The Air is Delicate” (Macbeth 1.6.10): The Role of Olfactory Design in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More – Rayna Li

“The Air is Delicate” (Macbeth 1.6.10):1 The Role of Olfactory Design in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More

RAYNA LI

Imagine running down a cobbled alleyway, brushing through the stagnant summer air, chasing a mysterious someone by a faint trace of her perfume. Imagine opening up drawers of crispy old files with yellowing pages, breathing the smell of feathers and fur in a taxidermy shop. Imagine the sharp smell of pine, of a symbolic Birnam Wood, and the loamy scent of fog and rain. Imagine three witches, standing hand in hand, in the opening scene of Macbeth. This is not a dream, but rather, it is the vividly detailed world of Sleep No More—an immersive theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy by British troupe Punchdrunk. Since its inception in England in 2003, Sleep No More has been staged across the globe in Boston (2009), New York (2011–), and Shanghai (2016–).2 In 2011 when the New York production opened its door to visitors, the show was showered with such tremendous acclaim that its maker Punchdrunk became synonymous with immersive theatre as a genre of performance.3 Since its premiere in Asia on December 14, 2016, the Shanghai production has experienced continued sell-outs and extensive media attention.4 However, Sleep No More is more than a business success; it is a theatrical experiment whose innovations and achievements continuously challenge the accepted norms of both performance and production—to me, it is a show remembered by its scents.

1 References to Macbeth are to William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 2 Rose Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6–7. 3

Ibid., 2.

4 Shu Pan, “Review of Immersive Theatre Production Sleep No More (Shanghai),” The Paper, 15 December 2016. This source was originally written in simplified Chinese.

The opening reflection of my most recent visit to this immersive theatre venue lends itself to my exploration of the multi-sensory design strategies employed in the world of Sleep No More, which functions as a lens into the broader topic of immersive theatre as a contemporary arts practice. While Sleep No More’s unique smellscape is such a triumph—to the extent that patrons would willingly pay CNY199 (US$30) for a scented candle that smells like the set5— olfaction has long been overshadowed and overlooked in the world of performance. Despite the many explanations for scent’s limited use in traditional theatres, the significance of olfaction in the emerging field of immersive theatres remains elusive and its merits rarely examined. Yet, as exemplified by the tremendous success of Sleep No More, it is high time that theatre makers reconsider the role and capacity of scents in the performing arts. Drawing on established performance and cognitive theories about the use of scents while using Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More as an example, this paper seeks to contextualise the practice of olfactory design within a focused case study and highlight the various instances in which scents have enhanced the delivery of dramatic effects. In turn, this paper examines the significant and sophisticated new role that is gradually assumed by olfaction in a new era of participatory storytelling, in which patrons and critics demand more from theatre makers than ever before.

1. Defying the Limitations of Scents Onstage

As theatre goers, seldom do we realise that the word “theatre” itself automatically implies the valuing of one sense above all others: the English word “theatre” owes its root to the ancient Greek theatron—a place for viewing.6 The theatrical world’s predominant emphasis on sight is widely reflected in the prosperous industries of scenery, costume, hair and makeup, lighting, and choreographic design, which all pertain to the audience’s sense of vision. Complementing vision’s dominance is audition, hence the word “auditorium”—a place for hearing. In fact, the history of performance is so

5 YeShouPaiLaoBanNiang, “Beast × the Mckinnon Hotel | Release of the Limited Edition Collaboration Series; Bring Sleep No More Home,” 2018. This source was originally written in simplified Chinese.

6 Susan L Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 2 (2018).

centred on these two senses that critics have related traditional spectatorship to “the dominance of the eye and then the ear, with a certain suppression of the other senses”.7

However, while the modern theatre is commonly required to be a fragrancefree zone, it is untrue that smell has always been shunned from performances and performance spaces. Historically, the beginnings of Western theatre in ancient Greek festivals and various religious performances were suffused with intense aromas associated with sacrifice.8 Productions of Macbeth in Shakespeare’s time featured special effects produced by two fireworks— “rosin powder” and “squibs”—both employed, in part, for being strikingly malodorous and utterly fitting for the ominous presence of the supernatural witches who: “hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.11).9 In this regard, smell has a long history of being used as an agent to produce meaning in the performing arts. Olfactory design is a useful possession in theatre makers’ creative arsenal.

But why is scent such a rarity in theatres today, to the degree that “almost every use [of scent] is likely to be considered non-standard to some extent”?10

Underlying the gradual elimination of scents from most performances seems to be the conventions of traditional theatres—an overpowering proscenium arch, an elevated stage, assigned seating, regulated intermissions, and so on. Indeed, the “fourth wall conventions of realism” encourage a division between the watchers and the watched, “permitting only sight and sound to cross its divide”.11 The physical structures of a traditional proscenium theatre and the distancing effect it invites makes the use of scents particularly

7 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 19. quoted in Josephine Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016): 44. A similar viewpoint can be seen in Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 131–32. Here, the author calls vision and audition “bullies” in the sensorium.

8 Sally Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” in The Senses in Performances, ed. Sally Banes and André Lepecki (New York: Routledge, 2007), 29. 9 Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of “Macbeth”,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 466.

10

Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 132. 11 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 29. A similar viewpoint is seen in Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense- Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 36, 44.

challenging. On one hand, technical hurdles must be considered. The immobility of the audience and the different spatial locations they occupy pose challenges to the “production, dispersion, and removal of odours”.12

Questions about odour detection, olfactory fatigue, stage managing and cuing need to be solved before olfactory design can be realised.13 On the other hand, the proscenium theatre and the traditional mode of performance it breeds have conditioned its viewers to rely primarily on vision and audition as modes of sensing and sense-making. Under the bombardment of dazzling stage lights and a live orchestra, traces of scent will likely go unnoticed. In this regard, olfaction is placed at a disadvantaged position in traditional performances.

However, scent is slowly starting to reclaim its place in immersive theatres, of which Punchdrunk is a leading practitioner. The term “immersive theatre” is used to describe a style of “contemporary performance practice involving a visceral and participatory audience experience with an all-encompassing, sensual style of production aesthetic”.14 Unlike traditional theatre’s excessive focus on vision and audition, immersive productions’ defining feature lies in the physical repositioning of the audience within an imaginary world by “exploit[ing] all that is experiential in performance”.15

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is a prime example of immersive storytelling, whose unique production framework defies the limitations of olfactory design discussed above. This site-specific performance takes place in a six-storey, lushly furnished “hotel”, in which audience members don masks and are left to freely roam “some 100 rooms” and probe “some 3000 drawers and hidden doors” as cast members re-enact pivotal scenes from Shakespeare’s

12

Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 132. 13 Michael McGinley and Charles McGinley, “Olfactory Design Elements in Theater: The Practical Considerations,” in Designing with Smell: Practice, Techniques, and Challenges, ed. Kate McLean Victoria Henshaw, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins and Gary Warnaby (New York: Routledge, 2018), 219–26. This design manual provides a comprehensive review of the technical considerations involved in olfactory design for performances.

14 15 Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 35. Ibid.

Scottish tragedy.16 This radical elimination of a stage and dispersion of the cast (and the audience) throughout a multi-storey performance space quickly make an omniscient view of the story impossible. Yet, this limited viewpoint, complemented by the “distraction” posed by a multi-sensory and interactive environment, in turn empowers the audience to break from the passive receiving of information and attend to their “internal feelings (both emotional and sensational) as much as external occurrences”.17 Specifically, Punchdrunk’s “screwing the proscenium” has unleashed the many potential applications of olfactory design.18

2. Harnessing the Evocative Power of Smell

Most published criticisms and reviews of Sleep No More mentioned the show’s unique scents and the feelings they conjure.19 On various social media platforms, frequent goers compose elaborate prose in memory of their whimsical encounters at the performance.20 In fact, such frequent pairing of scent cues with emotional experiences is no singular occurrence, nor is it utterly surprising. Humans’ sense of smell has long been acknowledged as inextricably linked to the formation and retrieval of memories, capable of both crystallising an episode of memory in time and triggering vivid remembrance. Various factors, both innate and learned, collectively contribute to the enthronement of smell as the most effective trigger of memory and emotions. At the same time Punchdrunk has devised many ways to harness the evocative power of scents in the interest of enhancing both its performance and production.

16 Erik Piepenburg, “Stage Is Set. Ready for Your Part?,” The New York Times. and Pan, “Review of Immersive Theatre Production Sleep No More (Shanghai).” In the New York production, the fictional hotel is named “The McKittrick Hotel”; in Shanghai, it is named “The McKinnon Hotel”.

17

Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 40. 18 W. B. Worthen, “‘The Written Troubles of the Brain’: “Sleep No More” and the Space of Character,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 94. 19 See ibid., 79. Worthen noted in his opening observation “an intense, loamy smell”, followed by a comment that “it’s entirely creepy”. See also Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 162. 20 For an example, see dreamingofmanderley, “Scent of a Boy Witch,” ed. Tumblr (2012). The blogger compares the smellscape of the performance space to “the scent of a long-lost lover”, linking various smells to the seductive character “Boy Witch”.

The origin of smell’s emotional potency traces back to basic human anatomy. According to Rachel Herz, a leading expert on the psychology of smell, the olfactory bulbs—receptors of sensory information—are located in proximity to the limbic system, where “brain structures responsible for emotion are found”.21 Within the limbic system, the amygdala is “critical for the expression and experience of emotions” while the hippocampus is “necessary for associative learning and various forms of memory”.22 By virtue of olfaction’s advantaged neuroanatomical structure and unique physiological mechanisms, an olfactory stimulus can evoke memories and emotions in the limbic system before the frontal cortex can consciously identify an odour.23

In the case of Sleep No More, the performance and design both function in mimetic mode: much of the events, emotions, and themes are implied in scenes of abstract, speechless contemporary dance and fragmentary, almost surreal, properties and sets.24 Due to the lack of language and the quick pace of action, the audience is often left confused, overwhelmed, and unable to decipher the information presented the moment; however, the subtle yet constant presence of a background scent can serve either as a hint to the immediate course of action, or as an olfactory “bookmark” through which the audience can relive the moment beyond the duration of the event itself. For instance, the ballroom, symbolic of Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane Hill, is characterised by a sharp, crisp scent of pine—the impending danger posed by a “moving” Birnam Wood.25 Here, Punchdrunk’s touch of olfactory design not only serves to illustrate—to complement the presence of physical trees in the space and to denote the setting and time—but also to evoke a mood of grave austerity and an ambience of malevolence through a thematic association between the smell of pine and the actualisation of the witches’

21 Rachel Herz, “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences,” in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (Oxford: Berge Publisher, 2006), 191. 22

23

24 25 Ibid.

Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 135.

Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 140. Li, Rayna. observation notes, March 24, 2018.

third prophecy.26 On a technical level, the scent of pine is a piece of olfactory stage direction forecasting the upcoming action in the story and contributing to the overall immersivity of the production. On a thematic level, the scent, emerging anew as a precursor to a scene of vengeance and justice, serves as a lingering reminder that inspires an intense and lasting intellectual engagement from the audience.

Considering the emotional intensity of the show’s content and the overwhelming elaborateness of its environs, it seems common that in the patrons’ hour of need for cathartic sense-making, they would somehow recall the show’s ever elusive yet infinitely evocative scents. In turn, these inextricable associations between Sleep No More’s olfactory cues and the vivid remembrances they trigger in the audience’s mind shed light on the potential implications of scent in promotion and marketing. According to Josephine Machon, “a vital component of immersive theatre” is an “energised liveness and the consequent live(d)ness of the performance moment”—a paradoxical experience of a “lasting ephemerality”.27 In other words, an integral part of an immersive experience is its “aftertaste”; it is only so powerful and memorable because the events are lived and re-lived, the emotions felt, ruminated, rewritten, and memorialised. By the same token, patrons are not simply after a US$30 candle branded with the show’s name, but the many thrills and excitements of show-going the aroma evokes in their mind.28

On the flip side, the other indispensable condition in the creation of scent-memories lies in nurture: odours acquire their meaning through associative learning.29 While “smell is a powerful generator of memorial affect”, comments Susan Feagin, Vice President of the American Society

26 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 30–31. In this article, Banes proposed a taxonomy of “theatrical aroma design” based on the “representational functions that the odors in the performances are intended to discharge”. Among the six identified uses of scents in theatres, “to illustrate words, characters, places, and actions” is most common, followed by “to evoke a mood or ambience”. However, Feagin criticises that using smell solely as illustration is “discouraging”, “unimaginative”, and “uninteresting”. Feagin favours the use of scents as a way to create “mood and atmosphere”.

27 28 29 Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 39. See note 4 above. Herz, “Understanding Odor Preferences,” 190.

for Aesthetics, “the variability of associations among different people for a great range of odours might in some cases compromise its potential”.30

The importance of environmental influence in forging scent preferences suggests that olfactory design for immersive theatres needs to be culturally sensitive—both to the setting of the story and the target audience. Since the aesthetics of Sleep No More are rooted in a contemporary audience’s nostalgia for an irretrievable past,31 the successful expression of its dramatic effects relies heavily on the audience’s capacity to empathise with the designed environment.

Among the various versions of the show, Punchdrunk’s bold decision to relocate its show to an Asian context challenged its designers to reimagine the basic premises of the production. In response to a different body of viewers, Felix Barrett, founder of Punchdrunk and director of its shows, revealed that special care has been taken to ensure the compatibility of the production design with its cultural environment: “every show is completely bespoke to the building it occupies … everything [the characters] touch needs to be coherent as well”.32 In the New York production, the “Paisley Sweets” candy shop appeals to the audience’s happy childhood memories with the scent of traditional candies and caramel.33 In Shanghai, the Scottish setting faced a Chinese twist. Instead of a Euro-American candy shop lined with jars of pear drops, striped humbugs, and aniseed balls, the Shanghai venue features a traditional herbal medicine shop equipped with an apothecary cabinet, and of course, the distinct smells of patchouli and camphor.34 The significant presence of herbal remedies in the Chinese culture makes these medicinal smells a meaningful equivalent to New York’s choice of caramel as a sensory reminder of childhood innocence and comforting familiarity amidst

30

Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 135–36. 31 Barrett, Felix qtd. in Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, “Interviews,” in “SMG Live Presents Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More” (program), August 2018, 17. Barrett revealed that the inspiration of Sleep No More “came from film noir soundtracks and the atmospheres they create”. 32 Barrett, “Interviews,” 17. 33 Piepenburg, “Stage Is Set. Ready for Your Part?”. Published electronically March 16, 2011. This article reveals that the set’s sweet smell of candy owes its origin to a caramel-scented spray administered before each performance.

34 Li, Rayna. observation notes, March 24, 2018.

an otherwise dangerous noir world. Through thorough research and crosscultural collaborations, Punchdrunk is able to address the cultural specificity of scent-induced memories with carefully curated olfactory details.

All things considered, the theatrical magic of Sleep No More resides in “the uniqueness of each experience for every individual”.35 By the same token, the smells of Sleep No More are certain to bear different meanings for each audience member given the different circumstances we have encountered both in life and in Punchdrunk’s fictional hotel. “What’s crucially important is the detail in the work”, revealed Artistic Director Barrett in an interview with Josephine Machon, “there’s always the promise of more to discover”.36 In the spirit of Barrett’s vision, my analysis of Sleep No More’s olfactory details is in no way exhaustive. Rather, a select few examples seek to provide a sample of what olfactory design can accomplish in the emerging field of immersive theatre. Yet, the study of olfactory design in theatres, traditional or immersive, does not end with one case. Smell’s natural properties—its subtlety, its elusiveness, its capacity to evoke memories and emotions—are an infinite repertoire from which theatre makers can draw creative inspirations and devise sophisticated works. Olfactory design makes the air delicate. The creative spirit makes the air delicate.

35

Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 36. 36 Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 159.

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