The Encounter
Inspired by the novel
Amazon Beaming
by Petru Popescu
The Encounter
Complicite/Simon McBurney
Title Page
Original Production
Petru Popescu
Simon McBurney
Gareth Fry
Paul Heritage
Complicite
Note on the Text
Characters
The Encounter
Copyright and Performing Rights Information
Contents
Directed and performed by
Simon McBurney
Co-director
Kirsty Housley
Design
Michael Levine
Sound
Gareth Fry
with
Pete Malkin
Lighting
Paul Anderson
Projection
Will Duke
Associate Director
Jemima James
Production Manager
Niall Black
Company Stage Manager
Caroline Moores
Assistant Stage Manager
Joanne Woolley
Sound Operators
Helen Skiera
and
Ella Wahlström
Sound Supervisor
Guy Coletta
Production Engineer
David Gregory
Stage Supervisor
Matt Davis
Projection Supervisor
Sam Hunt
Lighting Supervisor
Laurence Russell
Design Assistant
Lauren Tata
Artistic Collaborators
David Annen
,
Simon Dormandy
,
Naomi Frederick
,
Victoria Gould
,
Richard Katz
,
Tim McMullan
,
Tom Morris
and
Saskia Reeves
Associate Producer
Poppy Keeling
Producer
Judith Dimant
The Encounter
Simon McBurney © Gianmarco Bresadola
Complicite
The Encounter
was originally co-produced with Edinburgh
International Festival, the Barbican London, Onassis Cultural Centre
– Athens, Schaubühne Berlin, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne and Warwick
Arts Centre.
It was first performed at the Edinburgh International Festival on
8 August 2015, before touring to Lausanne, Bristol and Warwick.
In 2016
The Encounter
played at the Barbican London, HOME
Manchester, Onassis Cultural Centre – Athens, Brighton Festival,
Oxford Playhouse, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna Festival, Holland
Festival, Printemps des Comédiens, Montpellier and The Fourvière
Nights, Lyon.
Simon McBurney © Sarah Ainslie
‘There was always the same question when opening
the unknown: What to do with it?
Thoughts, thoughts. Like spaceships, whirling
somewhere in a sort of suborbital space. Lying in
his hammock, shivering from the cold and hearing
the sounds made by the tribespeople who were still
awake, McIntyre was aware of a subsphere of his
mind in which a different species of mental
processes, less explicit and formal, were forever
meeting, colliding, mixing. The tribe he had just
encountered was part of them.’
Petru Popescu
from
Amazon Beaming
Simon McBurney © Robbie Jack
Petru Popescu
Author of
Amazon Beaming
I’ve always been fascinated with who we are as humans. But I grew
up in Communist Romania. Dreams of exploration, of faraway lands
or of the wilds of the mind were drastically discouraged in
Communism.
In time, I became a turbulent dissident writer, then I ran away to
America. Among my first writings in English, I co-wrote the movie
The Last Wave
, which dealt with an encounter of modern man and
tribal man, in Australia. It became clear to me that I’d escaped from
my locked-in homeland carrying a
dream of encounters
with pretty
much any human, anywhere.
In the late 1980s, as I was sailing up the Amazon River – boom! – in
the city of Manaus I met Loren McIntyre, the first Western discoverer
of the Amazon River’s source.
Loren was a traveller and
National Geographic
photographer. We
became friends and he told me how he was captured in 1969 by the
Mayoruna tribe, at that time thought to be extinct. Loren had
rediscovered the ‘cat people’, but without a compass or any other
instrument and speaking no common language, he remained
virtually imprisoned by them for weeks. As they trekked upriver
together, Loren witnessed a unique Mayoruna ritual: the tribesmen
burned their belongings in order to go back in time, both
chronologically – they really thought time would run backwards –
and closer to the source of the river, which for them was ‘Time’s’
own beginning. Belongings meant the present, and the present
meant the oil prospectors who invaded their grounds and were
erasing their tribal life.
The embers of our original fire are lit inside all of us. Blow on those
embers; our flesh will awake and rise and dance in kinship like the
early sapiens. The peaceful relay race from one man to another to
another, that’s what made us human.
All this may sound too prophetic and philosophical – when I first fell
in love with Loren’s story, it really was for its adventurous scenes,
copious and various enough to fill the thick book I would eventually
write. Simon McBurney read that book in 1994 and remained so
beguiled that years later he decided to seek the stage rights for it.
‘And how are you going to tell this story on stage?’ I asked him, as I
couldn’t see how Simon would pour the Amazon waters across the
stage in front of a live audience.
He wasn’t sure yet, he replied.
Loren had trusted me with the book, I reminded myself. It was my
turn now to trust the new relay runner.
In August 2015, I sat in a theatre at the Edinburgh Festival and along
with the whole audience I put on a pair of headphones… A moan of
rainforest, enormous, ingenious, stylised and yet so real that I felt I
was crawling with jungle bugs, flowed out of the headphones and
conquered my brain. And the actor/director, alone; he played Loren,
he played headman Barnacle and interpreter Cambio, he played the
deluging skies above soaked treetops and the stifling hot air on my
own sweating skin, he played Loren’s capture and discovery of the
source,
and even the river flooding,
with evocative strength and
suspense that made me gasp.
How often does it happen that an
author witnesses such an enrichment of his work?
>
My only regret is that Loren didn’t get to see the show. He died in
2003, at age 86.
He would’ve been blown away.
Los Angeles, November 2015
Amazon Beaming
is available from pushkinpress.com
A girl from the Mayoruna community listening to the binaural head © Chloe Courtney
We see only what we want to see
Simon McBurney
When making a piece of theatre I am, frequently, if not most of the
time, in the dark. I truly do not know where we will end up.
—
We’re going to shut the door now and we’ll open it again in
twenty minutes. Is that okay?
—
Yep, I guess.
—
Have you ever sat in total silence? In the dark?
—
I’ll be fine.
As a result of spending sixty-three days in silence on a Vipassana
retreat, Yuval Noah Harari, the acclaimed author of
Sapiens:
A Brief History of Humankind,
proclaimed it the ideal tool with
which to scientifically observe his own mind. He came to realise he
had no idea who he really was and that the fictional story in his
head, and the connection between that and reality, was extremely
tenuous.
—
Okay well… if you freak out then push this button and we’ll
open the door.
The vast door to the anechoic chamber, which is, as the name
suggests, a room without echoes, at the Building Research
Establishment (BRE) in Watford, closes definitively behind me.
The concrete walls are so thick no sound from the outside world
enters your ear canals and the vast foam wedges that cover the
walls absorb sound to such an extent that a clap becomes a tap.
I am in total darkness. And total silence. I don’t mean the silence of
three in the morning at home, or even the silence of the remotest
place on Earth, I mean total silence.
My breathing sounds like a set of bellows; my heartbeat like an
arrhythmic drum machine.
—
Why am I here?
It is 40°C, my clothes are already sodden, although we have only
been here an hour. Or have we? I’ve lost track of time and I have no
battery on my phone. In fact I don’t know why I have a phone at all
given there is no signal here.
We are sitting in the house of Lourival Mayoruna, the headman or
Cacique
of Marajaí, a village of Mayoruna people deep in the
Brazilian Amazon, an hour’s flight west of Manaus and four hours by
boat up the River Solimões.
Lourival, according to local protocol, talks to us as part of our
welcome into the village – and has been doing so for the best part
of an hour. The hut is crammed with people and sitting between us
all like some twenty-first-century totem is a binaural head, the
microphone that records in so-called ‘3D’.
Paul Heritage, head of People’s Palace Projects, who has lived for
more than twenty years in Brazil, translates as Lourival winds down...
—
So you have come all this way and I have one question...
Lourival leans forward looking me in the eye.
—
Why are you here?
I nervously lick the wet salt off my upper lip, and sweat stings my
eyes as everyone’s eyes turn towards me.
—
I think you need to reply, says Paul.
The sounds of the forest and the village become extremely loud all
of a sudden. I clear my throat.
The slight rising panic makes me realise the noise I am now hearing
is the sound of fluids circulating in my head. And there is a high-
pitched hiss caused by spontaneous firings of the auditory nerve.
How long have I been sitting here in darkness? I squeeze my phone.
Five minutes. I thought it was at least half an hour.
—
Where are you going?
—
To work on my show…
—
What are you doing?
—
Um... sitting in a dark silent room in Watford.
—
Why?
—
To see what it’s like.
I look at my son. He is four. I’m not sure he buys this answer.
—
When is Christmas?
—
A long time. Several months. When it is winter, when it will be
cold again.
—
It was cold today.
—
Yes, okay, but not very cold.
—
Yes it was. I was cold.
—
You’re right, it was cold.
—
How long is several months?
I mutter something about moons and loads of sleeps.
Maybe this high-pitched hiss generated by my auditory nerves is
something more sinister. I should get my ears checked for tinnitus
when I get out of here. How much longer?
—
Forty-five minutes.
—
What?
—
You’ve been speaking for forty-five minutes.
—
Good God.
I got it all, whispers Gareth my sound designer, who looks even more
sodden than I do in the Amazonian heat, unplugging the totem.
I look round the room. Silence. I am not sure how it has gone down.
In English, the word ‘rehearsal’ derives from ‘hearse’ which means
to rake over. To prepare the ground. And one way for me to prepare
has always been to perform or improvise a show I am making to
those who have never heard it. Because the story is not the show. It
is not even the performance that is the show. The show is made in
the minds of the audience. I want to know what they see. What they
hear. I look at Lourival. He smiles.
—
We are moved by your story, he says. Your story about this man
who was lost, but who survived. Your story is about many
people, but it is also about us, the Mayoruna. And it tells us that
others in this world know of the Mayoruna people. You tell the
world that we have survived. Many have perished. We have
survived. But whether we will all survive... that is another matter.
He laughs.
—
So is it funny?
—
What?
—
Your performance.
Simon McBurney © Robbie Jack
My son examines me. I glance at him sideways. Draw in my breath.
The door suddenly creaks open and I am out in the Watford sunlight
again, blinking. What greets me I don’t expect. It shocks me. It is a
roar. So loud I want to block my ears. Traffic, voices, machinery,
planes... industrial, all-encompassing, unstoppable. The shock is that
most of the time, I do not hear it because our auditory system
blocks out our conscious mind. Our ears, without us asking, form a
filter and help to create a ‘normal’ reality, but one in which we hear
‘selectively’. As with our ears, so it is with all our senses. Our eyes,
our sense of smell, every way in which we perceive the world
creates a gap between what is actually happening and the story we
; make of it. We see only what we want to see...
The technician looks at me enquiringly.
—
How was it?
—
Disorientating.
—
And how did that feel?
—
Familiar.
August 2015
Gareth Fry
Sound Designer
I’ve been working with Complicite since 1998, and I’ve travelled a
fair few miles as we’ve made shows and toured them around the
world. There have been many memorable moments, such as taking
Mnemonic
to Zenica, near Sarajevo, in 2003, a city that had been
starved, literally and figuratively, by war, with ruin and decay
palpable everywhere – our audience packed into every millimetre of
space, such was their vociferous appetite for a culture that had
been too long absent.
But no show has led me further away from a darkened theatre than
The Encounter
. I regularly work on shows set in exotic places that
don’t end up with me leaving the inside of the M25.
Amazon Beaming
, the book that inspired the show, recounts how a
National Geographic
photographer, Loren McIntyre, went into the
rainforest to take photos of the rarely seen Mayoruna tribe only to
lose his way back. The normal approaches to adapt a book to the
stage just didn’t feel right. It needed an approach that could convey
both the initial isolation of Loren McIntyre and the eventual way with
which he could communicate with the tribe leader.
We explored the audience wearing headphones, separating them
from each other, rather than the usual shared experience of being in
an audience. This also allows a more intimate relationship with
Simon, who can talk into a mic onstage which can be heard as if he
is inside your head.
Our next step was to investigate binaural sound which is recorded
on a type of microphone resembling a human head with a
microphone in each of its ears. The effect of it is magical as it
transposes the audience to where the head is, or has been, so they
feel like they are on stage next to Simon. It is a unique sound and
allows Simon to talk to and interact with the audience in a way that’s
not possible otherwise.
To tell the story we needed binaural sound effects, which are pretty
rare – and that’s how myself, Simon, photographer Chloe Courtney