‘Mise en Scent’: The Théâtre d'Art's Cantique des cantiques and the Use of Smell as a Theatrical Device

Abstract

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.

Olfactory-colour crossmodal correspondences in art, science, and design

“…A number of artists and composers (in the opening decades of the twentieth Century), from Cèzanne to Scriabin (Hull, 1927 ; Runciman, 1915 ), through to little-known Futurist artists such as Azari ( 1924 ) and Carrà ( 1973 ) were undoubtedly curious about the connections, or correspondences that linked colours with odours (see Verbeek, 2017 , for a review). However, one of the stumbling blocks that stymied this early interest was that the phenomenon was primarily considered in terms of ‘synaesthesia’, what the Futurists were called ‘ syn-olfactismo ’ (Marinetti, 2014 ; see also Fleischer, 2007 ; Shepherd-Barr, 1999 ).…”

“…Meanwhile, putatively synaesthetic connections between colour and odour were subsequently, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, explored by Italian Futurist artists such as Azari ( 1924 ; described in Verbeek, 2017 ). There are also reports of symbolist performances at the end of the nineteenth century presenting corresponding colours, sounds, and scents to audiences (see Fleischer, 2007 ; Shepherd-Barr, 1999 ). Meanwhile, the famous Russian composer Scriabin often talked about, though never managed to deliver in his own lifetime, fragrances synchronised with the lighting score that he had designed for his 1911 tone poem Prometheus: Poem of Fire (Runciman, 1915 ).…”

Scent and the Cinema

“…And indeed technological challenges are especially noticeable in the context of the movie theater (e.g., as compared with the theater; see Banes, 2001). While problems associated with releasing, and then clearing, a sequence of scents in a theatrical setting have been around for more than a century (e.g., Hartmann, 1913; Shepherd-Barr, 1999), the use of scent in theatrical and music settings would seem to have more chance of succeeding both because a smaller number of scents have typically been involved, and also because the low-tech manual administration of scent is much more common (therefore lowering the cost) than the specially wired cinema seats that have, on occasion, been introduced (albeit only into a small number of cinemas). It is worth noting that the incorporation of scent has also been more successful in the context of the theme parks such as the Epcott center (Lukas, 2008), where the films are often specially commissioned specifically for the venue, and hence change much less frequently than the feature films that are typically shown in the cinema.…”

Scent in the Context of Live Performance

“…This is an interesting phenomenon, because these three senses are the only three that cannot be employed in any meaningful way by the movies or television. (p. 201)Meanwhile, writing a few years later, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (1999, p. 152) made much the same point, when writing of Roinard’s 1891 production of the Cantique des cantiques (about which, more later) that it “stands as a unique example of the use of smell in theatre; only a few such experiments have ever been made.”…”

“…Several Symbolist artistic performances took place around the end of the 19th century. They typically involved audiences being presented with various combinations of colours, sounds, and scents that were thought to correspond with one another (see Fleischer, 2007; Marvick, 1999; Shepherd-Barr, 1999). In one much-discussed early example, Paul-Napoléon Roinard delivered two performances of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon at the Théâtre d'Art's in Paris on the 10 and 11 December 1891.…”