Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost

Solange Ayache

doi:10.1515/jcde-2022-0007

Article

Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost

Solange Ayache
is a Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University, France. She teaches EFL and TESL at the Graduate School of Teaching and Education of Paris and holds a double-PhD from Sorbonne University and the University of Sheffield in English Literature. Her dissertation, entitled “In-Yer-Head” Theatre: Staging the Mind in Contemporary British Drama. Towards a Quantum Psychopoetics of the Stage, examines the dramatic modalities used by a number of British playwrights from the past two decades as they explore mental spaces and evoke post-traumatic mindscapes, psychological disorders, neuropathological conditions, and various cognitive processes. She suggests that this theatre paradoxically renews stage realism, especially when using quantum theories as metaphors to stage the characters’ inner experiences or alternative perceptions of the real. Her research interests in contemporary drama and theatre are interdisciplinary and rooted in the health humanities and the environmental humanities. A member of the Sorbonne research team VALE (Anglophone Voices: Literature and Aesthetics), she has shared her work in a number of international conference papers and articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

Published/Copyright: May 14, 2022

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

Looking at Simon McBurney’s award-winning solo performance The Encounter (2015), this paper examines the play’s contribution to environmental humanities through an ecocritical study of its combined use of state-of-the-art sound design and the age-old art of storytelling to address the link between the ecological and spiritual crises that we are facing. The Encounter relates the real story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre who lived with the Mayoruna tribe for six weeks in 1969 after getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Relying heavily on sound design to take us deep into the jungle, the show addresses our relation to nature and technology and elicits our empathy to denounce the dictates of a globalised world ruled and threatened by neoliberal and neocolonial capitalistic ideologies. As the brain – and the stage – become the forest, The Encounter challenges the notions of distance and separation from the Other in favour of a deep sense of interconnectedness. Using Donna J. Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this article sheds light on how The Encounter invites us to recognise the urgency of defining what it means to live together in “response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway 2) and how the intermedial, hybrid qualities of the play found not a “post-human” but, on the contrary, a “com-post” theatre piece (11).

Keywords: Simon McBurney; Theatre de Complicité; The Encounter ; Donna J. Haraway; Staying with the Trouble ; Chthulucene; ecodramaturgy; eco-theatre; ecopoetics; ecocriticism; environmental humanities; intermediality; interconnectedness; entanglement; compost; terran

About the author

Solange Ayache

is a Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University, France. She teaches EFL and TESL at the Graduate School of Teaching and Education of Paris and holds a double-PhD from Sorbonne University and the University of Sheffield in English Literature. Her dissertation, entitled “In-Yer-Head” Theatre: Staging the Mind in Contemporary British Drama. Towards a Quantum Psychopoetics of the Stage, examines the dramatic modalities used by a number of British playwrights from the past two decades as they explore mental spaces and evoke post-traumatic mindscapes, psychological disorders, neuropathological conditions, and various cognitive processes. She suggests that this theatre paradoxically renews stage realism, especially when using quantum theories as metaphors to stage the characters’ inner experiences or alternative perceptions of the real. Her research interests in contemporary drama and theatre are interdisciplinary and rooted in the health humanities and the environmental humanities. A member of the Sorbonne research team VALE (Anglophone Voices: Literature and Aesthetics), she has shared her work in a number of international conference papers and articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

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Published Online: 2022-05-14

Published in Print: 2022-05-12

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2022-0007

Keywords for this article

Simon McBurney; Theatre de Complicité; The Encounter; Donna J. Haraway; Staying with the Trouble; Chthulucene; ecodramaturgy; eco-theatre; ecopoetics; ecocriticism; environmental humanities; intermediality; interconnectedness; entanglement; compost; terran