Featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Bass Ensemble, Directions For Making a Round Ark is a chamber opera in three acts composed by Stanzi Vaubel, Artistic Director of the Indeterminacy Festival, and Philippe Treuille.

The Bass Ensemble brings vocal power and depth to this retelling of the primordial flood myth. Set in a richly imagined polytheistic world, the opera opens with the creation of humanity to ease the gods’ burdens—an act that quickly spirals into chaos. As human noise and numbers provoke the wrath of Enlil, king of the gods, divine retribution arrives through plague, drought, and ultimately an all-consuming flood. Guided by Enki’s secret warnings to build a life-saving ark, the narrative reimagines the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis, the earliest known flood story written a thousand years before Noah’s Ark.