The Encounter

From Friday 15 May (7pm BST) to Friday 22 May (10pm BST) you will be able to watch Complicite’s groundbreaking production The Encounter, recorded from the Barbican, London, on our website and on our YouTube channel. Don’t miss it and don’t forget to wear your headphones.

★★★★★ “A tour de force” Financial Times

Inspired by the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu.

Free to watch. Please wear headphones.

The Encounter tells the story of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre who, in 1969, became lost in a remote part of the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people. His encounter was to test his perception of the world, bringing the limits of human consciousness into startling focus.

Threading scenes of his own life with details of McIntyre’s journey, Simon McBurney incorporates objects and sound effects into this solo performance to evoke the depths of the Amazon rainforest. The show’s ground-breaking binaural sound design (3D audio) by Olivier Award winner, Gareth Fry, is transmitted to the audience through headphones and plugs into the power of the imagination, questioning our perceptions of time and our own consciousness. Described as ‘a tour de force’ by Financial Times and ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by New York Times.

“We are, as a consequence of this pandemic, bodily cut off from one another. Disconnected. Isolated. But perhaps this sense of our separation one from another, is simply a heightening of what we felt before this all began. We are thinking now, not only about how long this will last, but also what happens on the other side. To reconnect we need, perhaps, to learn to listen more closely. To each other. To our communities. To other cultures. To nature itself.

The Encounter is at its heart a story about ‘listening’, not ‘hearing’ but listening; to other, older narratives which, at the deepest level, form who we are, and if we do, we can imagine how we can ‘begin’ again.”
Simon McBurney – Complicité Artistic Director