The Encounter (NHB Modern Plays)

Complicite, Simon McBurney

• Verlag: Nick Hern Books
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781788500494
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Britisches Drama

In 1969 Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer, found himself lost among the people of the remote Javari Valley in Brazil. It was an encounter that was to change his life, bringing the limits of human consciousness into startling focus.

Inspired by the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, The Encounter traces McIntyre's journey into the depths of the Amazon rainforest, incorporating innovative technology into a solo performance to build a shifting world of sound.

The Encounter opened at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2015 performed by Simon McBurney, and received its London premiere at the Barbican in February 2016 before embarking on a world tour.

'Masterful storytelling from a man and a company who are incapable of remaining within known theatrical boundaries' - Independent

'The stuff of a twisting, turning, thoroughly engrossing fairytale... McBurney captures the metaphysical spirit - as well as the pulse-quickening heart - of the experience with this head-turning, spellbinding show' - Telegraph

'The effect is a soundcloud of a process, in which fact and fiction, past and present, research and production intermingle, spinning a story out of the air' - Variety

'In a solo performance made with many people... [McBurney] pulls the thread of a story from out of the noise of contemporary western life and the sounds of the jungle to create a meditation on interconnectedness, perception and time' - Guardian

' The Encounter is a tour de force that shows contemporary theatre at its most immersive and thought-provoking' - Financial Times

1. The Beginning

As the audience enters, it seems there is almost nothing on stage. Anechoic soundproofing covers the back wall, but the stage should appear prosaic to the point of dullness.

Onstage are various speakers and microphones. A desk and chair are downstage-right. A binaural head is centre stage, facing the audience.

Multi-packs of water bottles are placed at various spots around the stage.

The opening section is partly improvised.

The ACTOR invites the audience to turn their telephones off, and from this simple announcement begins to talk to them in a conversational manner that suggests the show has not really yet begun. This draws the audience into another kind of attention, through the description of how the evening will unfold.

ACTOR. My daughter is five. She doesn’t believe I work at night, so I’m going to take a photo of you all on my iPhone to prove I was really here. I have more photographs of my children here than there are photographs of my entire life. And these are just the ones I’ve taken in the last week. And there are more photographs on a single page of my phone than I have of the whole of my father’s childhood. Looking at these pictures of my children, I feel such a sense of responsibility. Because when they look at them, they feel as though they’re looking back at their whole lives.

But it is not their lives, it is only a story. And I worry they’ll mistake this for reality, just as we all mistake stories for reality.

There’s something uniquely human about telling stories. You might say that stories are what have allowed the human race to thrive. Stories, fiction, are how we explain, organise and agree on the meaning of our lives.

For example, two men who have never met might go to war together to fight and die for something called the United Kingdom. But the United Kingston does not exist. It’s a fictional idea that helps us organise ourselves into… what?

Two lawyers will fight to defend someone they don’t know because they both believe in the existence of the law, justice and human rights. But these things don’t exist. They’re fictions. Stories.

They don’t exist outside the collective imagination, but they allow us to organise ourselves by forming narratives we can all agree on wherever we are. They shape everything we see and believe in.

That is why I feel so responsible for the stories I tell my children…

I remember my father reading me bedtime stories as a child that transported me to other places and times. And that was how, for the first time, I started to get inside someone else’s head, and imagine what their experiences felt like.

And now I get into bed with my children at night, and tell them stories in the same way. I watch them empathising with the characters, discovering what connects and separates them from other people, other worlds. It is an intimate process.

It seems empathy and proximity are connected, so I’d like to get closer to you. Can you put your headphones on?

The following text is spoken into a microphone and is heard by the audience through their individual headphones. From now on, all narration, dialogue and other text, as well as all sound effects, are heard by the audience through the headphones.

So now instead of shouting I can be as close to you as I am to my children. Closer in fact, because now, instead of whispering in your ear, I am in the middle of your head.

I would like to check your headphones are all working, I will take a walk from one side of your head to the other, without even moving.

The sound the audience hears moves to the left ear.

I am now in your left ear, and now… I will move across to the right side.

The sound moves across towards the right ear. A very brief pause in case any audience members still have their headphones the wrong way round.

This is all being manipulated by technicians at the sound desk, but you have the feeling that my voice has ‘walked across’ your brain. I have not, but you ‘feel’ that I have.

Now you will feel that my voice is getting lower in pitch. It is not. It is simply being modified by a pitch modifier, also operated from the sound desk behind you. But it does appear that my voice has lowered.

The following is spoken into a different microphone, with voice-modification effects pitching the voice lower.

LOREN. And as my voice is getting lower, I too begin to ‘feel’ not quite myself. It feels more comfortable to me to speak now with an American accent. And this is the voice I will adopt for the principal character in the piece, the photographer Loren McIntyre. Loren McIntyre whose story unfolds in 1969. Here he is. And now you begin to accept this pitch as truly my own voice. So much so that when I speak in my ‘normal’ voice, the one I first used…

The ACTOR moves to the other microphone which is not pitch modified.

ACTOR. Of course I immediately sound like Mickey Mouse.

My voice was modified in pitch. But how might we also play similarly with the idea of space?

The binaural head is now turned on, picking up the ACTOR’s voice and the acoustics of the space. The following is heard binaurally.

To do so I’m going to use another microphone, a binaural microphone, which imitates the human head. It places you aurally right here on the stage. As if these ears were yours. It’s as if you were standing onstage with me.

It’s a somewhat skewed impression because the right ear is your left ear and the left ear is your right ear. So I’m just going to turn it around so it’s in the right configuration.

The head is turned to face upstage.

Now what I would like you to do is close your eyes. I’m going to take a little walk, around your head. You should have the impression that I really am beside you. This is not digital manipulation, this is what I’m really doing. Now I’m getting a little bit too close, maybe a little too intimate.

I’m a little bit dry, so I think I’ll have some water.

Pours and drinks water.

That’s better.

And to give you a sense of how the brain mistakes fiction for reality, I’m going to breathe into your ear and it will literally start to heat up.

Breathes.

Oh and there’s just a little hair here that I’ll get for you. And while I’m here I think I’ll give you a little haircut.

Snips the scissors around the binaural head.

SFX on small hand-held speaker: a mosquito flying around the head.

And now there’s this damned mosquito flying around.

Please open your eyes.

The ACTOR is standing with a speaker in their hand.

And there’s no mosquito. There’s just this speaker. It sounds real, but it is in fact just a –

The following is pre-recorded, although that might not be immediately obvious.

RECORDING. – speaker which is producing the sound of the mosquito. And as you look at it, the sound seems less convincing, simply because your eyes are telling you that you are listening to a recording. And in fact, it’s not even a real mosquito, but a recording of someone blowing on a piece of paper and a comb… (Continues.)

LIVE. And what you’ve probably realised by now is that this too is a recording. This is something that happened six months ago, when we were working on the show. Excuse me, can you turn the mosquito off now.

RECORDING. What?

LIVE. Can you turn that off; it’s really annoying.

RECORDING. You want me to turn it off?

LIVE. Yes, it’s really annoying.

RECORDING. Okay.

LIVE. Thank you. My voice over there is a recording, he doesn’t exist.

RECORDING. What do you mean I don’t exist?

LIVE. You’re not real.

RECORDING. Well, of course I’m real.

LIVE. He’s a recording from the past.

RECORDING. No, I’m in the present and you’re in the future!

LIVE. No you’re in the past and I’m the present.

RECORDING. Well okay, I’m in the past. Shall we swap sides?

LIVE. Okay, no problem. That’s not going to affect causality.

RECORDING. So, where are you?

LIVE. I’m on stage, at [name of theatre].

RECORDING. Oh my god! Should I be worried?

LIVE. No, not particularly.

RECORDING. How many people are there?

LIVE. Quite a few.

RECORDING. How’s it going?

LIVE. Well, they seem to be enjoying it.

RECORDING. I’ll just carry on talking then. Since I’m now clearly somewhere in the past, and I don’t really exist. Well actually, I think I do, because your past is probably more important to you than your present. And actually your past is probably more present to you than anything else. It’s created who you are. But your past is also a story. And we use that story to try to predict the future. So we’ll look back and ...