| Sumario: | In The Encounter, Simon McBurney uses binaural technology to recreate the vast Amazonian forest, while reducing the set to a desk, a chair, and a microphone. This study suggests that Complicite’s immersive production is built on a performative contradiction, combining visual distance with auditory intimacy in order to disrupt theatrical scale. These switches in scale are linked to the company’s previous micropoetics, arguing that The Encounter enacts technologically the search for connectivity that was previously explored metaphorically through neurobiology, mathematics, and particle physics in Mnemonic and A Disappearing Number. A comparative approach reveals the company’s development of an organicist aesthetics over the years, which finds its metaphorical roots in the scale-dependent paradigms of contemporary science, and construes microscopic environments as mirror images of the macro-environment. Because it employs the network as both a concrete tool and a cognitive paradigm,The Encounter effectively enacts the neurological substrate of the company’s work. It also offers a new experiment in theatrical perception: the way McBurney plays with the ‘grain’ size of our perception of time creates a unique experience,in which multiple resolutions coexist on stage. This show confirms several key features of Complicite’s organicism: a search for coherence which feeds on biological images, yet plays with scale to connect the microscopic to the environmental, and the individual to the group.
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