Smell and Taste in Theatre History: A Roundtable Series is part of one fell swoop, a writing collective for performance across disciplines.
We, the editors, work on smell and taste in the contemporary moment and felt a historical curation of smell and taste was vital to understanding the sensory politics of today. We aim to expand the calls emitting from The Senses in Performance, such as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's call for a theatre historiography that considers taste as critical or Sally Banes's aesthetic framework for olfactory performance.1 We join other contributions that have foregrounded the chemical senses in theatre history, notably the Performance Research special issues On Smell (2003) and On Taste (2017).2 We also nod to the greater realm of historical sensory studies in literature and cultural studies, such as work from scholars Constance Classen, David Howes, and Hsuan Hsu—and of course Holly Dugan's forthcoming Shakespeare and the Senses.3
We offer this roundtable series as a provocation to the field, a tasting, that asks us to think differently about how we approach, conceptualize, and teach theatre history. Our contributors' works with the senses are at once sensitive and revolutionary as they de-/reconstruct systems of knowledge and power and ask: What does it mean to stage Taste during famine in colonial Tenochtitlan/Mexico City? (Daniela Gutierréz-Flores); how does reading Shakespeare through smell destabilize our historical understanding of early modern London? (Holly Dugan); what are the complex politics of colonization, deforestation, and resistance, carried in a cool fragrant breeze through the Pacific Islands? (Angela L. Robinson); how do present fantasies of tasting the past shape the global circulation of the Japanese way of tea? (Michelle Liu Carriger).
I. Case Studies
Devon Baur and Elizabeth McQueen (DB/EM): We invited each of you to bring a case study from your particular temporal worlds beyond the stage. Can you describe the sensory world of the historical time period of your research? And can you introduce your case study and tell us how smell or taste (or both) perform?
Daniela Gutierréz-Flores (DGF): The case study I chose is the one-act play La alhóndiga divina. It was written in 1578 in Mexico City by a Spanish playwright and priest, Fernán González de Eslava. Only fifty years have passed since the fall of Tenochtitlan after the Spanish invasion. The city has undergone major changes in its urban composition and hence in its sensorial landscapes—from how the city looked, how it smelled, how it sounded, and so on. A lot of new foods were introduced: pigs, cattle, wheat, wine, and all those European staples. There is new music and new instruments, and the sounds of bells and churches are changing how time is structured through sound. The sound of languages like Spanish and Latin is also new. We often forget that language is sensorial and that different languages sound very different and feel different in the mouth. Spanish accounts of this period offer vivid descriptions of Mexico City/Tenochtitlan as a sensorially overwhelming city, framing this experience through a rhetoric of wonder that helped justify colonization.
La alhóndiga divina translates to "the divine granary," like the place where you store grain. It's a circumstance play, which means that it was written for a specific event. In 1578, the Vatican sent relics, including bones and hairs of various saints, to Mexico City. To commemorate their arrival, the Society of Jesus organized a huge celebration. This event was part of the Jesuits' effort to strengthen the newly established Catholic faith and to evangelize the Indigenous population. It included processions, plays (such as this one), and arches made of fragrant herbs and flowers that were placed across the city. With celebrations like this, the city itself became a big theatre, turning the streets into a stage and every passerby into a spectator.
The plot features the five senses as allegorical characters and revolves around the idea of the five senses being unable to apprehend Christ because only the soul's senses can do that, but not the body's. The five senses appear onstage and are conversing with two other allegorical characters, Justice and Truth, who test them on if they see the truth of God. Sight comes in, and he (or she, it's unclear) says, "I see a piece of bread." Justice rebukes him and says, "No, that is not bread, but it's actually Jesus." Smell comes in and says, "Oh, it smells like bread." Truth says, "No, God is odorless." And so on. The play subtly suggests that the five senses would've been played by Indigenous actors, because just like them, they can't fully apprehend the Christian God—they need to be converted. In the end, the only sense that is able to apprehend God is Hearing, because through it one could hear God's word, the doctrine, and convert to Christianity.
La alhóndiga divina was written not long after an epidemic surged in 1576, giving rise to a brutal famine. It's interesting that the five senses are really hungry characters that want to eat that bread, to enjoy it in all its sensorial qualities, but that Truth and Justice keep telling them, "No, this isn't bread, it's God." There's a tension between what would've been onstage if the play had actually been performed—I assume some sort of material representation of bread, edible or not—and the text's continuous attempt to dematerialize it in a context (the celebration organized by the Jesuits) that is just overflowing with smells and tastes and sounds and so on.
Holly Dugan (HD): My time period is 1606 in London. We tend to think of cities in the past as being more malodorous than cities in the present, and that's a fallacy that's linked to civilizing discourses. It reveals how Europeans thought about other spaces, and when thinking about the past, we should be suspicious of that.
One reason I continuously come back to early modern London is that I think it makes clear some assumptions in how we think about urban space. The senses offer up a methodology for thinking about space, specifically olfaction as a spatial awareness or navigation, in a city that was changing rapidly. And I'm going to talk about that in three different ways: (1) The city changed in terms of its demographics, (2) which in turn puts pressure on its infrastructure, and (3) then finally there are these systemic crises that result, like disease.
First, the population's demographic shift is interesting to me as a scholar of history, specifically of this urban space, which was transforming while Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writing. By the end of Shakespeare's career, London had become a global city—which wasn't necessarily the case even seventy years prior. That shift brings a rapid influx of different people, as well as different goods, into the city space.
This put pressure on its infrastructure. The city almost quadrupled its population within a very short period of time, resulting in housing crises, sewage crises, and food security crises. The population growth was not necessarily a generational increase; it was mostly young men (like Shakespeare) coming from the country to the city to make their fortune. But there were others who followed, and they transformed that space in really interesting ways.
For example, there were more animals in (and moving through) London. If you take a quick glance at the map of early modern London, you can see traces written on the streets: Bladder Alley, Butcher's Lane, Cow Cross Lane, Stinking Alley, Stews Lane. Through these records, we can start to make visible the phenomenological experience of all these bodies and spaces—and smell is hinged to that. But the slaughter of these animals also allowed for more leather goods to be produced in the city, leading to new kinds of questions about toxic dynamics of industry in urban spaces. It also allowed for the sale of luxury goods such as leather gloves (and the strong scents needed to scent them).
Theatre was impacted by these changes. Its infrastructure developed from them, even as it served an important collective social practice and aesthetic ritual. In early modern London, the sudden population increase was part of what made theatre possible as a viable economic industry, and in some ways it also helped to stabilize it. Across Shakespeare's career, you can see how stagecraft that was at first experimental solidified as playgoers became accustomed to the sensory stunts that were being put forth. This included using scented props and drawing on the sensory dynamics of the crowd itself.
Civet speaks to both of these histories. It is a very useful ingredient in perfume, blending well with other ingredients, elevating and strengthening other scents. It is a pungent cream produced in the perineal glands located under the abdomen and near the tail of the civet cat. Civet cats are indigenous to tropical forests mostly located in Africa and Asia (i.e., not England). By the sixteenth century, civet was imported into England; its use became ubiquitous in scented luxury goods (like leather), so much so that it makes an anachronistic appearance in Shakespeare's King Lear (which purportedly takes place in ancient Britain). In the play, the eponymous king calls for "an ounce of civet" from an apothecary to "sweeten" his imagination.4
It's a striking moment that occurs late in the play, after the king has abdicated his throne and been thrown out of his daughters' homes; in this scene, Lear has been wandering on the heath, exposed to the elements of a storm. His appearance conveys this to the audience; he has been lain bare to the elements for at least three days at this point in the play. He likely stinks. Yet he recalls what it feels like to be a king, calling for civet to sweeten his imagination. Shakespeare is both naming a very specific smell and also using it to create a metaphoric and abstract effect, juxtaposing its sweetness with the stench of poverty and precarity, a smell he himself later terms as the "smell of mortality." That the sweet smell is itself animalic only emphasizes the irony, linking civet with a memory of power and with precarity. Shakespeare trusts his audiences, even those who were more familiar with the smell of mortality than the sweet smell of civet, to understand these allusions. He uses civet to create a powerful aesthetic effect that likely resonated in compelling yet different ways for those in the audience.
It also speaks to a particular temporal moment. Such an allusion was particularly effective in 1606. King Lear was written during a new outbreak of plague, and this scene was likely first staged in the public theatres just as the plague was starting to spread rapidly. Playgoers were becoming very cognizant of its presence in London. The play likely debuted for two or three weeks in July, right before the public theatres had to close again due to the outbreak. Olfaction often becomes a discourse linked to regulating public health because it signals implicit moral associations with cleanliness and health. These heightened moments of outbreak are often accompanied by measures to regulate unruly bodies in space. The king's language about the smell of mortality would have not only resonated with the vulnerable but also struck fear in those who were proximate to them, especially in the shared space of a playhouse. Today, we know that plague was spread by the bite of an infected rodent flea; but in the past, they thought it could be all kinds of different causes: an act of God, a scourge, or something that could be transmitted through the air. Shared space suddenly became very charged. In those moments, one thing that happens is the sensory modalities, the way we navigate space—the unthinking ways in which touch, taste, and smell may be really integral to our understanding of urban experience—becomes really present when you're suddenly aware of the risk of disease, of sharing air with other people.
Angela L. Robinson (ALR): I'm looking at the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Pacific, a very sense-heavy world. That is still true now of the Pacific Islands. My family is from Chuuk, Micronesia, and some of my earliest memories are shaped by the senses that I can still recall very distinctly: sounds of children squealing, laughing, crying, of dogs barking, of women humming as they pounded the taro root, and of the wind through the palm trees; the feel of the ocean and of the mud squishing between my toes in the taro patches; the smell of the powdered soap mixed with well water that we would wash ourselves with and of the smoke from coconut husk fires; and the taste of the foods, like tuba, a sweet drink made from fermented coconut sap. Again, it is a very sense-heavy world; but at the same time, I hesitate to describe it this way, because colonists were obsessed with the sensory of Indigenous worlds. Smell, taste, and feel were constants in the colonial record of this time.
European colonists and missionaries were often very unhappy and quite miserable with the smells and feelings in the Pacific. They would describe pungent thick aromas and oppressive sticky heat; although sometimes you find a description of a cool island breeze that carries the pleasant smell of frangipani. But more often than not, it's a strong disgust and repulsion being expressed.
And then, funnily, the same was described of them. Pacific Islanders' oral histories show that the first Europeans they encountered were often described as demonic gremlins with huge noses who looked unwell and smelled poorly. And Europeans were often surprised that the Indigenous people would have these strong averse reactions to their smells, which they would remark upon in their journals and logbooks. There's one record of a French naturalist sharing his bottle of cologne with an Indigenous Pacific person, who is taken aback by the smell. French philosopher Joseph Marie de Gérando even wrote a treatise on investigating the senses of the "savage" called The Observation of Savage Peoples (1800), pointing to the importance placed on the senses to serve an early eugenicist framework of European superiority at the time. This obsession with Indigenous senses and scents also appeared in fiction. In German author E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 "Haimatochare," the character Dr. Archibald Menzies (based on the real-life Scottish naturalist Archibald Menzies, who traveled to Hawai'i on the HMS Discovery with British Captain George Vancouver in 1793) describes a wooded area outside of Honolulu where "[t]he air was sultry and filled with the voluptuous aroma exhaled by fragrant herbs."5 The forest scent described in Hoffmann's story may have referred to the native laua'e fern or the fragrant maile vines, but likely it was the sandalwood trees.
Sandalwood was a treasured scent in the Pacific. Islanders would soak its scrapings in coconut oil and use it on their bodies, but also on tapa or masi, which is a woven bark cloth. The Chinese also treasured it, using it for incense and wood carving. In the 1800s, when Australian and US ships started running out of appealing things to trade with China, they came upon sandalwood in the Pacific Islands. Sandalwood does not grow in North America and only in specific places of Australia. So they went to Fiji, New Caledonia, the Marquesas, Hawai'i, and other places in the Pacific to obtain sandalwood for trade. They decimated the native sandalwood population in these areas, destroying over 90% of it in Hawai'i alone. Sandalwood overharvesting contributed to widespread deforestation of Pacific Islands and the subsequent extinction of hundreds of native bird species and numerous environmental damages. In the specific case of sandalwood, it's even more devastating because of its slow regeneration: One tree can take up to forty years to fully mature.
Today, we see the long-term effects of this historical deforestation, where in many of these specific islands, sandalwood has struggled to survive due to the continuance of now-illegal logging and its very complicated cultivation. It is a semiparasitic plant, needing others to grow; you can't just pop a seed into the ground and grow sandalwood. So scent and sense perform these important roles in colonial power relations in the Pacific with material effects for environments.
Michelle Liu Carriger (MLC): I'm cheating on this question—I don't have a specific time period because I am looking at the preservation of the Japanese way of tea, which is typically called "tea ceremony" in English. Today's ideology of tea is that it has not changed since the sixteenth century.
Contemporary tea performance, the highly stylized and formalized sets of motions that culminate in a host offering sweets and making and serving tea to a guest, certainly looks very archaic. Practitioners study to become connoisseurs of Zen-inflected bodily postures and collect arts and crafts for deployment in tea. There's a reason to believe that when you see people practicing tea today—and of course that means tasting and smelling tea—you are seeing the 1580s through approximately the 1650s. That's absolutely not true. But is the tea roughly the same tea? It is. This question evoked a slippage between different periods and the complication of using taste and smell as the senses by which you attempt to understand the past.
As taste and smell have always been accused, they can make us believe that we know something that we may not really know. When we are talking about tea practice from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we are talking about matcha: ground, powdered tea, a tea that had been brought to Japan from China. It is the youngest leaves from the ends of the Camellia sinensis plant, which gives us white, green, and black teas. The leaves are raised under cover, which means those leaves are working harder than regular leaves to make chlorophyll. In this period, these tea leaves would be picked, dried, and then they would be delivered to great estates in a large or earthen jar. The finest leaves are actually packed in little cloth bags inside a big 18–24-inch jar. The packing to hold these precious leaves in place was more tea leaves of a lower quality. Over time, this translates into the two varieties of leaves that we now use for matcha. The very precious ones inside the bags are called koicha, thick tea. When prepared, it's very thick. Think of the consistency of melted ice cream or split pea soup. The thinner tea, the packing leaves, were not wasted. They themselves were also ground in the stone mill that you would have in the household, becoming usucha, thin tea. What's popular now around the world in the form of lattes is usucha, the thin tea, whisked up with foam on top.
Today, tea sweets in tea practice are incredibly sweet—they're very delicious. They're also incredibly beautiful. But we know sweetness changed over time. Even if buried in records, we know that people were having very different kinds of sweets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like shiitake mushrooms and citrus fruits, before refined sugar became widely available from about the nineteenth century. Tasting these sweets thus may not really collapse time, but it can invite us to muse on our simultaneous closeness to and distance from earlier practitioners and their tongues.
For example, November is an important part of the tea year because that is when the new leaves that were picked in May were delivered to the households. A specific form of tea gathering called kuchikiri (meaning cutting the mouth or opening) was invented for early November, also called Tea Person's New Year. In the first half of November, the tea jar has arrived with the New Year's harvest, and you cut open your sealed jar to grind the brand-new fresh tea. It's the most delicious tea of the year. This practice persists into the present. We still have Tea Person's New Year, but freshness doesn't really matter because we keep all our tea in the freezer and modify the temperature of the water to have more delicious tea; and actually our tea is pretty fresh all year round.
Today, we're overwhelmed with what became tradition very slowly over the Edo period (also known as the Tokugawa period, 1603–1868), but one that did not faithfully preserve a sense of the sixteenth century.
II. Archives
DB/EM: Thinking about the archive and the historical questions also invokes methodological ones, and it was wonderful to hear how you're already dealing with navigating that subjective sensory space. How do you figure, feel, smell, or taste the sensory in the archives?
MLC: There is an archival romance of continuity with the past in the case of Japanese tea and the sense that if I taste this tea now, I am unproblematically or transparently one with that past. I'm not totally immune to that aspect of the archive. I think it is important to think through the ways in which there is something to that.
Matcha, which has had a meteoric rise to a new global super food in the last fifteen years, was a forgotten tea form, used only by tea practitioners who really had preserved it in their own little cul-de-sac of culture. Prior to this explosion, I think it rightfully had more of a historical artifact taste to it, if you will. The sense of its historicity has somewhat dissipated, especially the last two or so years when matcha took over Tik-Tok and Instagram. Yet, as a globalized food and hipster trend, part of the appeal is that it is ceremonial grade and comes from a timeless Eastern orientalized tradition of mindfulness and oneness and harmony.
In trying to responsibly do these kinds of histories, it is fair to say if I taste this archaic form of tea, I am tasting something that has a continuity with senses five hundred years ago. And it's highly important to think also about the twenty-first-century desires with which we are freighting that connection to the past and combine that with responsible archival research. The archival research can help us turn over discrepancies and changes over time so that we can responsibly situate that sensorial connection to past practices.6
HD: I want to echo that, too, it takes creativity and also careful situating in context, especially around assumptions, which is the joy of archival sensory research. The past makes you think through and theorize the implicit work sensory perception is doing in the present. I'm a literary scholar, and literature and theatre offer a rich archive because they invite us to consider how the aesthetic connects to spatial and temporal dynamics as audiences are always shifting and changing. That sense of proximity requires audiences (and scholars) to interpret gesture and language through an in-depth (and often implicit) awareness of cultural references as well as what the author might've been trying to achieve. All this occurs in an instant, drawing on the spatial, temporal, and physical dynamics of space. That's super interesting to think through methodologically: How can we understand these dynamics in the past?
To do this, I always start by reminding myself that I come to the archive with a sensory history myself. For instance, I study the role of civet as a metaphor and prop in early modern performances. But civet is also one of my triggers for personal memory. Understanding the power of that embodied reaction, but not necessarily using it to guide interpretation about its meaning for others, is the real trick and the key to sensory studies. For example, there are important material differences. Most of the ways I encounter "civet" are in modern perfumes. But this is usually a synthetic ingredient that smells differently than what would've been marketed as civet in the past. It's important to contextualize not only these material differences but also what they inspire in terms of hedonic or affective registers.
ALR: I agree with what Michelle and Holly have said. It's interesting some of the ways these questions of methodology have come up in native plant restoration issues and cases of trying to understand historically which plants were around precolonization, because often there's the classic reading against the grain of the colonial record when trying to understand which plant they are actually talking about.
The laua'e fern, which I mentioned earlier, for example, is interesting because there was this heated debate that happened around its origins. According to Hawaiian cultural knowledge and oral history, this fern had existed as long as Hawaiians did—for a very, very long time. But fern taxonomists came in and said, no, this fern could only have been introduced to Hawai'i after 1900. Hawaiians insisted on its prior existence, however, by pointing to the countless references to the beautiful smelling laua'e fern throughout Hawaiian cultural performance practices, such as song, chant, and dance, from long before 1900.
Hawaiian ethnobotanist Puanani Anderson-Fung decided to do a study of the laua'e fern to see who was correct, and she ended up finding out that it was actually two different plants, and so both parties were technically correct. There was laua'e maoli, the native laua'e (Microsorum spectrum), which sadly faded out with deforestation, and there is laua'e hānai, the adopted laua'e (Microsorum grossum) that was introduced after 1900 and eventually supplanted the native laua'e. One thing that helped them identify the two species was the descriptions of the laua'e fern's scent, and so it's an interesting way that this research can have very material effects.
DGF: I think we're all very finely attuned with each other's methods. Responding to Holly, as I am a literary scholar too, I am often wary and skeptical of a purely symbolic reading of food in the text. In my view, purely textual methods can flatten the material and sensorial realities of the food that's being represented and described. With the senses, the method needs to be a little messy and as expansive as possible. Once you open the door to different kinds of archives, there are really interesting discoveries that you might not have expected.
In the case of La alhóndiga divina, I started reading other plays by the same author to get a sense of his "sensorial repertoire," what I would call an intertextual method. For example, in Fernán González de Eslava's other plays, he talks a lot about food. Even though the plays were written in Mexico and performed in Mexico, there are hardly any references to Indigenous foods. It's mostly Spanish food, so there's a lot of chorizos and morcillas and gazpachos. But did the author simply have more familiarity with Spanish foods than with the local foods of New Spain? Was he not consuming tortillas or chiles? Or rather than a matter of a personal diet, can we read this as an aesthetic choice and not a trivial detail?
I also find myself reading about things like the prices of wheat in a particular decade in the sixteenth century to figure out what the material reality behind the text would've been. For instance, to consider how readily available chorizos and morcillas were in the time of this play, we can ask if their appearance in the text is more nostalgic or represents a material reality. This changes the meaning constructed in the text and then of course how it would have been received by an audience.
It's interesting to me to look beyond text. For instance, the issue of the Eucharist. When reading from the senses, I start wondering: What did the bread look like onstage? The text doesn't tell us. There are no instructions saying if there is an object or what that object looks like. And if they used bread, who was making it? Was it made of wheat? Because wheat took a while to be a successful crop in the Americas, right? And in a lot of sources, you see people referring to other foods—like tortillas or yucca—as "bread," so can we really assume that bread was wheat bread? That becomes a pretty important methodological question, especially because Catholic doctrine at the time insisted that only wheat could be used for the Eucharist. The body of Christ couldn't transubstantiate into any other grain (and certainly not into maize, which Indigenous peoples considered sacred). So suddenly this tiny detail about that object becomes a much more central issue to the performance.
We also need to be as expansive as possible from a textual point of view: ask how the text was circulated, how it was performed, and how the performance would have interacted with other material practices like bread-making or the cultivation of wheat. And to Holly's point about thinking of the sensorial in the context of crisis, this is so important when acknowledging that this was so close to a famine.
III. Sensory Methodology
DB/EM: Historiographic methods shape a sensory methodology for theatre history that is different from visual or auditory analysis. If we were to envision a sensory methodology, what does it demand of us, readers, and our sensory history students?
MLC: I wanted to tag on to something that came up in listening to everyone else's answers. In the case of tea ceremony, the consumable is in the name of the practice, which is fundamentally about the consumption, the tasting and smelling, of food, incense, whole meals, alcohol, two kinds of tea, sweets, etc. When you look at the historiography of tea, frequently the taste and smell have been removed, perhaps a conscious or unconscious attempt to dignify the study of tea in academic and scholarly contexts. This feels like it overlaps with Angela's case studies. There's an ambivalence about trying to restore taste and smell because they have in many ways been ignored, removed, or minimized precisely in order to make the study of those things legible and appreciated in the scholarly context that we already have.
ALR: That makes me think about the play Daniela was talking about where God doesn't have a smell. It's funny because Europeans at that time had this idea of odorlessness as godliness, and obviously bad odors were debased. So, here, it is like odorlessness is aligned with scholarly seriousness and rigor.
DGF: Now that you mention odorlessness, in a lot of these texts on colonial contexts, there's a tension between highlighting the super-sensorial while also trying to discipline in the case of these highly conventional allegorical plays. The plays work to dematerialize the senses and the relationship with divinity, but there is a contradiction because they happened within a religious celebration that was intensely sensorial. From a methodological point of view, focusing on taste and smell—and I would add touch—opens the door to thinking about perspectives that are not just of the European author and consider all the potential participants of those performances: the people in the audience, the street vendors, and so on, whether they were Spanish or Indigenous or Afro-descendants. The senses take us out of visual-auditorial regimes and make us think of other forms of interacting with the text and other forms of experiencing the performance.
ALR: Especially if you're looking at certain time periods when people are in places where they are not typically from and they are describing senses, it helps to go back or to look at other things that are happening, like the methodologies Holly and Danielle described. And as Michelle was pointing out, attending to the senses sometimes is just important in and of itself.
Also checking multiple archives, looking at the Indigenous oral histories, will give you more information than the colonial record. And then constantly reading against the grain. There's this case of a British missionary who went to Papua New Guinea, and he describes everyone as "smelling" each other, but it's actually the sacred greeting of exchanging breath. In Māori, this is the hongi; in Hawaiian, the honi; in Sāmoan, the sogi; in Tongan, the fetongi; and in my own language Chuukese, the feihong. It is a sacred exchange of life force and power. It's deeply intimate and reverent. And so a sensory methodology needs to be a double methodology: Look for the senses, but then also find the significance of the sense in those cultural contexts.
MLC: One new complication in using taste and smell in our methods is that the information that we are liable to gather is less translatable into text and may be less rational. If we don't change the nature of what is knowledge, then we may not be able to get as much knowledge from these senses that codes as rational, as something worth knowing. Taste and smell open up a door, an invitation to also expand what might be worth knowing.
HD: The senses are a social conditioning of power as we've been describing in so many of these charged moments. And making the senses a scholarly object worthy of study is part of these larger, longer histories that are challenging the epistemological framework of what counts. And for me, it's thinking about embodied history as lived experience, and the questions: What did it feel like to be in that world? And what does it feel like now to be in this world? That's the joy, and that's the challenge.
A sensory methodology can help for theatre history. I think sometimes when we're contextualizing sensory experience in the past—at least in the first wave of work that happened (and my work is part of that)—we approached each sensory modality as discrete, and this piecemeal approach tended to emphasize universals. And I think where we are now is a possibility to start thinking through the proprioceptic, the intersensorial, the transcorporeal, as well as the heterogeneous, i.e., all the ways in which we're individuated. Our brains work differently, our bodies work differently, and our experiences are different; we can still hold space within that sense of cultural and historical contextualization for difference.
And that seems to be true in the sources that we're discussing today. We are all emphasizing sensory dynamics of power. It was also true in early modern London. When we imagine Shakespeare's audience, we're usually picturing white men. That's mostly accurate, but it is not the whole picture. Historical records show that a much larger demographic was participating in the creation of that theatre and the reception of it. If we consider who was in that audience, and we listen anew to many of these references, we can interpret how it might have signaled differently to those playgoers. What did it feel like to be the discordant person in the crowd, and how did they navigate that space safely? All kinds of new questions open up. For instance, what does it feel like to watch a banquet being staged when you're hungry? That's something that matters in the past, and it also matters in the present. And I want to have that capacity for embodied empathy in ways that disrupt choreographies of power and not necessarily reinforce them.
IV. Sensory Presents
DB/EM: We are all sensing beings in the present, grappling with these smelly, savory, sweet invocations of the past. How can you find connection or disjunction when tracing a line from these case studies to the contemporary sensory world? I feel like many of you have touched on this, but this is a last moment to just think about bringing that history into the present.
DGF: For readers unfamiliar with the context, it might be difficult to connect with a text about the Eucharist. That difficulty also comes from the baroque language, which is so unfamiliar, dense, and hard to read, let alone relate to. The senses help with overcoming that disconnect because they allow for an approach that is more embodied. They give another entry point when everything else feels so remote. And when we think of, as Holly was saying, about the lived experience of theatre, and not just the language, not just approach it through sight, it becomes easier to bridge that gap. Theatre practices today are obviously very different from those in the sixteenth century, and literary style has changed a lot too, but we still feel, taste, and sense. And that continuity helps us reconnect. For instance, after reading a play like this, walking contemporary Mexico City opens up an interesting temporal continuum. You can sense the messiness of the urban space—the early seeds are there, and there are colonial remnants in its streets, buildings, and sensorial landscapes, all of which impact how we experience it today.
MLC: I want to tag back to what Holly said, which was a lovely comment about disrupting or reinforcing circuits of power in connection to empathy. I'm obsessed with the problem and the promise of empathy. In thinking about taste and smell as these simultaneously highly individualized chemical senses, we realize they are literally precisely different for every single person. The deeply personal can evoke hard to narrativize or textualize kinds of knowledges that we're still so bad at understanding, articulating, and deciding what matters about them. I think what is exciting and complicated to grapple with is precisely how empathy is a tool that can either reinforce or disrupt power. I like the promise of smell and taste when thinking about these kinds of things. It remains important to think through which ways accidentally homogenize. Do we imagine sameness where there are differences, and/or do we assume differences where there is sameness? I am constantly engaging these ethical questions of historical work and humanities and arts-based scholarship broadly.
ALR: Sometimes when I read these historical descriptions of sandalwood forests or the laua'e fern, it makes me a little sad because those would be very difficult sensory experiences to relive now due to the environmental damages of colonialism and just the changing of time. We can't reproduce or experience some of these things now, when certain plants or animals become extinct; we don't know what that tastes or smells or feels like anymore, and we never will. So there's a reckoning with loss and the unintelligible that we have to do.
HD: One thing I've learned in my teaching career, and bringing this into the classroom, is when you switch sensory modalities from vision and hearing, you often have students who are unprepared for those very questions. And you need to be thinking about how to create an accessible classroom and make sure that you're ready for some of the things, sometimes the very troubling associations, that are revealed when you talk to people about smell. It's because most of us haven't had much practice in speaking about smell and we don't always know how to verbalize some of these lived experiences and all the problems of being a human. What is learned, what is taught, and what is personal are all there in the mix.
The series is part of one fell swoop, a writing collective for performance across disciplines. A collaborative practice between Devon Baur and Elizabeth McQueen, the collective has published in The Methuen Handbook of Gender and Theatre and forthcoming in Theatre Journal, Configurations, and Theatre Research International. They are coeditors, with Sean Metzger, of Sensory Dramaturgy, a forthcoming collection on the senses in performance. www.onefellswoop.co/
Footnotes
1. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium," Performance Research 4, no. 1 (1999): 1–30, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871639; Sally Banes and André Lepecki, The Senses in Performance (Routledge, 2007).
2. Judie Christie and Richard Gough, "Editorial," Performance Research 8, no. 3 (2003): 1–2, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.1080/13528165.2003.10871939; Joshua Abrams and Richard Gough, "Menu Dégustation—We Insist the Entire Table Participates: An Introduction to On Taste," Performance Research 22, no. 7 (2017): 1–5, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.1080/13528165.2017.1353240.
3. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994); David Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Berg, 2005); Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (New York University Press, 2020); Holly E. Dugan, Shakespeare and the Senses (ACMRS Press, 2026), https://press-uchicago-edu.proxy.library.nd.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo266703728.html.
4. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, 4.6.145–46, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/king-lear/read/4/6.
5. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Haimatochare," trans. Anneliese W. Moore, Hawaiian Journal of History 12 (1978): 6, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstreams/c72c5ff6-6ad6-4d18-a981-4efbf9adabc3/download.
6. A person who's good at striking this balance is Eric Rath, a food historian at the University of Kansas. He has been an excellent countervailing force in the academic work on tea and culinary histories of Japan, which as a field can get romantically carried away with a more mythologized version of history than would be fully responsible.