In October 1969, photographer Loren McIntyre was dropped by plane into a remote area of the Amazon rainforest, hoping to make contact with the Mayoruna people for a National Geographic feature. Within hours he had found a tribe, but he was also hopelessly lost with 400 miles of jungle around him. His only hope of survival was to stay with the Mayoruna. But would they accept him in their midst? They appeared to be experiencing a crisis themselves, one that McIntyre initially couldn’t grasp because he could not communicate with them in any language he knew.
A story seldom has a beginning or an end; it is a continuum that snakes back upon itself. Sometimes you are not even sure when the story has actually begun to be told. That’s the case with Simon McBurney’s latest piece for Complicite. In a solo performance made with many people, most of them creative technicians, he pulls the thread of a story from out of the noise of contemporary western life and the sounds of the jungle to create a meditation on interconnectedness, perception and time.
Inspired by Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming, based on McIntyre’s experiences, McBurney’s piece is a Chinese whisper of a show from a far-distant world that is delivered straight into the audience’s head using binaural technology and headphones. Its intimacy is both an astonishment, and at times, a challenge.
Just as McIntyre’s conception of the world is tested by every step that he takes deeper into the jungle, so the technology combines with McBurney’s dense, complex storytelling to lure us deeper into the thickets of the imagination where time is not just one dimension, where there are many different kinds of language and where jaguars hunt. Also on the hunt are the developers and the exploiters, in search of oil, or “the blood of the earth” as the Mayoruna call it.
The clinical coldness of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre soon gives way to the sweaty jungle. The clock-operated world retreats. The show creates the kind of altered consciousness in the audience that mirrors what McIntyre is experiencing in the jungle. Fascinatingly, although at the very start McBurney very carefully shows us how the technology operates – like a magician deconstructing a trick – knowing how it works doesn’t make us any less susceptible to its transformative possibilities. For all the wonders of science, maybe some of the mysteries of the world do not need to be unpicked and explained, but understood through being felt and experienced. Like all McBurney’s work, this is a show that will only deepen and get richer. It has all the time in the world.
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