Simon McBurney, founder of Complicite, and I both studied at L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. After leaving, we worked together on a couple of productions and, in the decades since, I have been interested to see how he has developed the skills we learned at the school. In The Encounter he takes storytelling in impressive new directions.
On the stage is a table, packs of bottles of water, a box overflowing with celluloid strips, a circle of speakers, and a grey, geometric head resting on a stand. This last is a microphone that records in “so-called 3D”. Across the backs of our seats hang earphones to be put on – through these we will hear the entire performance delivered as an extraordinary world of sound that surrounds each one of us, retreats from us, whispers close in our ear, moves to one side or the other. Some of the sounds are created before our eyes by McBurney, playing with objects, voice, body, effects pedals; others are pre-recorded and are fed into the live performance by sound operators Helen Skiera and Ella Wahlström. This aural-physical combination achieves visceral intensities.
McBurney kaleidoscopes us through times and places. We are in the here and now of the performance as he talks to us about stories, identity and time. We are in the 1970s Amazonian rainforest, immersed in the encounter between North American photographer-explorer Loren McIntyre and a group of local Indian people, who have little contact with incomers (based on an account of the events by Romanian writer Petru Popescu). We are in McBurney’s home, where he is putting together the show we are watching while fielding post-bedtime interruptions from his young, sleepless daughter.
Transitions are playfully managed: we think McBurney is speaking to us in the present; he turns his head; we realise the words we hear are recordings from a time past. These games with time are also thematic, intersecting the collective time of communal belief, the subjective time of individual perception, the passage of night and day, the private, timeless bedtime stories told across generations. We the audience become part of all these times, and add to them our own experience of this time of storytelling movingly executed.
