BAH:
A FUSION OF FLOOD MYTHS AND COSMIC (RE)BEGINNINGS
Theatres of Archimagination

Bah poster
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    • Andria Langi & a crew of Global Storytellers     

    In the beginning there were stories. Around the world, many cultures have creation stories that include episodes of annihilation and beginning again, striving to recreate the world anew. Floods figure prominently as forces of renewal in such stories.

    Given our present era of catastrophic global warming and rising sea levels, it is both timely and illuminating to reconsider the diversity of flood myths, the precarity of our shared world, and our collective responsibility to imagine better futures. These stories compel us to ask: What forces are destroying our present world? What agencies can remake it? What resources will be preserved, and how?

    The mythopoetic work of Bah suggests that language and stories are among the most valuable cultural cargo to survive the ravages of time, and, if preserved, may also buoy our sinking global vessel.

    Commonly known also as air bah, Bah is Indonesian for ‘flood’ in its most overwhelming and destructive sense. Bah: A Fusion of Flood Myths and Cosmic (Re)Beginnings, integrates flood stories of multiple global cultures to invent a common epic arc: rising and falling, building and rebuilding, surviving and thriving.

    The Bah narrative fuses a flood story of First Nations peoples (the Ojibway creation story of Turtle Island) with eight tales of deluge from other cultures that are prominently represented in Winnipeg by settlers and immigrants. Specifically, the stories derive from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, a sacred Hindu Vedic myth, the Hebrew book of Genesis (the B’reshit in the Torah), the Arabic Quran, excerpts of Norse mythology, as well as folklore from the Philippines, China and Nigeria. While these stories have important differences, they share many themes and struggles, including confrontations with mortality and immortality; the limits of individual heroism and need for communal cooperation; and the obligations of humans to respect the environment and to humble themselves to the awesome powers of the more than human world.

    Bah also represents the stories of migrants with rich cultural inheritance striving for new light and hope, risking their lives on  precarious vessels.In gathering a fusion of stories and storytellers, this work itself becomes an ark preserving the emotional and transformative experience of migration journeys.Nine female Winnipeg storytellers with different ethnic and religious backgrounds, each proudly represent the role of the male heroes of the tale. Through this experiment, Bah speaks the voice of the minority and amplifies  the aspiration of others.

    Integrating traditional Indonesian puppetry, wayang,  with contemporary digital animation, environmental sounds, and the emotional voices of multicultural storytellers, Bah leads listeners into the woods of a trans-cultural and trans-historic narrative. In doing so, Bah helps us reimagine how we might avert total ecological disaster, while suggesting how we might all live together in strife-spiced harmony.

    Bah begins screening on September 24, 2021. An online conversation with the artists and storytellers takes place Saturday, September, 25, 2021 at 11:00am EDT (10:00 AM CDT).

    Application Deadline
    ROLLING 

    Program Fee
    Free