbatim doves and all) that he is reported to have stripped off his clothes and leapt around the British Museum naked screaming for joy, convinced that he had just found definitive evidence for the historicity of Christianity - although the opposite may in fact have been true. 

There are so many more delicious pieces here: a god loud-talking to a reed fence to avoid breaking an oath of silence, seven days of stale-molding bread used to mark time...but we'll save that for later as the project develops.

Thanks so much to the Henson Foundation for supporting this!
18
We are delighted at long last to announce the formation of MegaFawn, a new performance collective exploring ecological catastrophe through epic literature, beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Ron Shalom and Kalan Sherrard have worked together for 17 years in many configurations and for the past two years we have been piling up research and development towards this fundamental dream opus.

Gilgamesh is our everything. It is the first (non)-story, a hodgepodge of translations, additions, subtexts, lacunae, impossible and lost meanings – arguably the most seminal story of Western literature, perhaps infecting the civilized mind with the virus of narrative. It is a story of love, immortality, lust, power, humanity's break from the ancient past, and the ontological crisis between Nature and Civilization.

Since 2024, we have been immersed in this story. Thanks in part to the generosity of curators, historians, and Assyriologists who have guided us thus far, we've begun to swim in the oceans of scholarship that surround the Epic. We are students of sun- and oven-baked bricks, cuneiform engraving, lapis lazuli refinement, the pictography of cylinder seals, and the uncountable interconnections between the world of Gilgamesh and the world we live in now.

Like the Epic itself and the millennia of lives it has lived, our interpretation of Gilgamesh will evolve and mutate with each performance, interwoven with the astounding tales of its loss, rediscovery, and translation. We are thrilled to present workshop performances for you this May and June in New York City, as we work towards our dream of bringing our Gilgamesh to its place of origin, the city of Uruk in modern Iraq.

We're grateful for the support of a Henson Foundation grant as we pursue this work. We'll be posting performance updates here, along with snippets of what we're creating.

*P.S. we have a SPECIAL PRIZE to anyone who can decode the cuneiform written on that flood tablet mask and an EXTRA SPECIAL PRIZE to anyone who can explain or force it to make sense*
17
back to up