English actor and director Simon McBurney will be recognizable to many for his supporting roles in action movies of recent years like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, but he is also the co-founder of Complicité, a 34-year-old theater collective in London that has become known for wildly experimental, intellectually challenging stage work, some of which hasn't occurred on a stage at all such as an adaptation of John Berger's To The Wedding, a collaboration with The Pet Shop Boys that was performed in Trafalgar Square. Complicité's latest and much acclaimed work, The Encounter, is a one-man show in which the entire audience wears headphones and is led through what the New York Times called "an aural labyrinth of many layers" that doubles as a narrated trip through the Amazon rainforest.
The show comes to The Curran this month for a brief engagement, from April 25 to May 7, and here we bring you some video previews that clearly won't do justice to the live experience of the piece. It is based on the 1991 novel Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, which itself is based on the real-life accounts of American photojournalist Loren McIntyre traveling through the Amazon and encountering Mayoruna tribe in 1969.
McBurney takes the audience on a journey that goes back and forth in time with very little grounding in any "present tense," incorporating meta references to his own creation of the show, his interviews with academics and Popescu himself, and his five-year-old daughter interrupting him as he works. His live vocals and old-timey radio sound effects (shaken water bottles to simulate the sounds of the Amazon River) mix with pre-recorded materials, and having not yet seen the show I can only go on the rapturous descriptions of others to understand what this will be like.
Below, snippets of McBurney's meditations on consciousness, the self, and imagination, as well as a video diary McBurney did when he traveled to do his own research in the Amazon in the preparation for the show.
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