What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [63]
AFTER IMAGINING an olfactory effect, the artist has to create it for the public to experience. The stage has always been a favorite experimental playground for the olfactively minded artist. The innovative American director and stage designer David Belasco was an early adopter of olfactory special effects. In 1897 he directed a play set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His staging impressed the New York Times: “The senses of sight, hearing, and smell are violently appealed to for the sake of creating an illusion; for the perfume of Chinese punk fills the theatre and the music is as Chinese as possible.” The critic for the New York Journal didn’t buy it: “The entertainment last night began with small whiffs of sickening, nauseating odor that was burned for atmospheric and not for seweristic reasons…. The theatre was bathed in this hideous tinkative odor of incense, and during the long overture, you sat there getting fainter and fainter.”
Belasco was not discouraged. In 1912 he created a detailed stage replica of a Child’s Restaurant (a then-famous New York chain), complete with a working stovetop on which the restaurant’s specialty pancakes were prepared during the show. For a melodrama set in a forest of the Canadian Northwest, he strewed pine needles on the stage floor. Aroma was released as the actors crushed them underfoot.
Theatrical scent today rarely ventures beyond Belasco-style realism. Incense and cooking food are popular effects, but nonliteral atmospheric scents are rare. The campy use of smell, as when Britain’s National Opera handed out scratch-and-sniff cards before a performance of Love for Three Oranges, leads some directors to avoid odor for fear of wallowing in kitsch. Aroma design remains an intriguing possibility for the theatre; it can be unique or as trite as any other aspect of staging.
The husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most beautiful (if uncomfortable) pieces of furniture in the twentieth century. Less well known is that they were pioneers of olfactory multimedia. In 1952 they created a show about “communication” for the University of Georgia. Time magazine’s William Howland called it “one of the most exciting things I have seen, heard and smelled in many years.” The show used three slide projectors, two tape recorders, a movie with its own soundtrack, and “a collection of bottled synthetic odors that were to be fed into the auditorium during the show through the air-conditioning ducts.” Charles Eames wanted to overstimulate the audience: “We used a lot of sound, sometimes carried to a very high volume so you would actually feel the vibrations. So in the sense that we were introducing sounds, smells, and a different kind of imagery, we were introducing multimedia. We did it because we wanted to heighten awareness.” Eames liked the results: “The smells were quite effective. They did two things: they came on cue, and they heightened the illusion. It was quite interesting because in some scenes that didn’t have smell cues, but only smell suggestions in the script, a few people felt they had smelled things—for example, the oil in the machinery.” Edwin E. Slosson would have been proud; if you cue them with sights and sounds, the audience will create the smells in their own heads.
THE THREE TRAITS of the smell-minded artist find their greatest creative expression in the field of literature. We all know the power of the printed word to conjure images as we read; less well known is that written descriptions evoke appropriately scaled mental images of light, sound, and smell. For example, the phrase “a very very bright light” produces a brighter mental image than the phrase “a weak light.” Similarly, a written description allows a reader to accurately imagine a smell’s intensity and character. Further, merely