Acoustic baffling. The phrase describes
both the backdrop to the vast Barbican stage for this Complicité
production – a pattern of foam wedges to deaden reverberation within a
space – and director/performer Simon McBurney’s approach to telling
this particular story. The audience don headphones and attend as
McBurney works a stage bare but for a functional table and chair, a few
dozen mineral water bottles and the wherewithal to create a range of
soundscapes. McBurney wears a head microphone; there are a number of
ambient mics, and a binaural set-up shaped like a human head to create
the kind of stereo surround panorama we naturally perceive. One of two
directional mics at the table is set to fluke McBurney’s tenor speaking
voice down to become that of his protagonist, American photojournalist
Loren McIntyre. McBurney uses hand-held speakers and looping units to
create the sounds of the Amazon rainforest in which McIntyre made first
contact in the 1970s with a Mayoruna tribe and, cut off from contact
with “civilisation”, accompanied them in bewilderment on their quest to
return to “the beginning”… of time.
Recordings from different times – interviews with Petru Popescu (of
whose book
Amazon Beaming
this is an adaptation) and Marcus du Sautoy, domestic conversations
with McBurney’s young daughter – blend in our ears with the live
performance. For this piece not only retells McIntyre’s story about
time, but is itself about storytelling and time, and also about voices.
The multi-vocal storytelling of McBurney’s Berlin production of Stefan
Zweig’s
Beware Of Pity, which
I reviewed several weeks ago, now becomes apparent as a kind of
limbering-up for this presentation, in which one man remains alone on
stage for more than two uninterrupted hours. Alone on stage, but not in
our perception. It is not unlike one of Katie Mitchell’s dramatic
deconstructions, except that the artificial composition builds up not
before our eyes but between our ears and that, in a Complicité keynote,
the process is never allowed to overshadow the material. This account
of the lessons and wonders that a technology-free Brazilian people may
have to teach us is conveyed by using contemporary technology to create
a palpable impression of those wonders.
Written for the Financial
Times.