Tonight, at 1 a.m., India time, you can experience yet another time-zone challenged cultural event. The British theatre group, Complicite, will be broadcasting a live performance of their play, The Encounter , straight from London’s Barbican Centre, to their website and on YouTube as well.
The play has an extraordinary real-life genesis. In 1969, American photojournalist Loren McIntyre journeyed to the densely-forested Javari valley in the heart of the Brazilian Amazonia and, having lost his bearings, encountered the then still ‘uncontacted’ Matsés tribe. Finding his way back was impossible: he had no way of communicating with his otherwise friendly hosts. During his accidental captivity, McIntyre was “confronted with notions that overturned everything he thought he knew about the world”, as playwright Simon McBurney said in The Guardian .
At one point, McIntyre found that he had begun to communicate wordlessly with the tribe’s leader. A 1991 article in the Los Angeles Times notes, “This telepathy seemed at times to include the indecipherable background ‘buzz’ of the entire tribe’s mental activity.” McIntyre came to call the phenomenon ‘beaming’. After his escape, for 20 years, he rarely spoke about this, till the Romanian author Petru Popescu met him on a river boat, and drew out the story. This led to the 1991 book, Amazon Beaming . McBurney was given the book in 1994. And 20 years later, he would find himself amidst the Matsés, driven there purely by the unbridled need to “tell the story to other people in the theatre”, and to experience something akin to McIntyre’s transcendental journey.
A very strong advisory to those watching, at the Barbican, or via the live-stream: you must wear headphones, or the effect of the binaural sound design will be lost. This three-dimensional sound will give you the acoustic experience of actually being in an Amazonian rain-forest, alive with tones and sensations. As McBurney writes, “I thought the only way to represent the most biodiverse place on the planet was to make people imagine. And McIntyre’s journey is as much an inner one as a somatic experience. Perhaps what happened to him internally was even more attritional than his physical hardships.” With the headphones, he wants people to experience being both alone and together simultaneously, in much the same way McIntyre was.
Complicite is a company with some name recall in India, thanks to their 2010 tour with A Disappearing Number , also directed and conceived by McBurney, with a multi-cultural ensemble cast. Inspired by the collaboration in the 1910s between exemplary pure mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujam, and Cambridge’s GH Hardy, the play featured .tabla percussion summoning the cadences of mathematical axioms. It took Prithvi Theatre’s Sanjna Kapoor, three attempts to get the show to India. As producer Judith Dimant said then, “Making it to India was possibly the hardest thing we had ever pulled off.”
Live-streaming a production perhaps sidesteps the logistical nightmare that mounting it could involve in countries like India, which have poor infrastructure. Of course, filmed live entertainment can never capture the ephemeral incandescence of watching a performance in the flesh.
However, as regular screenings of National Theatre offerings at the NCPA have shown, sometimes the right technology can yield impeccable results. One of the first plays simulcast in India, Frankenstein , with Benedict Cumberbatch, was captured on multiple cameras that zoomed in and panned across and amplified each moment of drama, a cinema adventure that perhaps bested the experience of watching it out of crummy seats. The Encounter will perhaps never play to the Matsés in the way its playwright has envisaged, so at least in that, we are lucky to experience it ourselves, one degree removed, in the privacy of our rooms.
The Encounterwill be live-streamed tonight at 1 a.m. on complicite.org and youtube.com/user/CompliciteCompany/It’s free to watch. It will also be available on demand for a week after the live broadcast.
The author is a freelance writer and theatre critic
