The Encounter Page 2
and Brazilian-based academic Paul Heritage found ourselves
travelling to the Amazon rainforest, to spend four days living in a
Mayorunan community – hearing their stories and travelling into the
rainforest to record its sounds. Several hundred mosquito bites later,
those recordings form the sonic bed for the show. Since then I’ve
been binaurally recording Cessna aircraft in Surrey, mosquito
colonies at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and
leading a merry band of volunteers around Epping Forest –
perversely, I got more mosquito bites in Epping Forest than I did at
the mosquito colonies.
The Encounter
is a devised show – the script came out of rehearsals
as a process of experimentation and refinement. In fact, our press
night in Edinburgh marked only the fifth time we’d ever run the show
from start to finish. The show is, and will remain, in constant flux so
we can change and refine the story as we go. To do this we have a
team of unseen operators. Between them they respond fast to
changes in the show, whether prearranged or as they happen during
performance. Part of the process of making this show has been
about learning how they can respond to Simon, to anticipate and to
lead with sound, so that together we can act as one, and the
division between storytelling and sound design are non-existent.
For me, this show started out in a rehearsal room five years ago with
rudimentary technology as we explored the ideas that would form
the show. We’ve harnessed the technology so it becomes invisible
(but far from inaudible!) and indivisible from the process of telling the
story.
Twenty years after Simon was given the book, six hundred pairs of
wired headphones and two kilometres of headphone cable later –
we have a show. For many productions the development time is
spent working out what the story is you want to tell. For us, it has
been about finding a new theatrical way to tell our story. We have
developed a technique that uses technology to create intimacy,
isolation and a little bit of magic, and will hopefully lift you out of
your seat and take you as far away as this show has taken us.
October 2015
Sound Designer Gareth Fry recording binaural sound © Sarah Ainslie
Gareth Fry recording in the Amazon Rainforest
© Chloe Courtney
The Encounter
rehearsals © Sarah Ainslie
Binaural head in the Amazon Rainforest © Chloe Courtney
Memory and Identity
Paul Heritage
On 1 May 1500, Pêro Vaz de Caminha sent a letter to the King of
Portugal informing him that Pedro Álvares Cabral had found the
country that became known as Brazil. 515 years later, Paul Heritage
has sent a reply...
Rua São João
Batista 105
Rio de Janeiro
July 2015
Dear Pêro Vaz de Caminha,
Let me introduce you to the theatre-maker Simon McBurney. In
2014 he began a journey to the land you first sighted on 22 April
1500 and described so vividly in your letter to Dom Manuel I. More
than a letter, you wrote the birth certificate of Brazil, describing in
extraordinary detail what happened during the first exchange with
the people of the new world. Simon sends us now a performance
that asks some of the same questions that have echoed down five
centuries since you sent word of that first encounter.
In a rehearsal room in Bethnal Green in London, on an unseasonably
cold afternoon in June 2015, I watch as Simon unfolds how he is
going to enact the encounters that formed part of the journeys to the
Amazon region of Brazil that we had undertaken together the previous
year. Simon’s rehearsal room is itself a place of encounter. Even
though this is a monologue in the making, the room is full of people.
The recorded voices of scientists, philosophers and political activists
merge with the actual voices of the sound technicians and stage
managers, overlaid with actor-friends who are there to interact with
Simon as he develops, discards and discovers his ways of telling.
It is also a place where I hear again the sounds of Amazonian nights
spent motionless in the darkness of a forest, recording a world that
seemed intent on biting us to infinity. In the centre of a room, which
is both hi-tech and a child’s playpen, stands the ominous life-size
dark grey head that had travelled with us on our visit to a Mayoruna
village. Placed on a pole on a forest path at night, the head with its
binaural technology had recorded Amazonian sounds that were now
swirling a full 360˚ round us as we sit with our eyes closed in
Bethnal Green. Just as when we read the words in your letter of five
hundred years ago, Sr Vaz de Caminha, we are engaged in a
collective act of imagination about an encounter that did not finish
at that moment of its perception by one person, but is part of our
consciousness now as we are sitting together.
Like so many of us, Simon had engaged with, imagined, created
Brazil and its indigenous peoples for himself long before he visited it
for the first time. What you describe in your letter about the meeting
with those naked people in April 1500 became in scribed into the
European imaginarium for the next five hundred years. Before he
actually arrived for his first visit, Simon had been taken there
through reading
Amazon Beaming,
Petru Popescu’s account of the
photographer Loren McIntyre’s time spent with the Mayoruna
people on his search for the source of the Amazon. After two
decades of holding the book in his head and heart, Simon asked me
to set up a visit to Brazil in order that he could meet indigenous
people in a way that would enable him to begin work on adapting
Amazon Beaming
as a monologue that he could perform on stage.
You saw approximately five hundred people on that beach during
ten days in 1500. They were just a tiny proportion of an indigenous
population that numbered over five million at the time, made up of
countless different peoples occupying the territory that became
known as Brazil. By the time Simon stepped off a canoe in the River
Solimões in March 2014, to be greeted by young girls in a Mayoruna
village, over 90% of those peoples had been annihilated. Yet the
depleted, decimated population that survives today is probably ten
times greater than it was fifty years ago. It used to be assumed that
indigenous people – the
índios –
had no future. War, legislation,
disease, catechism and capitalism established a trajectory that
seemed to indicate the unstoppable and inevitable extinction of the
índio
in Brazil. The end of the last indigenous groups was always
supposed to be imminent and irresistible. But there we were in the
State of Amazonas, two plane journeys and a couple of boat rides
away from London, being led up the riverbank to a village that forms
part of a growing Brazilian in
digenous population now estimated to
be approximately 900,000 people.
In the rehearsal room in Bethnal Green, Simon reminds us that
McIntyre loses not only his watch but all sense of linear time during
his stay with the Mayoruna, as described in
Amazon Beaming.
Simon plays with time in the construction of his performance, just as
he did with his own schedule to steal the days we spent in
Amazonas and then later in the Xingu territories. Impossible as it
was to carve out the weeks that would have been needed to travel
to the Valley of Javarí, where the majority of the Mayoruna live on
the borders between Brazil and Peru, we travelled to the village of
Marajaí on the banks of the River Solimões where some of the tribe
had relocated many decades earlier. It is there that Simon begins to
experience and record the specifics of the forest while also
confronting the villagers with the story of Loren McIntyre. He acts
out with mime all that my translation cannot capture. The eighty-
year-old
Cacique
(the head of the village) acknowledges with simple
gestures and a nod of the head that he recognises the story Simon
tells as part of the history of their people. Simon introduces the grey
head that will capture the forest recordings, placing headphones on
the
Cacique
and making birds and frogs appear round the old man,
who reaches dreamily for all that Simon conjures up for him.
New stories form as we walk round the village over the next few
days. The school with its internet connections, health centre and
Cuban doctor, the condom wrapper on the path to the forest, the
phone box and digital cameras. The original stories we brought
with us are never enough, as we see the way in which this riverside
community lives between worlds.
Índios
will not stay put in an
unviable and inviolable myth of pure origin that has been created
round them, but like all Amerindians across the Amazon region they
know they must hold on to what has been taken from them by
those they call the ‘white man’. They are increasingly aware that
this means taking responsibility for the production of their own
identity. Just like Simon, they search for and record the dances,
rituals and languages that they are in danger of losing. They are
discovering their own ways of sharing and telling those stories
using some of the same technologies as the ‘white man’. They
want to participate in the modern world – to be Brazilian – so long
as their identity and differences are respected. All the complexities
of those first ten days of April 1500, when Brazil was born in the
exchange that took place between two cultures, are still being
played out in the village of Marajaí.
The mono-motor Cessna that took us to the Xingu five months later
was a necessity imposed by the limited time we had to make the
trip. We had been invited to the Xingu funeral ritual known as the
Kuarup, which in August 2014 was going to take place in the village
of the Yawalapiti. Carved out of the southern part of the Amazon
region, the Xingu is bigger than Belgium and was created by the
Brazilian government as a territory for indigenous peoples to protect
them from the encroachment of ‘progress’ that would have
destroyed their lands and therefore their cultures. The two-and-a-
half-hour flight we made from Goiânia, on the central plains of
Brazil, could surely not have been so very different from the journey
made by the Villas-Bôas brothers who had fought so hard to
establish the Xingu Park in the 1950s. We felt the same intense
drone of the engines, the same unnerving sway of the plane as it is
caught by air currents, bouncing as ferociously as if we were
arriving on one of the dusty, untarmacked tracks that cut through
the forest below.
The view that we saw for the first hour, of course, was noticeably
different from what the Villas-Bôas brothers would have seen fifty
years earlier. Leaving the jagged urban landscape of Goiânia – home
to those whose lives and disproportionate incomes depend on
Brazil’s agroeconomy – we rise 10,000 metres above the
uninterrupted soya fields that have gorged the land. This soya will
feed cattle that produce meat which is served at dinner tables all
over Europe and North America. It will be nurtured with pulverised
fish farmed from the oceans, and the toxic chemicals that enable
this crop to proliferate on the unforgiving Brazilian savannah will
seep deep into the earth and rivers. As we reach the Xingu there is
an abrupt, exact line like a scar, which separates modern Brazil from
the ancient forest. The line marks the point where the mono-colour
soya fields give way to the multiple greens of the forest panoply and
the interconnecting loops of the rivers, broken only by irregular red-
dirt tracks that occasionally lead to the vast circular forms of the
Xingu villages. These are the
aldeias
of the nine different ethnic
groups that inhabit the territory of the Upper Xingu.
We land on one of the dusty roads that has served as an airstrip
since the Villas-Bôas brothers first arrived there in the 1930s. An
índio
, blackened with jenipapo and naked apart from his waistband,
helps us step across the wing of the plane and down onto the Xingu
lands for the first time. It is difficult for me not to think of your
landing, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, and the Guarani
índios
who put
down their weapons to help you from the rowing boats that brought
you ashore from the Portuguese galleons. Simon and I remove our
many bags of food, clothes, hammocks and presents to be greeted
by the representative of FUNAI, the government’s agency for
indigenous affairs. Simon is already attached to his recording
equipment to capture the sound of the Cessna as it immediately
prepares to take off and leave us in such unfamiliar and yet very
welcome territory.
Lourival and Joaquina, Complicite’s hosts in Marajaí, listening to the binaural head © Chloe Courtney
A kombi van stripped of most of its seats takes us for thirty minutes
down a dusty, suspension-busting road to reach the final stage of
our journey as the sun begins its rapid descent. We are left on the
edge of a mighty circle of nine long, tall
ocas –
the same huts that
you recorded in your letter over five hundred years ago.
We are
staying with Pikakumã and his wife Iamoni, who step out to greet
us. Iamoni leads us into the darkened, cool air of their
oca.
Wordlessly she accepts the beads, fish-hooks and wool that we
have been instructed to bring, and Pikakumã shows us how to
attach our hammocks between the wooden stakes that rise up the
arching walls and the central pole of the hut
.
From the moving uncertainty of my hammock I watch two musicians
enter, naked yet in
full ceremonial dress, with wooden flutes
stretching almost two metres in front of them, suspended just above
the earthen floor as they breathe long across the wide opening that
hangs from their lips. The low echoing sounds of these decorated
flutes will reverberate across the
ocas
until the final moments before
we leave four days later. Simon lies in the hammock beside me,
watching, listening, writing, recording. Being there. Tomorrow at 4
a.m. he will walk towards the sunrise across the dusty oval of the
central ground between the
ocas
and whisper, ‘the best awakening
of my life’.
The Kuarup introduces us to the rituals of the Xingu. There is no
fixed liturgy but a flux and flow of repeated actions, music and
dances; it will be difficult for us to understand how and why a
movement ends or when another begins. The Xingu conjure a world
of spirits that elude, spirits that attack, spirits that need to be
appeased, spirits that evade and invade lives. There is spirituality in
the struggles of the young men fighting, yet their dusty, ferocious
two-minute wrestling bouts also offer a ludic attraction within the
ritual. Spirituality is invoked through struggles that are part of the
memory and identity of a people. Throughout the four days, other
villagers are summoned and arrive from afar by boat, bicycle,
motorbike and on foot to be part of this year’s Kuarup. There is a
spiritual insecurity to be found in the Xingu as they gather to
celebrate their funeral ritual: a sense of still trying to discover what
life is and what it is about. Perhaps that is what has drawn Simon
here. It is part of his struggle and his destiny, just like the journey
that Popescu traces for McIntyre in
Amazon Beaming.
A journey to
a place where everything converges.
Although you did not survive the long journey back home to Lisbon,
Pêro Vaz de Caminha, your letter reached its destination and has
continued to speak to us across the centuries of an encounter in
April 1500 that defined both a new world and our destiny.
Globalisation seemingly brings people and lands ever closer, and