Sniff Art

It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil painting and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

—Paul Auster, Timbuktu (2000:39)

On the Scent, a piece of installation-theatre by Helen Paris, Leslie Hill, and Lois Weaver, was the surprise gift of a preconference, that odd institution of supplementarity in academic life. A preconference is a parasite on a main event. But it's usually also where the action is. This was certainly the case with the preconference sponsored by the Performance Studies Focus Group of ATHE in July 2003. This first-ever event, organized by CUNY graduate students Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, was enthusiastically embraced by approximately 100 like-minded or at least similarly titled PS-ers. For a day and a half before disappearing into the zoo-within-a-zoo that was ATHE held in the Times Square Marriott Marquis, participants discussed their PS identities as an ever-unclassifiable species.

In the evening, the entertainment—supplements-to-the-supplement—partially soothed and partially sharpened disciplinary anxieties that had been raised by the discussions of the day. This was because the shows—On the Scent and a playlet by Richard Maxwell—turned out to be, well, exactly the sort of thing that people in performance studies like. Our identity within academe may be unstable, but we know ourselves well as lovers of theatre that is experiential and site-specific.

Of the two shows, On the Scent was the one that worked harder to make an experience for the audience. Letting loose all sorts of scents and odors, Paris, Hill, and Weaver's domestic dream folded the sensory into the illusory like egg whites into batter.

This is how the piece works. You and your audience-partner put yourselves in the hands of three intent performers and let yourselves be propelled by them through a small world of smell-filled rooms. You enter through the front door of an apartment and proceed through its sights "peristaltically," as if urged by a thousand fingers. Each room is themed, with its own performer and array of objects. When you enter one, the performer is activated like a doll in a window. You sit very near as the room's special olfactory script room comes to life. You are immersed in its specific feel as the performer begins to speak in rapid paragraphs about scents gone by, the lost scents of childhood, madeleines of the nose.

To be alone, or nearly alone, in front of a performer performing, can be a horror story—even if the performer is not blatant in his need for your attention. Thankfully, the On the Scent performers were virtuosic in their independence, like cats, so we could enjoy the split-screen of their address, which went both at us, and beyond. In one room, we were given a drink, in another, the twinkle of a returned gaze. Recognition without participation, intimacy without responsibility, and in half an hour we were out.

Preconference attendees were invited to see On the Scent in the apartment of Marvin Carlson, distinguished professor of theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. In his absence, his small and unassuming lodgings were overcoded by the sights and smells of femaleness and longing. The living room surfaces were crowded with tiny bonbons, droopy, voluptuous flowers, and heavy strings of pearls. Our wary hostess, the gorgeously taffeta-ed Weaver, was leaning against the wallpaper alluringly. "Avon ladies," she threw out bitterly, casting a sideways glance in our direction. "They're temporary. Itinerant. Door-to-door." Was her bitterness for the carrot of the products in the Avon lady's bag? Once offered and then bought, they are packed away for baiting new customers.

The second room of the tour was a Southwestern-themed sliver-of-a-New York-City kitchen. Hill was getting ready to cook as we entered and oil was crackling...