Listen up for a close
An upcoming Auckland Arts Festival theatre show uses field recordings and headphones to transport the audience into the Amazon rainforest. Sound designer Gareth Fry talks to about The Encounter.
Apasty white Londoner tramps through the Amazon rainforest. In his pack, a disembodied head. All around him, trees scarred with long deep scratches where jaguars have been sharpening their claws.
The sun beats down like a hammer as he trudges ever onwards through clouds of vicious biting insects.
Growls and rustles, chirps and howls, whistles and shrieks: he stops in a clearing and alien sounds assail him from every direction.
And Gareth Fry smiles broadly. These sounds are precisely what he came here for. He pulls the head out of his rucksack, plugs in his headphones, and hits ‘‘Record’’.
‘‘On one hand, it was f…ing miserable,’’ admits Fry from his London home. ‘‘Hot and humid, tramping with recording equipment into jaguar country, carting around this big heavy head with binaural microphones attached. But it was incredible to spend a week living with an indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest, and the sounds we brought back were amazing!’’
Gareth Fry went to the Amazon so that you don’t have to. An esteemed sound designer who’s worked on a host of film and theatre productions, Fry was on a sonic safari, harvesting jungle sounds for British theatre production The Encounter.
After a stellar run in London, Edinburgh and New York, the show opens here this month as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.
‘‘It’s a true story about this National Geographic photographer who goes deep into the Amazon in 1969 to photograph a remote tribe. The second he lands, his translator contracts malaria and has to be flown out again.
‘‘But he makes contact and follows these people, walking for hours and hours, so engrossed in trying to get these photos that he loses his bearings entirely.’’
This American photographer, Loren McIntyre, travelled deep into the remote Javari Valley in Brazil, the same valley Fry revisited to meet descendants of the original tribe and