The Encounter @ EICC, 16 Aug
An astounding, immersive show, The Encounter is performed and directed by Simon McBurney of Complicite
The audience is equipped with head phones, where sound is relayed from a totem-like binaural ‘head’, so that we too are dropped into the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. Based on Petru Popescu’s Amazon Beaming about Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer captured by the Mayoruna (Cat people) and the recordings of McBurney’s own trip, we too experience a destabilizing encounter.
What is real? What is the nature of time? McBurney plays with our perception of reality with real-time performance and recordings jumping back and forth in time. He is the only person on stage but he performs many characters who inhabit our imagination while a mosquito whines at our ear, or a jaguar coughs. Sound effects are created on stage – pouring a plastic bottle to create the river, or screwed-up video tape for walking through jungle undergrowth. The voices of McIntyre and the Amazonians are intercut with McBurney’s own young son back home asking unanswerable questions, as children do, and those of scientists, philosophers and activists on how for the índios, contact with ‘whites’ often means death.
We share McIntyre's experiences; how he loses his trainers, his watch, his camera... everything that makes a 20th century person; how he enters a new sense of consciousness and learns to speak the ‘old language’, communicating through silence with the head-man; how he undergoes terrifying drug-induced hallucinations to reach another reality, the pulsing rhythm of time, and we too emerge shaken.
The Encounter, EICC, 'til 23 Aug, 7:30pm (2:30pm), £32