Sniffing Out a Past
A Staging Decadence Long Read
Guest post: Dr Nando Messias and Dr Stephen Farrier
This blog post is an edited version of our collaborative talk, which took place on the 10th of March 2021 on Zoom as part of the Staging Decadence research project. In the talk, we used scent as a framework to explore some trails through queer solo performance’s indulgence with decadence. In doing this, we followed the whiff of decadence’s sillage to explore the wake and reach of queer performance practice and its tradition of decadence.
The parts in italics are our individual stories about scent. The rest of the text is jointly produced.
Opening
Nando: The first time I ever used scent as part of a creative process was in 1999. I was still living in Brazil. I was working on devising a dance-theatre piece based on Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), in which I played the character of Divine.
One day, a colleague approached me and asked if I would be interested in a lot of clothes being given away by her cousin. She suggested these clothes might be of interest for the character of Divine that I was developing. I was intrigued, so I arranged to meet her cousin soon after. In my memory (and this might be slightly embellished), I arrived at this mansion on a gated, leafy square to be given a treasure trove, divided into (not so glamorous) bin bags. I packed them all into the boot of the car, thanked the donor, and went home. When I started to open these bags, I could hardly believe the fabulous things that were coming out of them: full-length evening gowns, opera gloves, corseted swimming costumes, matching shoes and handbags, cigarette cases, compact mirrors, feathered hats, etc. I felt like Cinderella… after the Fairy Godmother declares she shall go to the ball.
I especially recall how redolent this cornucopia of delights was. There was a perfume that permeated everything. I explicitly remember opening the handbags and a waft of perfume rising from them. This scent was a mixture of compact powder, aldehydes, waxy florals and lipstick. I picked out about five outfits from this dowery to dress Divine and I also picked out a scent. This was the first time I created an olfactory identity for a character. It was also the first time I wore a scent marketed as ‘feminine’. I felt liberated just the same way as I did when I first wore a dress or a pair of high heel shoes. Picking a scent is now an integral part of my creative process. And I always wear violet-scented face powder.
Here are two YouTube videos of Nando as Divine, wearing outfits selected from the treasure trove. The perfume that went with this performance was Salvador Dali’s Laguna, which I found in the back of my mother’s wardrobe. It had been a gift, and it remained sealed for years as she refused to wear anything other than her signature fragrance: Ysatis by Givenchy.
Steve: My lockdown/socially-distanced morning routine/getting ready for looking good on camera (by that I mean Zoom…). Wake up, normally quite early, have breakfast, walk with my partner for 40 minutes. This walk in Brighton takes me through a park (I note the birds now there is less traffic – lots of people have) say ‘good morning’ to the man walking his slightly over-aggressive dog, say ‘good morning’ to the woman with the phone strapped to her arm exercising, say ‘good morning’ to the queer couple walking their dogs on the seafront – try to say hello to ‘grumpy person’ who we walk by most days but who refuses to acknowledge us.
Brighton on a morning walk. Courtesy of Stephen Farrier.
On our walk, we note what the sea is doing and if we can smell it before we see it (often we can on days when it’s rough). Return home, wash and select the scent for the day. Almost always I chose something to reflect my mood or to shift it – lighter scents for days I am/or want to be lighter, heavier and smoky scents on the days I feel, or want to feel, warmer or cosy. Obsessively begin to ask colleagues what they are wearing scent-wise. Luckily this does not make me appear as creepy as that question can sound. In the current lockdown, begin putting something else on late afternoon. After evening exercise and a long shower, put something on a couple of hours before bed. Scent for now is structure, while somehow also containing some esoteric meaning.
Head Note Number 1: Our First Decant
What we want to do in this post is find ways to talk about histories of queer performance using scent as a framework to guide our noses through one selective journey. We connect this journey to decadence in part because scent emphasises, quite explicitly, that it is experienced in and through the body (and we are aware that scent forms part of decadence studies).[i] We understand the idea of decadence as connected to luxury, pleasure, excess, artificiality and pretense (all things that chime with performance), but in this post we do not focus much on decay and moral decline, which also form part of our understanding of decadence – though of course we acknowledge that queers are often employed as rhetoric in discourses of moral and social decay. And we are taken with the idea that scent is often regarded as over-refined, obviously constructed, frivolous, and historically indicative of degeneracy. Rather like Marie Antoinette, who wore an exclusive, signature blend created by the royal perfumer. She was known as ‘the flaunting queen’, so her scent of course had to do justice to her extravagant reputation. It included notes of rose, jasmine, tuberose, bergamot, cardamom, incense, cinnamon, sandalwood, patchouli, tonka bean, musk and amber. It is believed that it would be unbearable to the modern nose. But never mind what scent she wore. Even the sheep in her folly Swiss village were perfumed.
In an article for The New York Review, Hillary Mantel writes:
Antoinette had her own house, the Petit Trianon, a neoclassical château made over to reflect her exquisite taste. It was a stylistic break with the old-style opulence of Versailles, but the new style could not be mistaken for simplicity. The Queen did not break the codes of artificiality, but substituted a new code, which looked different, but was no more easy to achieve for outsiders. (...) Antoinette was not a great reader, and had probably never read Rousseau, but she had picked up the idea that what was natural was good, and to be imitated, at great expense if necessary. She turned Rousseauist thinking into a style statement and perverted it; the flowers you saw at the Petit Trianon were not just nature’s flowers, but flowers of porcelain and enamel, gilded flowers, painted flowers. She sanitized nature and made it whimsical; at her toy farm, Le Hameau, she kept perfumed sheep.[ii]
Her personal scent, aptly named Parfum du Trianon, copied flowers which copied flowers. It was doubly artificial.
There are other kinds of queens detectable historically in and through scent. Because of this, we are drawn to José Esteban Muñoz’s narrative of ephemera as evidence in order to link historical queer performance to decadence via scent. Such ephemera is not without materiality; it has material impact. For instance, scent has been used as a tool of colonialism and racism, as well as gender normativity. Additionally, as Matt Houlbrook has pointed out in his work on queer London between the wars, evidence of being overly scented and powdered while in the street was logged in records of arrested queans.[iii] And for a while, around WWII, lesbians used Bandit, by Robert Piguet, to indicate their proclivities to those in the know. Scent is evidence that functions as both secret and blatant signal, but one that evaporates. Muñoz connects this attraction with ephemera to performance, saying ‘[c]entral to performance scholarship is a queer impulse that intends to discuss an object whose ontology, in its inability to “count” as a proper “proof,” is profoundly queer’.[iv]
Ephemera need not indicate evaporation or vanishment, as it also relates to material objects past their use or popularity. Following this attraction to detritus, evaporating molecules and Muñoz’s idea of ephemera as queer evidence, we are drawn to queer works where scent plays a leading role, especially where that work is decadent, or chimes with the themes of decadence. But, inevitably, we do not wish to be as clean as all this; we want to engage too with queer smells, which, as Reinarz notes, ‘like unisex fragrances, have the potential to confuse categories and challenge boundaries’.[v]
We have structured our writing into what we have called head notes, heart notes and base notes. Those who know these terms will associate them with perfumes and possibly with whiskey or champagne. The head notes (sometimes called top notes) are the first part of the scent, they are effervescent and often fleeting, and they are the lighter molecules able to escape their surface and be consumed. The heart notes are next and describe the main body of the perfume, and they are often depicted as the main part of the perfume journey, though they are sometimes used to disguise the coming base notes which might be unpleasant when first detected. Base notes are the last and lengthiest experience and are often formulated to boost the endurance of the heart and head notes. They bring solidity and gravity. In this paper, we use these terms playfully as a holding structure for our thoughts, memories and readings. The head notes are our intellectual approaches, fleeting and quick, built to best introduce the heart notes. The heart notes stand as our memories of scent: the main stories we have with it. The base notes serve as a track of historical queer decadent performance with scent as a key aspect to the work. We reflect too that the base notes (the queer performance practice) both anchor the heart and head notes, and strengthen them too. We note that although it is conventional to describe perfume as a journey – head, heart, base – it is often experienced in a less orderly way. Likewise, we will not always observe a straight journey in our discussion, but one that is interleaved – or perhaps to follow our structure, we are drawn to the moments when the headnotes are on the cusp of heart notes, or where there is a trace of the base in the heart.
Heart Note Number 1: Being a Bit Clingy
Steve: It’s about 1989/90 – I’m young and in Heaven, a gay nightclub under a mainline railway station in London. I had caught the train up from my hometown. It’s my first proper gay club and I’m trying not to look too blown away with it all, at which I obviously fail. I remember that the first thing I notice is how the bass from the music feels in my chest.
That evening I meet Alexander, we hit it off and we kiss. A lot. It was impossibly romantic – he was from Germany, I from a sink estate in Essex. Things like that can only happen in Heaven.
That night is imprinted in my memory and I return to it often, less for tender reasons (though at the time I was so smitten that I could not function properly, or breathe), but because the scent Alexander wore that night is still available, and occasionally I smell it in the air and for a moment I am back in my shitty estate, in the bedroom waiting for a letter to drop through the letterbox postmarked ‘Germany’.
We write to each other like smitten people do, and the time in between letters is wished away. In the letters I write about how I have not washed the shirt I was wearing when we met and often go to the wardrobe to smell its scent, still faintly lingering many weeks after that night. He sends letters doused in the same scent – often spraying the scent onto a green feather and tucking it into the envelope. (At the time I thought sending green feathers was some kind of gay code that I should have known about… it wasn’t). These memories are brought back every time the scent hits me. Looking back now, I see this as a kind of screen memory sitting atop what else was happening at the time in my life and in the queer community, like a sequined gown covers the secrets of a drag performer’s padding. Gone now is the poverty and violence of the lived reality of those times (for me, that is). And although of course I carry many memories, what brings these into sharp relief is Alexander’s scent (which at the time was very chichi, but now is a drug store purchase).
Photo of Steve with his sister, Vanessa, around the time he met Alexander. Courtesy of Stephen Farrier.
Fast forward to our current lockdown and scent raises its, or my, head again in a pronounced way. Scent has bonded me to new friends, and helped with getting through the day/week/month/this-never-ending-year. It has come as only a small surprise that scent helped me through one viral crisis, and I return to it in the current one.
Nando: I had dressed up that day to go to the Barbican. I remember I was wearing a satin jacket with flowers embroidered on it. I had put some perfume on too. It was Spring 2011 and the performance I went to see was On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God (2010), by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.
It tells the story of a son looking after his dementia-suffering father. The latter, as a theatre critic has put it, ‘graphically – and all too regularly – spills the contents of his adult nappy all over the pristine white stage.’[vi] Towards the end, I remember muttering in the audience and then, a gentle drizzle from above. A light rain slowly dampened my clothes, my hair, my skin. And then the smell suddenly hit me. I knew this was synthetic prop shit but I was still furious about it. I wanted to get up and storm out. Politeness is what stopped me, which is weird because being sprayed with shit felt like quite an aggressive act to me at the time. I remember walking home because I thought if I got on the tube, people would think I had shat myself. I was enraged. I had dressed up to go to the theatre and I didn’t want shit thrown all over me. Oh, and let me tell you, shit goes rather badly with perfume. At least with the one I was wearing.
Base Note Number 1: Nosing About Performance
All performance involves scent, whether emanating from the stage, from perfumed punters, or from a grubby floor. And, as with queer work, where it is being observed impacts the way that scent might circulate. The scent of a dive bar is different from a recently cleaned theatre in this sense.
Eleanor Margolies points to a history of scent used consciously in theatre and performance. Margolies notes particularly a scratch and sniff ENO production of The Love of Three Oranges in 1989, and ‘the scent diffusion techniques developed by Hamburg-based company Trollwerk for their "multi-media concert" Velcro Sync 1/0 (Edinburgh, 2001)’.[vii] Earlier than Margolies’ paper is Sally Banes’ article ‘Olfactory Performances’, which notes earlier productions using smell, particularly those directed by David Belasco: such as The Governor’s Lady (1912), in which pancakes are cooked. Banes also notes how in ‘Tiger Rose (1917) he scattered pine needles on the floor to create the proper scent for the forest setting; and in The First Born (1897), set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he burned Chinese incense’.[viii] There is a long history of scent being used to one effect or another in the theatre, and Banes’ work lays this out in excellent detail. Scent in the theatre has been deployed as description, atmosphere, novelty, and to produce visceral responses from audiences.
Additionally, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr’s essay ‘”Mise en Scent”: The Theatre d’ Art's Cantique des cantiques and the Use of Smell as a Theatrical Device’ notes scent in the service of an 1891 performance of Song of Songs, where the director Paul Napoleon Roinard
… used exclusively pleasant, and primarily floral odours, as if steering the audience's reaction to correspondingly lovely thoughts. But the result may have been quite different and unpredictable for each spectator, depending on the associations the scent aroused.
Key to Shepherd-Barr’s, Banes’ and Margolies’ articles is a question of how scent produces and/or exceeds meaning in performance. Both authors connect their ideas to a semiotic reading of scent, carefully articulating its indexical qualities. But, as Margolies notes, scent can gesture towards singularity while also meaning many things at once:
Thus, drawing on cultural associations as well as material qualities, the scent of roses might mean 'romance' (warm, soft, luxurious), 'Englishness' (rambling cottage gardens) or 'exoticism' (heady, spicy, a flavouring in Turkish delight). If sandalwood incense is burnt, the desired features might include associations with India and spirituality, or its 'dark', 'soft' and 'heavy' qualities rather than the 'light', 'hard' or 'fresh' qualities of pine disinfectant. The relation between these qualities and the 'image' represented is learnt rather than automatic, open to dispute but not entirely arbitrary. However, caution is required: material qualities and meanings can be attributed to substances according to their cultural associations in the absence of any relevant intrinsic qualities. [ix]
There is a foreshadowing here of some of our current concerns around cultural associations and how those associations are employed to support a status quo. What we can see is that in its use, scent in the theatre is excessive in a special way, in that it is invasive, flows over, evades or exceeds a singular meaning, can both make sense as description of a ‘real’ thing (cooked food, or the smell of manure on stage, for instance) while also drawing attention to falseness and fakery. This slippage feels particularly queer, in that queerness as an idea also seeks to exceed, resist and flow.
Although not in a queer frame, the work of Enrique Vargas is interesting. In an interview with Richard Gough and Julie Christie, Vargas explains the central role excessive scent plays in his work:
We did a show called New York by the Nose: the theatre goes dark and we would begin with smells of shampoo and shower, soap you know, like when somebody wakes up and goes to the bath, then scrambled eggs and bacon and all the stews and that type thing, and then perfumes and then city smells, industrial smells, gasoline, then we went into a very good diner with different types of food, T-bone steak, just right, then burnt, then rotten, then the rotten smell of meat would get bigger and bigger, until people would begin to vomit and the idea was to create conditions so that the public could vomit; we had only 75 people at the time but once two or three would begin vomiting it was easy for the rest to vomit.
I thought that people would hate it, but after four days there was a long line of people waiting to come in and vomit![xi]
Head Note Number 2: Making Sense/Making Scents.
We begin by making reference to what is often hailed as the ultimate example of decadent literature, À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans dedicates a whole chapter to perfume (and there is a perfume made in its honour). In describing Des Esseintes’ interest in the creation of scents, he writes: ‘One aspect of this art of perfumery had fascinated him more than any other, and that was the degree of accuracy it was possible to reach in imitating the real thing’.[xii] In perfumery, as in decadence, the artificial, the synthetic, the man-made is often seen as ‘better’ or even as ‘more natural’ than nature itself. Chemical compounds evoke the essence of a thing that is absent. Rose scents are created with not a single drop of the actual flower, as we read in the novel. ‘Hardly ever, in fact, are perfumes produced from the flowers whose names they bear’.[xiii] Perfume is therefore a simulacrum. It can be imagined as a painting created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. We saw earlier how Marie Antoinette’s perfumer formulated her signature scent by attempting to conjure up, in the lab, the olfactory image of her toy village, itself already an artificial copy of the real thing. More recently, in the twentieth century, we have another pointed example of this tension between nature and artifice. In creating her iconic No. 5, ‘Chanel abandoned roses and lilies, which she believed smelled artificial on women and, paradoxically, composed an artificial scent [an overdose of aldehydes] that would smell natural’.[xiv]
There is a parallel we would like to draw here between perfume, decadence and gender. Let us begin with the following binaries: nature versus artifice, real versus fake, original versus copy. A queer performance of gender is often talked about as being ‘unnatural’, as going ‘against nature’, or as being a ‘faulty copy of the original’. But we would question the idea of an original in a similar way as we doubt there is an essence that the genderqueer person is failing to reproduce. We see gender, like perfume, only as an approximation, a deception, a simulacrum of an original that has always been absent. Butler has famously asked: ‘With respect to gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within the very descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit hierarchy?.’[xv] Perhaps more decidedly, she has argued that
The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities [...]. But the relation between the ‘imitation’ and the ‘original'’ is, I think, more complicated than that critique generally allows. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself--as well as its contingency.[xvi]
She goes on: ‘As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself’.[xvii]
Perfume and gender are conditioned by cultural values that emerge as a result of specific codes, which are always necessarily contingent on socio-historically-determined practices. That is to say that their meanings are perpetually in flux, constantly shifting and evolving. The study of gender and the study of smell, in other words, have in common the fact that both gender and smell are inherently unstable, in flux, in transition.
The point can be made more effectively perhaps if we look at one specific example:
One perfume that was rapidly gaining in popularity during the eighteenth century and was originally employed as a medical remedy to treat constipation, fever, and, most famously, plague was Eau de Cologne. Thought to have traveled from Italy to France in 1500 with Catherine de Medici, Henry II’s fourteen-year-old bride, the fragrance was initially known as Eau de la Reine.[xviii]
The recipe for Eau de la Reine (which means ‘the Queen’s water’ in English) travelled to Cologne with an Italian perfumer who renamed it Acqua di Colonia, or Eau de Cologne as it is more commonly known. As its formula evolved, the purpose and meaning of this perfume changed too. It transitioned from a medicine into a fragrance and from a female scent to one marketed to men.
Heart Note Number 2 – The Queen’s Water
Nando: In the summer of 2019, I went on a research trip to New York, and there I visited Quentin Crisp’s archive. This was a very special occasion as I was allowed to try things on: Crisp’s iconic pink Fedora, his silk scarfs, his rings and his brooches. In trying his jacket, I felt I was being embraced. I put on his lipstick – or what last drags remain of it – and later kissed the pages of my research diary to save it.
And then, when I mentioned my fascination with perfumes, I was invited to dab on a drop or two of a tiny bottle of pure parfum concentration of what was Crisp’s signature scent: a classic Eau de Cologne (Eau Sauvage by Dior, in fact). I still cannot believe I was actually allowed to do this and I probably shouldn’t be telling you about it so let’s keep it between ourselves. It all felt like a forbidden dream. The scent touched me in a very direct way. I started to cry. It felt like I was in Crisp’s presence, like I could smell him. I could not smell him, obviously, because he has been dead for a number of years now, but in smelling his scent while dressed in his clothes, it felt close enough for me.
Quentin Crisp during a Q&A. Photo by Ross B. Lewis. Creative Commons.
In hindsight, I can see how trapped and restricted I am myself in my thinking around gender. I had always imagined Crisp smelling of jasmine, roses or violets, not of Cologne, which for the modern nose is the male fragrance par excellence. It is the example of what a real man should smell like. I mean, Napoleon used to wear it. There were crates of it in his military campaigns. He practically showered himself with it every morning.
Base Note Number 2: Shit! Queer Performance
It’s reported (well, gossiped about) that Quentin was not happy when he went to see Bette Bourne in Tim Fountain’s play Resident Alien (1999) in New York.[xix] Principally he was not happy with a depiction of himself because it featured a shit stain on the back of his trousers. Despite being famous for living in dirty surroundings, and at the same time for being powdered and scented, this was a step too far. But it is not unusual to combine perfume, the shit stained, and queer people.
Rose Wood in the dressing room before a private performance at the Zipper Theater, New York. Photo by Michel Delsol. All rights reserved.
We are reminded of the function shit has served in performance through its links to stench and contagion, similar energies historically levelled at queer lives. We also note key moments where queer performers have related to or interacted with shit – both metaphorically, as image, and in reality: for instance, when David Hoyle invited Berlin artist Puta to the stage to shit in part of David’s 2008 Magazine series (David still did his action painting). Historically, the connection between such smells and homosexuality was thought causal, as Reinarz notes by way of Matt Houlbrook, whose work
has demonstrated more precisely how certain discursive processes embedded ‘the queer in the dirt and defecation of the urinal’, at least in the modern British context. While London’s magistrate Harold Sturge defined homosexuality as ‘morally wrong, physically dirty and progressively degrading’, his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s argued that such passions could easily be controlled by cleaning the capital’s public toilets more thoroughly, the ‘stale’ scent of urinals being said to excite queer men; ‘once they have the scent’, it was said, ‘there is no holding them’.[xx]
A key queer performer playing with this link is Rose Wood. Rose, a ‘transgender terrorist’ known for her confrontational work, performs acts that are supremely challenging and confrontational. For instance, she vomited on Susan Saradon and emptied a condom on Leonardo DiCaprio. Central to her work is a ‘spectrum of shit-themed performances’ that include throwing shit at an audience (it’s fake, we think), and walking through the audience, shit-stained, while trying to make herself beautiful for a spectator she’s fallen in love with – but failing (to a point where she can’t hold it in anymore and shits in her handbag). This kind of expulsion and repulsion follows a familiar queer performance tactic – to be the most extreme version of a stereotype (you think I’m perverted, I’ll be the most perverted you’ll ever see). And of course, there is the attendant stench, real or imagined, that turns the stomach, that exceeds or resists boundaries, that makes a point about expulsion and disgust through scents that mirror social disapprobation (of queers).
But this disgust in Rose Wood’s work is not always a moment of rejection from an audience. Rather, there are regular reports that audience members find it transformative. We understand this in some way: for instance, remembering the power of seeing the drag performer Divine eat dog shit in Pink Flamingos (1972) as a complex of repulsion, hilarity, outrageousness, and (for us) incomprehensibility. Divine’s shit eating was transgression embodied, was resistance to normativity, was fabulously offensive – even if we couldn’t smell it through the screen…
We note with glee that Rose Wood is similar to rosewood, a perfume ingredient popularly mixed with Oud by Christian Dior. Oud is an ingredient itself that can give off a fecal scent (‘barnyard’ is how reviewers politely refer to it). Yet, when mixed with other ingredients (famously rose/oud combinations), they deepen the scent. The base note of the oud does something to the rose, transforming it into something intriguing, attractive and transformative. Like Rose Wood the performer, some run towards, some are repelled.
Head Note Number 3: For Those Feeling a Bit Sick
The idea of noxious smells leads neatly into contagion. The history of Epidemiology is littered with tales of the health hazards associated with unpleasant odours. Many of these have been discredited, but associations between contaminated air and transmission linger. Nando was once deterred by the Council from peeing on stage because of health and safety reasons, and was told the smell might contaminate the audience. To be clear: there was no plan to pee on the audience. ‘Contaminate them with what?’, Nando asked. The argument was useless, and required eventual capitulation to their decree.
But the council was following historical precedent/energy. We are all familiar with the nursery rhyme:
A pocket full of posies
A-tishoo, A-tishoo
We all fall down
Some claim this is about The Great Plague: the ‘roses’ are the red blotches on the skin; ‘a-tishoo’ refers to sneezing fits; ‘we all fall down’ to dying. The ‘posies’ are what interest us here. They were the sweet-smelling flowers people carried to try to ward off the plague. Posies, pomanders, and, our favourite, ‘nosegays’ (as in ‘something appealing to the nose’) were carried or worn around the neck because it was generally believed that the disease could be transmitted through breathing contaminated air. Constance Classen explains that ‘doctors wore a "nose-bag" filled with herbs and spices over their noses when visiting patients’.[xxi] She goes on to say that
Special care was taken when entering a sickroom. One London physician recommended that the sickroom have herbs at the windows, an aromatic fire burning in the fireplace, and rose-water and vinegar sprinkled on the floor when visitors were to be received. Visitors were advised to wash themselves with rose-water before entering, to keep a piece of cinnamon or other spice in their mouths, and to carry a pomander to smell.[xxii]
Although Miasma Theory is now an obsolete medical concept, the idea of breathing a deadly disease could hardly be more part of our daily consciousness as we go about our lives with face masks on. Though we may largely understand pathogenic odours today as ghosts from the past, the need to clean and sterilise ourselves and our environments remains. That might well be for good reason, but what of those instances when vital clues get lost in the process? Archives are just one case in point.
In one of Nando’s visits to the V&A Theatre and Performance archive, they were informed that all items must be thoroughly washed at ultra-high temperatures before even being allowed to enter the room. Once again, there are obvious good reasons for this. Any bugs living in garments might contaminate the remaining items and destroy potentially unique, irreplaceable historical pieces. But there are surely bits of information that get lost in this sanitisation process too: lipstick stains, sweat patches, perfume traces. These are what we would like to call queer archives.
We have talked about how difficult it is to capture the experience of scent: how Nando could smell Quentin Crisp’s perfume, but not his odour, for example. Odours cannot be recorded, says Classen; ‘there is no effective way of either capturing scents or storing them over time. In the realm of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions and recollections.’[xxiii] Scent is therefore akin to queerness in that both are protean, hard to capture, and ephemeral. Also, in that latter sense, they both relate to performance. Scent crosses boundaries that are hard to breach. It is characterised by mobility. Scent cannot be constrained. It is of the moment. These characteristics – it cannot be seen, it cannot be stopped, it cannot be constrained – may incite fear, and so scents are deleted before they enter the archive, suffering an early death.
We return to Muñoz again here when he notes:
Queer is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moment, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere – while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.[xxiv]
The covert transmissibility of queerness, the trace it leaves behind and the fact that it evaporates to the touch are all ontological properties it shares with the sense of smell. These are the kind of ‘invisible evidence’ which Muñoz unpacks as ‘ephemera’:
Ephemera [...] is linked to alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance, a kind of evidence of what transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues and specks of things. It is important to note that ephemera is a mode of proofing and producing arguments often worked by minoritarian culture and criticism makers.[xxv]
Heart Note Number 3: Having a Man in Our Mouth
Nando: As I entered the Public Library building at Lincoln Centre, I was informed that they had recently acquired Lou Reed’s personal archive. This had not been the purpose of my visit but it was clearly a sign. I don’t know how many of you have been in these rooms where one can examine archival pieces, so let me set the scene. These are very peculiar environments. The temperature is controlled – that is to say, it’s freezing cold. You have to store all of your possessions in a locker, apart from a notebook and a pencil (who uses pencils still?). You have to wear white gloves. And you feel like you’re being watched the whole time. Or at least I did.
Lou Reed’s High School Yearbook. Public Domain
As I unfolded one of Lou Reed’s very own T-shirts, this whole idea of sterilisation seemed to go out of the window. To my naked, untrained eyes, it seemed unwashed. There were tiny flakes of what appeared to be his dead skin around the collar. My first instinct when I saw this was of course to try to smell the T-shirt, but how to do this surreptitiously when the librarian was sitting behind a desk facing me, and when there were other researchers all around me? I looked around and did my best to disguise it – I couldn’t help it! – and smelt the neck of the T-shirt anyway. I couldn’t detect any scent. It most probably would have been sterilised as one would expect. Naturally, I was disappointed about this, but when I started to remove my gloves to write a few notes, I noticed that one of the flakes from the T-shirt had transferred on my gloved finger. At this point, I unceremoniously licked it – just the way Medieval pilgrims used to lick relics – and I swallowed it. And that’s how I got Lou Reed inside me!
What I’m saying here is that you can’t archive the ephemerality of a scent; the sterility of the archive engenders a premature evanescence of queer clues, which are then lost forever (unless you swallow them).
Steve: A couple of years ago I had a very painful tooth. I made an emergency appointment at the dentist (the location of the practice is ironically in the middle of a group of chocolate shops). The dentist couldn’t quite work out what was going on. It must be a ‘decaying nerve, and I needed a root canal’. What seems like a very long time later in the dentist's chair with the dentist's fist in my mouth, the nerve was exposed, and I was glad that the large injection I had been given was working well and I could not feel anything… The dentist dug out the root and, curiously, smelt it. This was not a polite cursory whiff, but a full lunged inhale – his eyebrows tense in confusion.
It turns out that the nerve was healthy and that the tooth was cracked in an unusual and difficult to see way. For all the (expensive) tests, x-rays and technical paraphernalia, I was taken by the fact that it was his nose that understood what was happening. I’m still not sure how I feel about having a part of me removed and smelled in front of me… and there’s a part of me that wished I’d asked to sniff it too.
Base Note Number 3: You Had to be There to Breathe it
‘Smell, like hearing, is a channel of vulnerability, whereby one often experiences something involuntarily’.[xxvi] Although smell and sound share penetrability as a common factor, there is something that is unique to smell. That is, in order to smell something, one really has to be there, where the smell is. It cannot reach across the screen, for example. So, in a world where live performances are in a state of suspension, smell might be the most difficult sense to convey. Its presence can only be imagined.
This is also true of historic performances. If you weren’t there to experience it, you might not know what it smelled like. As Hill and Paris have argued, ‘[b]oth performance and smell are defined by ephemerality. When pairing live performance with olfactory stimulation “you really had to be there” goes one step further to become “you really had to breathe there”’.[xxvii] For that reason, when thinking together, we could name a few queer performers who we see as ‘decadent’, but struggled to name ones where smell featured as a prominent experience. The reason is, of course, that we weren’t there. It was left to our imagination therefore to wonder what performances like Leigh Bowery giving birth at Wigstock in 1993 would have smelt like. Bowery’s costumes were opulent in their use of fabric, colour and shape. They were engineered contraptions which in this specific case was structured to hold an adult human being concealed inside it. This mock-birth performance brings to mind other radical enactments of birth such as the rituals performed by eighteenth-century Mollies.[xxviii] We see the moment of delivery and the placenta. We watch as the fake baby arrives covered in blood. We witness Bowery biting off the umbilical cord and we wonder if the artist matched the verisimilitude of the visuals with olfactory realness in the excess of this performance.
We also see queer performers connecting to excess. Time is important here. For instance, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2010) runs for 24 hours. This can be seen as an excessive expectation of an audience not only when it comes to their time, but also when it comes to their resources since ticket prices for a full version of the show were inaccessible to many. The costumes, by Machine Dazzle, are fantastical, often made from obviously recycled materials – the crap that is thrown out. At the International Ibsen Award, Taylor Mac appeared in a fabulous array of plastic fruit, vegetables and flowers reminiscent Vertumnus, a 1591 oil painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Taylor Mac’s roots are in club performance, like Bowery, where one expects incidental scent (boys-at-a-disco perfumes, stale beer, performers’ sweat – in the past cigarette smoke too), and where scent sometimes plays a key role in some work. The scene of the club – and this might include a provincial gay club as much as a famous club in a city – is vital to the lifeblood of performance, and in which scent is ambient score. And sometimes it gets to play a key melody.
Perhaps the fact that we couldn’t find any consistent use of scent in queer performance outside our lived experience of being there – or ‘breathing’ there – speaks to the fact that queer and scent are both doing the job they were designed to do. To use the words of Muñoz, it only exists ‘as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments’. Like gossip, they act as ‘invisible evidence’ to protect the queer subject from the threat of attack. In leaving no trace, queer and smell are paradoxically successful.
So, what can we do to access those performances in a way that is useful for our endeavour? Well…. we gossip! In conversation with performers and producers of drag shows, for instance, we are told that it is sometimes possible to know who is on the bill by how the dressing room smells. We thank Joe Parslow (#boyfriendjoe) and the drag performer Me for the information around this. And queer shows sometimes instrumentalise scent, for instance, Willam, of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame, performs the Popper Slap Game (2016) which involves sniffing amyl nitrate, and slapping your opponent or getting slapped. In Burgerz (2018), Travis Alabanza makes a burger in front of the audience. They then serve it as food – sustenance, and a metaphor for transphobic violence. The smell of cooking fills the space. The Fabulous Russella cooks pancakes while doing the splits and lip synching to Christina Aguilera. Rusella’s turn is almost a round trip back to 1912, except rather than pancakes being cooked in The Governor’s Lady, they are being tossed on Britain’s Got Talent.
Final Accord
In conclusion, we look at what we have done. What’s lingering? How grand is our sillage?
We end with as many questions as we started. We’ve started to nose around queer performance using scent and gossip as our guide. It’s kind of like being 22 again – and, like being 22, we’ll miss LOADS of things. We’ve used scent and its connections to memory to structure, too. And we come at this stage to ask a question:
If queer performance could catch a whiff of itself, what would it smell? Stale beer on a pub’s threadbare carpet? Quentin Crisp’s Eau de Cologne? Excrement and urine (which we know now drives queers mad with desire)? We rather think that it might be something like a whiff of Marie Antoinette with a sprinkle of Lou Reed.
Notes
[i] Although we don’t call on it, we are aware of Catherine Maxwell’s work, particularly ‘Carnal Flowers, Charnel Flowers: Perfume in the Decadent Literary Imagination’, in Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (eds) Decadence and the Senses (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), 32-50.
[ii] Hilary Mantel, ‘The Perils of Antoinette,’ The New York Review, 2007, https://www-nybooks-com.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/articles/2007/01/11/the-perils-of-antoinette/, accessed 5 March 2021.
[iii] Matt Houlbrook uses the spelling ‘quean’ instead of ‘queen’. ’While the spellings “queen” and “quean” were used interchangeably in the first half of the twentieth century’, he explains, ‘I have followed Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld, in using “quean” as the standard spelling’. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-1957 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 277, fn. 16.
[iv] José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8 (2) (1996), 6.
[v] Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. (Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 22.
[vi] John O’Mahony, ‘Romeo Castellucci: Christ… What is that Smell?’, The Guardian, 19 April 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/apr/19/romeo-castellucci-concept-face-son, accessed on 28 February 2021.
[vii] Eleanor Margolies, ‘Smelling Voices: Cooking in the Theatre’, Performance Research: On Smell, 8 (3) (2003), 16.
[viii] Sally Banes, ‘Olfactory Performances’, TDR (1988-), 45 (1) (Spring 2001), 68-76.
[ix] Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, ‘”Mise en Scent”: The Theatre d’ Art's Cantique des cantiques and the Use of Smell as a Theatrical Device’, Theatre Research International, 24 (2) (Summer 1999), 156.
[x] Margolies, ‘Smelling Voices,’ 14.
[xi] Enrique Vargas, ‘Finding Oneself through the Perfumes of Memory’, Performance Research, 8 (3) (2003), 95-6.
[xii] Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (London: Penguin Books, 1956), 105.
[xiii] Huysmans, Against Nature, 105.
[xiv] Reinarz, Past Scents, 137.
[xv] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 176.
[xvi] Butler, Gender Trouble, 187, original emphasis.
[xvii] Butler, Gender Trouble, 188.
[xviii] Reinarz, Past Scents, 67.
[xix] It premiered in London’s Bush Theatre in November 1999.
[xx] Reinarz, Past Scents,142.
[xxi] Constance Classen, Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 60.
[xxii] Classen, Aroma, 60.
[xxiii] Classen, Aroma, 3.
[xxiv] Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence,’ 6.
[xxv] Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence,’ 10, added emphasis.
[xxvi] Reinarz, Past Scents, 91.
[xxvii] Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, ‘On the Scent’, A Journal of Performing Arts, 8 (3), (2003), 66-72.
[xxviii] See Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992).