I was excited to see Simon McBurney’s The Encounter at the Odeon Theatre last night, and would definitely
recommend it to all English speakers. It’s a rare occurrence to see theatre in
English in Paris, and when it’s McBurney, it’s worth lining up for tickets.
The Encounter is a
one-man show that tells the story of the American National Geographic
photographer Loren McIntyre who travels to a remote part of the Brazilian Amazon
to document the existence of the Mayoruna people. As we know from the plethora
of jungle stories in which explorers since the Conquistadors have ventured to
this region of the world, things usually don’t end well for Westerners. However,
McIntyre’s story as re-told by McBurney has an interesting trajectory because
he lived to tell of the transformation he experienced as a result of his
adventure.
McIntyre’s (somewhat familiar) story of being led into the
forest by the locals soon after arriving, unable to communicate through shared
language, met with mistrust and hostility by the people he has come to
photograph, threatened with murder by one of the locals, rescued from near
death by others, taking of hallucinogenic drugs, disorientation and all the
usual plot twists is just the beginning of McBurney’s re-presentation. It’s a
one man show with very little else on McBurney’s stage other than a lot of
water bottles, various microphones, plastic speakers, a table and chair. But
the extension of the performance is achieved through sophisticated
technological manipulations of sound. Sound gives the stage a
multi-dimensionality; it enables us to visualize the story, is manipulated to
create multiple characters, and surrounds us with an immersive environment. Each
person in the audience dons head phones on arrival in the theatre, and is
quickly taken into the Amazon jungle, caught in the water, creeping through the
forest, surrounded by mosquitoes, admiring the color of the local people, their
tattoos, their piercings, and eventually suffering the burden of the humidity.
Together with the rich texture of the language, McBurney uses the sound to
create this world in our minds. At moments, the experience is even
disorienting. When McBurney comes across four freshly butchered bodies of white
people, I found myself squirming at the blood and the insects it attracts. There
were also times when I looked around at a voice I momentarily misunderstood to
be coming from behind me, only to realize it was the manipulation of the
microphone.
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The extension of the set through sound also facilitates the
creation of different voices, McBurney’s ability to move between accents,
continents, and an oscillation between the present in McBurney’s London home,
his discussion in a café with the man who wrote McIntyre’s story, and the
photographer’s journey through the Amazon. Through these sonic and aural
extensions, as well as the constant revelation of these strategies, the piece also
enters into a discourse on the illusion of the distinction between reality and
fiction, representation and reality. For example, The Encounter opens with McBurney already in character casually
telling the audience how the performance is put together, revealing its
mechanisms so to speak. It takes a few minutes to realize this is what we are
seeing, and audience members in the audience who don’t know McBurney, may even
ask themselves if the guy up the front is a stage hand. Thus, where the piece
actually begins is difficult to discern.
As well as being about the fusion of representation and
reality, The Encounter is also a play
about time and the ability of the human warrior to transcend time, to live in a
time that is not governed by our own ideas of mechanical precision as it is dictated
by the watch. It’s an interpretation of the story that becomes about the movement
beyond language, beyond the linearity of past and present, beyond the
divisiveness of nature and technology. That is, it becomes about the mechanisms
it uses to convey the story itself.
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I came away haunted by the phrase, “Some of us are friends”
which was telepathically communicated to McIntyre by Barnacle, the chief of the
Mayoruna. The line speaks to the relationship between the westerner and the
indigenous across history. Some of us are friends awaits completion with, while
some of us are exploited by capitalism’s greed for the oil that is the
lifeblood of the Mayoruna land. Of course, the exploitation of the natural
resources by the west in the interests of money then makes the piece very
topical and it becomes highly political. In turn, while McIntyre communicates
telepathically with the people with whom he does not share a language, he
communicates with us through a sophisticated mélange of visual and sonic
effects. Then there is a character named after his habit of ending every
sentence with “OVER” because he learnt Portuguese as a radio operator, when the
Americans came, killed his wife and child. His introduction is of course a
searing critique on the language given to the colonized in exchange for their
lives.
Ultimately, this is the discourse that resonates well after
we leave the theatre: how the indigenous people are touched irrevocably by the
westerners who go there, touched in a way that comes as a kind of death. While
the Mayoruna give life, enabling an existential transformation to the westerner
who invades their land, culture and lives, we, the colonizer take. The draining
of their soil of its life blood by mining petroleum being, of course, the end
of the invasion.
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