The Encounter - Théâtre Vidy Lausanne

 REVUE DE PRESSE
SIMON MCBURNEY
The Encounter
08 – 12.09.2015
Edinburgh: The Encounter, International Conference Centre
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/edinburgh-the...
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Edinburgh: The Encounter, International Conference
Centre, review: 'spellbinding'
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THE ENCOUNTER IS ONE OF THE EARLY HITS OF THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL CREDIT: A. PHILLIPSON/LIVEPIX
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THEATRE CRITIC
9 AUGUST 2015 • 2:08PM
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Edinburgh: The Encounter, International Conference Centre
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/edinburgh-the...
You are alone in the dense, almost inaccessible Amazon region of Brazil, 400 miles from
"civilisation". The aim is to take photographs of an elusive, barely contacted tribes-people
called the Mayoruna – to show the world what they look like. And, amazingly, you strike gold.
There, suddenly, some of them are. You follow them, snapping as you go – failing, unlike
Hansel and Gretel, to leave a trail behind you.
The story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre’s incredible 1969 encounter with
“the cat people” (so named because of the whisker-like palm-spines adorning their lips and
noses) is the stuff of a twisting, turning, thoroughly engrossing fairytale. And in re-telling it, in
this brilliant solo show mounted by his much-travelled company Complicite, Simon
McBurney adopts a high-tech bedside manner that places the audience in the role of
wide-eyed – or should that be wide-eared? – children.
Clipped to every seat in the large, functional theatre suite at the International Conference
Centre is a set of headphones. What you hear has the intimacy of someone whispering in your
ears, as if snuggled up beside you. But, more than that, thanks to an array of sonic gadgetry, at
the centre of which stands a ‘binaural’ pick-up device, mounted on a mannequin human head,
the effect is fully immersive – so that you hear sounds from all sides, conjured with
disconcerting pinpoint precision.
Close your eyes, and you can believe you’re in a far-flung corner of the world – gnats and
mosquitoes buzzing skin-pricklingly close, birds hooting in the trees. Keep them open, as you
are mainly bound to, and you are aware of McBurney – scruffy in jeans, T-shirt and baseball
cap – busily creating this perturbing, polyphonic paradise.
He partly, often amiably and entertainingly, chats in his own voice, confiding details about his
inquisitive daughter and domestic life (samples of which we hear). He switches too – by
putting on an accent, and talking into a pitch-lowering microphone – into McIntyre’s growly
baritone. And with the help of a backstage team and looper-pedals, McBurney the magician
can turn the sloshing of a water bottle into the lapping sound of a river; he can scrunch old
VHS tape to evoke a trek through humid undergrowth; he transforms a crisp-packet crackle
into a roaring fire.
Such is the power of imagination that we are conscious of the artifice but can lose ourselves,
like McIntyre, in this alien terrain. We are miles away, yet somehow connected. Through this
mesmerising theatrical trickery, McBurney captures the metaphysical spirit – as well as the
pulse-quickening heart – of the experience, which was recorded in the 1991 factional novel
Amazon Beaming by the Romanian Petru Popescu. McIntyre, who died in 2003, maintained
that he developed the ability to communicate telepathically – “beam” – with certain of the
Mayoruna, and in living among them entered a different state of mind, and time.
Somehow, over two hours that leave its charismatic star exhausted and the audience elated,
we too are taken into a synapse-altering space, floating free of modernity’s plastic trappings.
Does that sound like a far-fetched claim? Honestly, with this head-turning, spellbinding show,
hearing is believing.
2 sur 6
27.08.15 12:08
‘The Encounter’ Review: Edinburgh International Festival Pr...
http://variety.com/2015/legit/reviews/the-encounter-edinburgh...
Edinburgh Theater Review:
Complicite’s ‘The Encounter’
AUGUST 10, 2015 | 08:48AM PT
ROBBIE JACK
Matt Trueman (http://variety.com/author/matt-trueman/)
Leaping off from Petru Popescu’s book “Amazon Beaming,” an account
of an American photographer’s encounter with an indigenous tribe, Simon McBurney (http://variety.com/t/simon-mcburney/)’s solo show for
his company Complicite (http://variety.com/t/complicite/) is quite
extraordinary: a profound meditation on our relationship to time and a
captivating piece of high-definition storytelling. “The Encounter,”
premiering as part of the Edinburgh International Festival (http://variety.com/t/edinburgh-international-festival/) and moving to London’s
Barbican in February, is theater that materializes out of next to nothing,
with one of the world’s great theatermakers — and theater thinkers —
working right on the cutting edge of his art-form to scintillating effect.
McBurney has long been fascinated by the presence of the past. (His father
was a renowned archaeologist.) In “Mnemonic” (2003), he recounted the
discovery of Ötzi, a 5,500 year-old corpse found preserved in the Alps. “The
1 sur 4
Encounter”
seeks out Ötzi’s living counterparts: the Mayoruna tribe, living
isolated in the Amazon rainforest.
27.08.15 12:06
‘The Encounter’
Review:
International Festival
http://variety.com/2015/legit/reviews/the-encounter-edinburgh...
McBurney
stands
on aEdinburgh
large soundstage,
its backPr...
wall patterned
with foam
soundproofing. There’s a desk with a couple of microphones and, center
stage, a head on a stick: a binaural microphone that records sound in space.
When he whispers into its left ear, we in the audience, wearing headphones,
feel his presence at our left shoulder. Gareth Fry’s design piles up layers of
sounds — recorded interviews, foley effects, a soundscape of McBurney’s
home study. The effect is a soundcloud of a process, in which fact and fiction,
past and present, research and production intermingle, spinning a story out of
the air.
One microphone drops McBurney’s voice a register. Adopting a slow American
accent, he becomes Loren McIntyre, the American photojournalist who, in
1969, successfully located the Mayoruna people. In doing so, McIntyre
dropped out of time. Having failed to mark a route back to civilization, he
became marooned amid 400 square miles of dense, Brazilian rainforest. With
no shared language and suspicion growing among the tribe, his survival hangs
in the balance, dependent on the protection of its headman, whom he
nicknames Barnacles. In time, the two men strike up a connection, apparently
telepathic.
It’s a story told with vivid precision, both linguistic and theatrical. McBurney
flies over the Amazon with a bamboo stick for a plane. He takes us right into
the rainforest, looping his own animal whoops and insectoid croaks as he
circles the stage, rustling plastic for leaves underfoot. The head-mic becomes
the shamanic headman. It’s a deeply immersive experience, completely
transporting. You seem to fall out of time with McIntyre and McBurney, rapt by
this gripping thriller.
Time swirls through the whole piece: the modernity encroaching on and
threatening Mayorunan existence, photographs that attempt to pause the
present, sound recordings that bring back the past. It explores the psychology
of time — the need to stay connected to it and the urge to surpass or escape
it — as well as the philosophy. “More than one time is possible,” says a
scientist in a recorded interview. McBurney makes it so.
History exists in our heads just as this show does. It’s a kind of telepathy in
itself; McBurney’s voice transmitting direct to our brains. The show’s form
doesn’t just echo its content, it elucidates it. All this technology serves the
same primitive, human urges: the need to communicate, the itch to transcend
time. Where Mayorunae lick frogs and dance for hours, we disappear into our
2 sur 4
smartphones.
27.08.15 12:06
‘The Encounter’
Edinburgh
International
Festival Pr...
http://variety.com/2015/legit/reviews/the-encounter-edinburgh...
What
elevates Review:
this story
— a gripping
adventure
in its own right
— is that it so
matters to McBurney. It’s born of a burning question: whether we need all this
stuff; whether the gadgets and comforts are worth the intrusions into our lives
and relationships; whether the march of materialism is worth everything it
eradicates. He takes a hammer to his tech desk, then stops. Scattered around
the stage are water bottles — exactly what the parched McIntyre needs to
survive, exactly what McBurney needs to calm down. This is a piece that asks
about the price of progress, but never forgets the possibilities. Sensational.
Edinburgh Theater Review: Complicite's 'The Encounter'
Edinburgh International Conference Center, Edinburgh International Festival; 480 seats;
£32 ($50) top. Opened Aug. 8, 2015. Reviewed Aug. 9. Running time: 2 HOURS.
Production
A Complicite production of a play in one act by Simon McBurney.
Creative
Written by Simon McBurney; Directed by Simon McBurney and Kirsty Housley. Design,
Michael Levine; lighting, Paul Anderson; sound, Gareth Fry; projection, Will Duke.
Cast
Simon McBurney.
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The Encounter (Edinburgh International Conference Centre) ...
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REVIEWS
The Encounter (Edinburgh
International Conference
Centre)
Directed and performed by Simon McBurney,
Complicite's new production traces a lost
photographer's journey into the depths of the
Amazon rainforest



Michael Coveney • Edinburgh • 11 Aug 2015
WOS Rating:
Reader Reviews: Be the first to review this show
Simon McBurney in The Encounter. 'This extraordinary show is a sonic blast and a half'
© Robbie Jack
The theatre of the one-man show is usually a stand-up, or
a low key confessional, or a comic rant. Several great
performers - Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Ken
1 sur 5
27.08.15 12:11
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Complicite; in a brilliant programming coup, McBurney
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plays back to back with Lepage's latest piece, 887, in this
same venue later this week.
This extraordinary show is a sonic blast and a half, an
epic journey to the dangerous heart of the Amazonian
jungle from a writer's study in London where an
importunate child pleads for her father's attention.
McBurney humours the child, as he humours late-comers
to the theatre.
For with his technical team, he has created a radiostereophonic play in a live setting which we absorb
through our personal headsets while also watching
McBurney who is himself reading the script on an
autocue at the back of the huge auditorium. Sometimes
you catch yourself turning around in your seat, so
convincing is the wrap-around aural babble of voices,
insects, crackling fire, rushing rivers.
The literary source is a Romanian screenwriter's account
of a photographer, Loren McIntyre, who, in 1969, gets
lost in the Javari Valley on the border between Brazil and
Peru. McBurney splits his identity with that of McIntyre
as he becomes ever more enmeshed in danger,
anthropological research and political theory about the
decimation of the tribe he encounters.
Some of this becomes over-convoluted and hard to
follow, but the broad sweep of it is irresistible. It's like a
one-man version of Peter Brook's theatricalisation of
Colin Turnbull's book about the lost tribe of The Iks, but
at the opposite end of the purity scale, ie, McBurney gives
us the works.
The Encounter is also a meditation on paternity,
creativity and the merely providential in both artistic and
"real" life. It's a plea for a shared humanity but not a
soppy one, and some of the stories, and a lot of the detail,
are both mind-boggling and hair-raising. A real festival
triumph.
The Encounter runs at the Edinburgh International
2 sur 5
27.08.15 12:11
The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival review: a five...
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/edinburgh-fe...
The
Encounter,
Edinburgh
International Festival review: a
five-star hallucinogenic trip with
Complicite
Audiences wear headphones for Simon McBurney's new one-man show about the
Amazon jungle
Alice Jones
Tuesday, 11 August 2015
In a festival already over-populated by men and microphones, Simon McBurney has
produced something of a game-changer.
He hasn't taken up stand-up, though he begins his new solo show with a few minutes of
deceptively low-key knockabout chat. After that, he gets on with the real business of
transforming a chilly Edinburgh conference centre into the humid, hallucinogenic depths
of the Amazon jungle, using only his voice and a couple of microphones.
Complicite's brand new show, which will transfer to London's Barbican in February 2016,
is a hi-tech trip. The audience wear headphones that are of such quality that when
McBurney speaks into the left ear of a mannequin on stage, you can practically feel his
breath on your ear; and when he buzzes a mosquito sound around the right ear, you all
but bat it away. This is binaural technology - sounds recorded and transmitted
separately into each ear — and McBurney uses his new toy to bring his story thrillingly,
intimately alive.
That story, based on Petru Popescu's new book, Amazon Beaming, traces the journey of
the National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre into the Brazilian Amazon in 1969.
He was there to shoot the Mayoruna tribe, but when he found them and began to follow
them, he failed to mark his tracks back to his plane. Lost in the rainforest, he was forced
to live among the tribe, though they shared no language.
It is an incredible story, beautifully written. The tribal leader has warts on his legs “like
barnacles” and wears a “diadem of white egret feathers”. There are red-cheeked men
and dancing boys, jaguars and maggots, fires and floods and rituals with hallucinogenic
toads. It is, primarily, a cracking yarn but it sucks in bigger ideas at every narrative
twist. Is it possible to communicate without words? What good are possessions? Could
modern man to remove himself from time? What will become of these tribes if the
oilmen win?
For all its sound wizardry (overseen by Gareth Fry), this is also rather lo-tech,
old-fashioned storytelling, where a bottle of water makes the sound of a Cessna landing
on the river, a packet of crisps stands in for a crackling fire and two brooms evoke the
feeling of being trapped in a thorn bush. It's a bedtime tale, with added Foley effects.
1 sur 2
27.08.15 12:05
The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival review: a five...
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/edinburgh-fe...
McBurney wheels and whirls around the stage, swapping voice from narrator to McIntyre
to tribesman like a shaman. He is extraordinary.
Two hours without an interval is too long, but this is masterful storytelling from a man
and a company who are incapable of remaining within known theatrical boundaries. A
must-see - or perhaps I should say, a must-hear.
EICC, to 23 August (0131 473 2000; www.eif.co.uk).
2 sur 2
27.08.15 12:05
The Encounter, EICC, Review | Edinburgh Guide
http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2015/theatre/cabaret/...
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EdinburghGuide » Edinburgh's Festivals » Festival 2015 Reviews
The Encounter, EICC, Review
By
Vivien Devlin - Posted on
11 August 2015
RELATED CABARET NEWS
The Encounter, EICC, Review 11 Aug '15
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Aug '13
Show details
Venue: Edinburgh International Conference Centre
Company: Complicite
Running time: 120mins
Production: Simon McBurney (director), Michael Levine (design),
Gareth Fry (sound design), Paul Anderson (lighting).
Performers: Simon McBurney
Théâtre de Complicité was co-founded by actor and director
Simon McBurney in 1983, a Lecoq-inspired company creating an
Ballad of the Burning Star Review 13 Aug
'13
Hotel de l’Avenir Review 19 Aug '11
Mind Reading for Breakfast Review 07 Aug
'11
Fringe 2011: Just the Tonic and Underbelly
Mix It Up 04 Aug '11
Smoke and Mirrors Review 24 Aug '10
Frances Ruffelle - Beneath the Dress
“inimitable style of visual and devised theatre - strong,
Review 14 Aug '10
corporeal, poetic and surrealist.” Two years later they won the
Ferris Bueller's Way of ... - Free Review 14
Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Aug '10
Now, thirty years on, Complicite is on the Edinburgh
International Festival with McBurney performing what is, in
essence, a stand up show – a man and a microphone on stage.
But during this multi-layered, inventively theatrical experience,
17 Border Crossings, Summerhall, Fringe
review 26 Aug '15
the audience encounters a host of characters and exotic
Feast, Zoo Sanctuary, Review 26 Aug '15
creatures along the way, transported on a magical, mystery tour
EIF 2015: Max Richter –
in darkest Brazil.
Recomposed/Memoryhouse, Edinburgh
Like taking any journey, arrive in good time at the EICC, down
Playhouse, Review 26 Aug '15
two flights of escalators to the Lennox 3 suite, a vast arena with
Edinburgh Book Festival: Janice Galloway,
an extensive stage. The rows of plastic seats is more like a pop
Sex Life & Parenthood, Review 26 Aug '15
up Fringe venue (bring a cushion) with fitted head-phones. Sit
We This Way, Summerhall, Review 26 Aug
back to hear an extraordinary real life adventure story.
'15
Loren McIntyre first sailed the Amazon River in 1935 at the age
Current Location, Summerhall, Review 26
of 18. Brandishing notebook and camera he toured Japan, China,
Aug '15
Singapore, India, Africa and South America. with an insatiable
Paperwork 2, Fringe Venue 208 (Edinburgh
spirit for adventure. In the Peruvian Andes is Laguna McIntyre,
Ski Club), Review 26 Aug '15
the uppermost source of the Amazon River which he discovered
in 1971.
Vanity Bites Back, Gilded Balloon Study,
Review 26 Aug '15
“The Encounter” is based on as described in the book ” Amazon
Edinburgh Book Festival: Roy Hattersley, In
Beaming” by Petru Popescu. This is an account of McIntyre’s
Praise of Equality 26 Aug '15
life-enriching, death-defying experience after being kidnapped
by the Mayoruna tribe, sharing their magical spiritual journey to
1 sur 2
LATEST FESTIVAL NEWS & INFO
EIF 2015: Rudolf Buchbinder: Beethoven
27.08.15 12:19
The Encounter, EICC, Review | Edinburgh Guide
http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2015/theatre/cabaret/...
find the "beginning of time" beyond the reach of civilization.
Simon McBurney stands on stage in baseball cap, T shirt and
jeans. He is both himself as the narrator, switching in an instant
Piano Sonatas, Playfair Library, Review 25
Aug '15
More Edinburgh News
to the role of McIntye (a deep, purring American voice akin to
Harrison Ford). Time shifts from present to past, travelling in
space and place from his London family home to the Amazon
jungle, in a seamless, fast paced, rollercoaster ride of a
performance.
On stage are just a few props – table and office chair, bottles of
water, a box of discarded black video tape, a bamboo stick, and
various microphones producing special aural effects.
As if being part of an elaborate radio documentary, we listen
intently to the sound of a seaplane flying low over the Javari
River; we follow in Loren’s footsteps trekking through the lush
undergrowth, sense the steamy heat, hear the buzzing of
mosquitos, as we venture further into the jungle in pursuit of the
nomadic Cat People, the legendary Mayoruna tribe with their
tattoos and painted faces. Soon, lost in the rain forest, in a
shimmering, misty light, we can virtually feel the splashing
torrents of a monsoon shower drenching our skin.
Simon McBurney is like a magician with a box of tricks and
technical wizardry, charging around the stage with effervescent
energy, to create a vividly evocative soundscape with its myriad
of voices and music revolving in our mind.
Just one man, a microphone and a mesmerising traveller’s tale,
told with childlike imagination, humour and absorbing passion.
Show Times
7-10, 16-19, 21,22 August @ 7.30pm
14, 15, 20,23 August @ 2.30pm
Ticket price £ 32
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The Encounter
An unforgettable journey into the Amazon through 3D
sound
Source: The List
Date: 14 August 2015
Written by: Yasmin Sulaiman
comments
Credit: Gianmarco Bresadola
About a quarter of the way through Simon McBurney's new show with Complicite, I
realise I am watching with my jaw open. So astonishing and inventive is this production
that it feels like we're witnessing a real turning point in theatre, a performance that will
be looked back on in years to come as hugely influential.
1 sur 3
27.08.15 12:12
The Encounter – An unforgettable journey into the Amazon t...
https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/73550-the-encounter/
The Encounter uses binaural (3D) sound technology, which the audience experiences
through the headphones provided, to bring Petru Popescu's Amazon Beaming to life on
stage. Popescu's 1993 book tells the real-life tale of American photographer Loren
McIntyre, who travels to the Amazon in 1969, encounters the 'uncontacted' Mayoruna
tribe and is seemingly captured by them.
The Amazonian setting evokes images of rich, green vegetation and coursing rivers; but
on stage here at the ultra-modern Conference Centre, McBurney has only a few props, a
tangle of wires, some bottles of water, speakers and a head-shaped binaural
microphone for company. Behind him on the expansive, empty-ish stage is a huge
anechoic (echo-free) chamber wall, and its formidable appearance gets drawn into
McBurney's tale-telling too.
What McBurney does so well is demystify binaural technology, explaining to us in
entertaining detail how it works. So when he begins to tell McIntyre's story – loosely
intercut with the actor's young daughter's amusing interjections during his working
process ('Daddy, it's so boring') – we're not over-awed by the technology because we
understand how it works. Instead, we're captivated by how McBurney uses it to create a
deeply immersive world with almost no props.
It's an intense two hours and, thanks to its intelligent set-up and McBurney’s astounding
performance, they're unforgettable. If Fergus Linehan continues to programme
breathtaking works like this for the Edinburgh International Festival, we're in for a good
few years ahead.
EICC, 473 2000, until 23 Aug, 7.30pm (20 Aug, 2.30pm), £32.
The Encounter
“…my hand, groping around the universe, has torn a corner open… why did I tear the
corner open, if I’m not prepared for the encounter?” Twenty years ago Simon McBurney
was given a book. Written by a Romanian who escaped the Ceaușescu regime to
reinvent himself as a Los Angeles screenwriter, the book, Amazon Beaming…
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The Encounter review – kaleidoscopes through times and place...
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/23/the-encounter...
The Encounter review – kaleidoscopes
through times and place
Edinburgh International Conference CentreSimon McBurney impresses with a
visceral world of sound that transports his audience from the Amazonian rainforest
to his daughter’s bedroom
Clare Brennan
Sunday 23 August 2015 08.05 BST
S
imon McBurney, founder of Complicite, and I both studied at L’École Jacques
Lecoq in Paris. After leaving, we worked together on a couple of productions
and, in the decades since, I have been interested to see how he has developed
the skills we learned at the school. In The Encounter he takes storytelling in
impressive new directions.
On the stage is a table, packs of bottles of water, a box overflowing with celluloid
strips, a circle of speakers, and a grey, geometric head resting on a stand. This last is a
microphone that records in “so-called 3D”. Across the backs of our seats hang
earphones to be put on – through these we will hear the entire performance delivered
as an extraordinary world of sound that surrounds each one of us, retreats from us,
whispers close in our ear, moves to one side or the other. Some of the sounds are
created before our eyes by McBurney, playing with objects, voice, body, effects
pedals; others are pre-recorded and are fed into the live performance by sound
operators Helen Skiera and Ella Wahlström. This aural-physical combination achieves
visceral intensities.
McBurney kaleidoscopes us through times and places. We are in the here and now of
the performance as he talks to us about stories, identity and time. We are in the 1970s
Amazonian rainforest, immersed in the encounter between North American
photographer-explorer Loren McIntyre and a group of local Indian people, who have
little contact with incomers (based on an account of the events by Romanian writer
Petru Popescu). We are in McBurney’s home, where he is putting together the show
we are watching while fielding post-bedtime interruptions from his young, sleepless
daughter.
Transitions are playfully managed: we think McBurney is speaking to us in the
present; he turns his head; we realise the words we hear are recordings from a time
past. These games with time are also thematic, intersecting the collective time of
communal belief, the subjective time of individual perception, the passage of night
and day, the private, timeless bedtime stories told across generations. We the
audience become part of all these times, and add to them our own experience of this
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The Encounter review – kaleidoscopes through times and place...
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/23/the-encounter...
time of storytelling movingly executed.
More reviews
Topics
Edinburgh festival 2015
Theatre
Simon McBurney
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4 septembre 2015
« Le théâtre de texte n’est absolument pas mort » Samedi culturel, le samedi 5 septembre 2015
Simon McBurney in Vidy-Lausanne: Liebeserklärung an die...
http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/buehne/liebeserklaerung-an-die...
Simon McBurney in Vidy-Lausanne
Liebeserklärung an die Macht der
Imagination
Das Flaggschiff der Westschweizer Theater am Ufer des Genfersees bietet
Gelegenheit, internationale Produktionen zu sehen. Zur Eröffnung gab's ein
hinreissendes Solo.
von
Andreas Klaeui
10.9.2015, 05:30 Uhr
Das Théâtre de Vidy direkt am Genfersee ist nicht nur das schönste, sondern
auch das wichtigste Westschweizer Theater.
Seit einem Jahr hat es einen neuen Direktor, den 47-jährigen Vincent
Baudriller
, der zuvor zehn Jahre lang mit grossem Erfolg das Programm des Festival
d'Avignon verantwortete. Er steht für ein zeitgenössisches Theater,
Grenzüberschreitungen, die Öffnung zu Tanz, Performance und bildender
Kunst. Und er ist vernetzt wie wenige: Das Flaggschiff unter den Theatern der
Romandie holte sich einen Kapitän, der es in fischreiche Gewässer steuern
soll.
An den Quellen der Zeit
Die Rentrée nun in Lausanne mutet in der Tat an wie ein Mini-Avignon:
Unter dem Titel «Face à l'autre, face à soi» – «Angesichts des andern,
angesichts seiner selbst» – startet das Theater mit sieben Produktionen in die
Spielzeit, die auf ihre je eigene Weise die Konfrontation mit der Grundlage
der Selbsterkenntnis aufnehmen. Teils sind es Gastspiele, teils Kreationen.
Unter den Künstlern sind die Lausannerin Magali Tosato mit «Home-Made»
nach Fritz Zorns «Mars»; der Deutschschweizer Milo Rau (
mit «The Dark Ages»
); die Franzosen Pascal Rambert und Karim Bel Kacem und zum Auftakt der
Brite Simon McBurney, Mitgründer der Truppe Complicite, mit dem Solo
«The Encounter».
Es geht darin um einen US-amerikanischen Fotografen und seine
abenteuerliche Reise zu den Quellen des Amazonas. Unterwegs begegnet er,
im sprachlosen, aber nicht weniger beseelten Austausch mit einem
Indigenen-Häuptling, den Quellen der Zeit und seiner selbst. McBurney
erzählt es vermittelt: gestützt auf den New-Age-Roman «Amazon Beaming»
von Petru Popescu. Er erzählt sich selbst als Performer mit, im
Arbeitszimmer, nebenan das Töchterchen, das nicht einschlafen will (und
eine Geschichte einfordert). Und er erzählt es mit stupenden akustischen
Kniffs: Die Zuschauer – die hier zuvörderst Hörer sind – erhalten individuelle
Kopfhörer, über die der Performer sich direkt in ihre Köpfe einschleichen
kann; ein Kunstkopf auf der Bühne sorgt für täuschend echte
Richtungslokalisation.
McBurney verwickelt uns so in ein Geflecht der Wahrnehmungsebenen, das
dem Castaneda-Gestrüpp der Vorlage durchaus angemessen ist – vor allem
aber einen faszinierenden erzählerischen Sog entwickelt. Bei geschlossenen
Augen hören wir das amazonische Lagerfeuer knistern, mit offenen sehen wir
die Pommes-Chips-Tüte vor dem Mikrofon. Es ist die hinreissendste narrative
Überrumpelung und eine kleine Liebeserklärung an die Macht der
Imagination.
Und auch wenn McBurney das Looping-Pedal dann exzessiv nutzt und mit
raunenden Echos den esoterischen Aspekt der Vorlage noch verstärkt, bleibt
es eine so stupende wie furios berichtete Begegnung mit dem Andern. Man
kann Vincent Baudriller nur beipflichten, wenn er sagt, das Erzähltheater sei
alles andere als tot.
Keine positive Diskriminierung!
«The Encounter» kam nach der Premiere am Edinburgh Festival für das
Lausanner Gastspiel in die Schweiz. Das Théâtre de Vidy fungiert als
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Simon McBurney in Vidy-Lausanne: Liebeserklärung an die...
http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/buehne/liebeserklaerung-an-die...
Koproduzent: Auch dies will Baudriller forcieren. Ohne Partner ist ein kleines
Haus wie das Vidy heutzutage aufgeschmissen.
Konfrontiert man man den Direktor mit dem in der Romandie gehörten
Vorwurf, er sei zu international ausgerichtet, zu «pariserisch» und
berücksichtige die einheimische Szene zu wenig, erwidert er klar: «Pas de
discrimination positive!» Keine Quote, die Romands müssen dabei sein, aber
alle sind mit derselben Elle zu messen. Baudriller ist ein «Passeur», ein
«Fährmann», wie man im Französischen so schön zu den Ermöglichern und
Begleitern sagt. Steht zu hoffen, dass er auch den konservativeren Teil des
Lausanner Publikums an Bord holen kann.
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