PROJECT RELATED, VIRTUAL THEATER, DEVISING BOARD Guido Luciani PROJECT RELATED, VIRTUAL THEATER, DEVISING BOARD Guido Luciani

Dissenting Scent

The dancer’s intoxicating scent awakened my most primordial instincts evoking a Sensory-Somatic connection between us.

When your work as an artist is mostly inspired by your Sensory-Somatic System, having highly developed senses comes to a great advantage. From all the senses, the vomeronasal sense is perhaps the most acute and influential of all my senses. Even when surrounded by the breathtaking visuals of the fall transition into winter at the mountains, it was the sultriness of the soil and the scent of the stillness of the menacing snow what evoked the deepest of my sensory-somatic memories.

During an exploratory trip to New York City in the spring of 2013, I attended a physical theater performance at La MaMa’s main stage. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the company's nor the production’s name but, I remember the driving force of the show: a man’s fight to overcome a gender identity struggle.

The audience was sitting on chairs along the two long sides of the stage at the same level of the performers. The show was engaging and the performers powerful and inspiring. It was half way into the show when I experienced what I would call a “total immersion”, a "sensory-somatic connection” with the lead performer at levels far beyond the performers' intentions.

As the lead male performer/dancer eloquently expressed his character’s torment with a series of very physical and explosive dances, he began to sweat profusely, saturating the theater with his intoxicating scent. Every time he ran past me, his penetrating scent awakened my most "primordial instincts" which allowed me to feel his pain, taste the sweat streaming down his face and body and, smell the fear emanating from his groin, armpits and body hair.

After regaining “consciousness", trying to collect my “thoughts”, I reflected on both the theatrical reality we were being presented with and, the show’s proposal … is there such a thing as a “masculine” scent? Could any “rational” inference we the audience could reach from the show’s proposal possibly defy the bold statement being made by this male actor’s powerful dissenting scent?

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Dis-scent: a NYC Story

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The Bring-Your-Own-Menu Approach

I believe my role as a coach, director and photographer to be that of a guide and a creative partner. I believe in creating a collaborative space for the exchange of ideas, experience, inspiration and encouragement.

 

An actor, auditioning for one of my devised theater plays, once told me that “committing to the project without first seeing the script was like going into a restaurant and ordering without first seeing the menu” - to which I replied: “to this restaurant, you-bring-your-own-menu and we’ll prepare the meal together.

I believe my role as a coach, director and photographer to be that of a guide and a creative partner. I believe in creating a collaborative space for the exchange of ideas, experience, inspiration and encouragement.

As many times before and I’m sure, many times to come, this actor provided me with the perfect analogy for my approach to directing, coaching and photographing people.

I often tell my actors, students and models that mutual inspiration - between them and myself - is the key to a successful exploration and a fair exchange of creativity.

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The Artist’s Solitude

CREATING ONE’S OWN WORLD TAKES COURAGE

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“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist”
— Jean Genet

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The "illusion" of being alone and intimately connected with each one of the viewers was the first thing that caught my attention and ignited my interest in this new Virtual Theater language. The quality of this "connection" has been something I've been exploring and trying to create in live theater for as long as I can remember but, what are the trade-offs? Even if we are successful in making the virtual audience feel they are "alone" and only "connected" with us (the performers) ... how about on our end?

When devising Becoming A Rose, my first virtual theater production, I wanted to really experiment with this "intimacy" feeling so I decided to make this one-man-show a real one-man-show ... meaning: no crew or audience in the space where I was performing and streaming the show from. Just before I went live for the first show I made a very unexpected discovery: I was experiencing "stage fright" and fear was making solitude feel more like loneliness ... the very same feeling I was trying to avoid by establishing this intimate connection in the first place but, this post is not about me complaining but about me sharing with you my findings during this fascinating experiment and my personal views on the artist's solitude and how this is directly linked to the artist's courage to create his/her "own" world. 

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