Ergo Phizmiz

Gargantua, a brand new 'vaudeville of the imagination' from the beautifully scrambled brains of UK polymath Ergo Phizmiz, tours the UK in March 2013.

A multi-sensory feast and genuinely unique patchwork of artistic disciplines, Gargantua plunders history and culture and places them in a boiling pot ready for explosion. A devilish mix of storytelling, performance, animation, puppetry, moving image collage and masks, all garlanded by an original music score that's equal parts contemporary electronic, medieval and 1930s British dance band.

If 'F is for Fake' then 'E' could be for 'Ergo'. This hallucinatory odyssey through time and culture tells three simultaneous tales: one a detective story on the disappearance of the giant King Gargantua, another of an adventure by French writer Francois Rabelais across Europe, the third a strange, elliptical board game that draws these threads together, as described by the more than reliable Gargantuan narrator Orson Welles...

As one portal gives you access to insider knowledge, a trapdoor opens and leaves you wonderfully displaced, and so it goes. Grey matter is constantly electrified and eyes lavished by Terry Gilliam-esque architectural constructs, political sensibilities are enlightened by meta-narratives, absurd social commentary echoes Thomas Pynchon or Felix Kubin and limbs and laughing muscles loosen as if being tackled by a crack tag-wrestling team of Andy Kaufman and Phil Kay.

If you haven't visited before, welcome to the world of Ergo Phizmiz.