Directions For Making a Round Ark

A chamber opera in three acts, composed by Stanzi Vaubel, Artistic Director of the Indeterminacy Festival, and Philippe Treuille, which tells the story of the primordial flood. Set in a richly imagined polytheistic world, the opera opens with the creation of humanity as a solution to the gods’ burdens—only for that solution to spiral into chaos.

As humans multiply, their noise and presence provoke the wrath of Enlil, king of the gods. Enlil attempts to reduce the population through plague, drought, and ultimately a devastating flood. Each time, Enki intervenes, culminating in a secret warning to build a life-saving ark.

Directions For Making a Round Ark reimagines one of humanity’s oldest stories. Inspired by the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis, the earliest known version of the flood myth, written a thousand years before Noah’s Ark.