There’s a wild man wandering the desert and there’s a woman.
She has what he doesn’t: language and sex and utensils for eating food.
Untamed Enkidu meets the priestess of sacred sexuality Shamhat on the first tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The story dates back perhaps 4,000 years but soprano Heather Pawsey notes one seemingly modern element: the female character is forgotten.
In Unheard, a musical performance that stirs ancient mythology and history with modern poetry and new music, the Capilano University professor sings the songs of women who are unheeded, forsaken or left.
The crux of the show came from Vancouver poet laureate Rachel Rose, who found herself asking what happened to Persephone and Eve and those women whose piece of the stone tablet split and tumbled from history.
In Unheard, Shamhat hoped Enkidu would be a vessel, carrying art and poetry and culture to lands where civilization could multiply like cane toads in Australia, Pawsey explains.
But when Enkidu marches to war alongside Gilgamesh, Shamhat wishes she left him in the desert. At that point she’s bewitched by a vision of the future.
“Bodies of my priestesses will be dumped in alleys, stuffed in the trunks of cars, left to bloat in rain . . . there will be no worship in the act.”
The show, which Pawsey emphasizes also contains “great humour,” is set to play at the Canadian Music Centre on March 23 and the Chali-Rosso Gallery the next evening.
The show germinated over five years when composer Jeffrey Ryan suggested using Rose’s poetry to write solo voice theatre music for Pawsey.
Pawsey is alone on stage, her voice the only sound.
“It’s such a rarity in classical music,” she says. “There’s absolutely nowhere to hide.”
It means staying in pitch for 90 minutes without the aid of musicians that sometimes lure a wayward singer back to the melody.
While she appreciated the challenge Pawsey says she was initially daunted at rehearsing without a pianist.
“There’s always at least somebody else in the room,” she says with a laugh. “Here I am in my studio looking at myself in the mirror going, ‘Heather, what’d you think of that phrase?’ “I don’t know, Heather, what did you think about that phrase?”
Knowing she needed “a third eye,” Pawsey worked with stage director James Fagan Tait, who joined a creative crew including photographer Maggie MacPherson and costumer Diane Park.
The staging of the show, which coincides with the #MeToo movement, feels like a “cosmic occurrence,” Pawsey says.
In one of the show’s more brutal moments, Daphne sings of asking for help when Apollo tried to rape her. There’s a song for Buddha’s wife, Yasodhara, who’s “left a single mom” when her husband seeks enlightenment the morning their first child was born.
But the tone varies dramatically, Pawsey promises, describing Persephone as a strong-willed teenager who has no interest in leaving the underworld with her mother.
“She wants to stay in the underworld and have hot sex with her incredibly hot boyfriend,” Pawsey laughs.
Speaking as Persephone, Pawsey adds that her mother: “couldn’t possibly understand it and how dare you bring me back. Oh my god!”
Audiences should leave the show with a sense of hope and empowerment, Pawsey says.
“I think it’ll be startling for some people and some people will find it an absolute revelation,” she says. “It was both for me.”
