Every so often you come across something that challenges how you define things.
We all have things in our lives that have done this. It is one of the reasons why we seek out culture. Why as a species we are drawn to adventures both real and imaginary. Perhaps in your life one took the form of a book, or a movie, or even a chance encounter.
Which brings us to Complicite/Simon McBurney’s incredible, genre defying The Encounter, now playing at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. McBurney has upended what I thought was possible with the one-man storytelling format and managed to create an experience that bends time and space.
A Little Slight of Mind
At it’s core The Encounter is the story of Loren McIntyre, the American photojournalist who co-discovered the headwaters of the Amazon, on his most harrowing adventure. For two months in 1969 McIntyre got lost in the Amazon chasing after the Mayoruna people. He survived alongside them, despite a complete lack of shared language, thanks to an experience of telepathic communication with the tribal elder.
Yes, this is a real story, and this is how McIntyre tells it — with McBurney playing the part of McIntyre with a rugged American accent. But that’s just the barest outline of what The Encounter is, and as fantastical as the story reads on paper, it is the way that McBurney realizes the tale that makes this show one for the ages.
For starters: every seat in the house comes equipped with a pair of headphones. This is so that the array of microphones the Complicite team has placed on stage — including a human head shaped binaural microphone (more on that in a moment) — can be fed directly to the audience. The array creates a virtual field of sound around the listeners head, putting every member of the audience on stage with McBurney though an act of sonic teleportation.
That human-head shaped binaural mic becomes the co-star of the show, allowing McBurney to move in close to us in our mind’s eye even when he’s yards away physically. The experience is uncanny, creating a kind of out of body sensation at points only to slam back down into the feeling that we are with McIntyre in the rainforest. Hinting that we too are sharing in an act of telepathy that reaches across time with McBurney as the medium.
It is rare in the theatre to see form match content so cleanly, and when that happens it is something to rejoice. The Encounter starts out on that level, and then takes off for even more ambitious ground. Yet somehow the technology — which is astounding — never overwhelms the story of McBurney’s own performative wizardry. He slides in and out of time — here with us in the theatre, now months ago in his London flat talking to his daughter, now as McIntyre undergoing a harrowing — without seeming to break a sweat.
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All simultaneously right next to us and in the magic box of the stage.
There’s something of the experience of virtual reality to The Encounter, and the audio storytelling is so robust that this performance should be required for every artist and producer who wants to make great VR.
Between Two Worlds
If all that The Encounter did was bend perception for the sake of bending perception it would be worth the price of admission. But there is another way in which the form matches the content.
For while this is a performance by a white man telling the story of a white man’s experience of an indigenous people’s culture the way in which it is told suggests that there are uncomfortable ties between us all that have long since gone past the point of being ignored.
The Mayoruna of 1969 were on the run, trying to escape deeper into an Amazon already overrun by oil fields and the tools of the modern world in search of a profit. In McIntyre’s telling they wanted nothing more than to abandon the means that lead to our consumptive culture, and indeed wished that he had never chased them into the jungle.
Yet the damage has long since been done. The people alive today — Westerners and Mayoruna alike — are the children of the choices made then, forced to reckon with a world shaped by decisions we never had a hand in. Benefiting or suffering because of them in unequal measures. It might be better if somehow we could rollback time and create a barrier between our two worlds, but that choice has been robbed from us. So now we must find a way to recognize that we share a world. That the walls of culture that separate us might obscure an older way, what the Mayoruna call “the old language.”
Immersive Storytelling
While the technology that McBurney uses is not the same as telepathy, the experience gives the sensation of a deeper contact. Walking into the theatre and taking my seat I carried great doubt that The Encounter could be a truly immersive experience. A theatre seat meant leaving out a key part of immersive theatre: the body of the audience.
Yet, The Encounter is very much immersive. It is a work of immersive storytelling. More akin to a piece like Her Long Black Hair than a work like Sleep No More. McBurney has worked through the design of the experience for the audience with as much care as anyone making great immersive theatre or virtual reality has. The limitation that the audience must sit and listen becomes a mere complication in the hands of the sorcerer.
For this I am grateful to McBurney and the Complicite team. They have knocked down another wall that separates the arts institutions of the world and the growing immersive disciplines. All in service of ideas whose time is long since overdue.
The Encounter plays at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in a limited engagement through April 16th, and is currently on tour.
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