A work in progress by Complicite is brought to the Festival of International New Drama at the Schaubühne. Directed, written and performed by Simon McBurney, based on the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, it tells the real life story of an explorer’s trip to the Amazon jungle and making first contact with an indigenous tribe in 1969. Primarily an adventure story with interweaving strands of the process of creating the show by McBurney, the story touches on themes of the primitivity, the human origin and the consequence of technological advances. At this stage of the largely spoken word piece, the story is not the focus but the use of sound. The audience members each wears a headphone and the multiple microphones onstage give the ability to bring an immediacy to McBurney’s voice. Also, the overlaying of recording, sound effect and looping gives it a technical base for the story to develop. Despite McBurney’s modest protest of the piece still being in early development, the piece manages to explore quite a lot of the potential of the technology available.
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