At the same time, Casserly explains during a Zoom call from Dublin, he had long wondered: “Why is the bog never on a postcard? Because it’s so beautiful, but you never really see it.”
That may be about to change. If you can’t bring an audience to the bog, Casserly thought, maybe you can put the bog, or at least its scent, in front of an audience’s noses.
The 28-year-old artist’s latest project is “Distillation,” a one-man show about the past, present and future — and the smell — of Ireland’s bogs. Commissioned and presented by Solas Nua, Washington’s Irish arts organization, in collaboration with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the show will run for about five weeks at D.C.’s Eaton House, followed by a week at Bethesda’s Round House Theatre, then a North American tour. It incorporates a specially designed perfume loosely inspired by the bog landscape — an example of sensory theater, a rare but growing form of stagecraft that invites audiences to use more of their five senses.
Staged at a massive round table for 25 audience members, covered with 330 pounds of dried Irish peat — Casserly calls it a “sculpture,” designed by Ger Clancy — the show is not easy to pigeonhole. It’s part educational TED Talk, part community-building and part campfire story, during which Casserly speaks at times in the voice of the bog. And it features a bespoke fragrance created by Joan Woods of Waters + Wild organic perfumery.
Scent will not permeate the performance space, like the fresh-baked apple pie did in the 2016 Broadway musical “Waitress.” Or Irish soda bread, hot from the oven, in Solas Nua’s “Wild Sky,” a 2016 play staged by the company’s artistic director, Rex Daugherty, in the living room of a private home in Washington. Or the scent of real bacon sizzling in a pan during a scene in a 2010 off-Broadway production of “Our Town.” “Sleep No More,” an immersive restaging of “Macbeth” in New York, features ambient smells throughout its staging area (and closes later this spring).
Dried peat, on the other hand, is odorless. It only gives off its distinctive, pipe tobacco-like aroma — both rich and sweet — when burned, as it traditionally was in Ireland for fuel. In December 2020, Ireland suspended the industrial harvesting of peat from Ireland’s bogs, the soft, spongy wetlands that cover one-sixth of the country’s surface.
“Distillation” is the third of three bog-themed artworks by Casserly — including a bog live stream and a series of audio field recordings made in five Irish landscapes (bog, forest, port, coastline and mountain). The trilogy was born during the early pandemic, when shutdowns forced Casserly to move back home. It was during that isolation that long walks in the bog renewed deep, buried feelings and memories, not just of nostalgia, but also of the environmental, economic and cultural implications of peat. Casserly’s father, a third-generation farmer, used to work for Bord na Móna, the state power company that once harvested peat on an industrial scale to generate electricity.
“It’s very much a hybrid of a number of things,” says Casserly, whose often autobiographical work centers on environmental themes. He calls himself a “performance-maker” rather than a more familiar term, because not all of his pieces take place in a traditional theater. “I perform the work,” he explains, “but I’m not an actor. Nor am I a playwright, but I write text for performance.”
Smell is integral to what Daugherty calls this “4D performance journey.” Several fragrant items are passed around the table. First, a canister of coffee beans to cleanse the olfactory system, a tradition of the perfumer’s art; then a handful of fresh peat, partly decomposed organic matter that has the earthy smell of fertilizer; and later a clump of live moss, which covers the bogs like a blanket. The scene-stealing manner in which the perfume is ultimately revealed, late in the show, is best not spoiled.
Although Casserly and Woods lay down on the peat when they first came together to create the fragrance, pushing their noses directly into the soil, it is not meant to replicate the smell. “To have a real experience of what it smells like,” Casserly says, “you should probably visit an Irish bog and, you know, inhale.”
Rather, he calls the perfume an “artistic translation,” an honoring of a place that has in some aspects “just disappeared.” Casserly compares the changes in the Midlands to what is also happening in the U.S. coal-mining states as that industry declines.
According to Woods, every perfume has “a beginning, a middle and an end,” starting with the lighter, more evanescent top notes that “fly away” and ending with the base notes that linger. Her formula for this show’s perfume, which smells slightly different every time she re-creates it, features bog-myrtle, coriander, coconut, oakmoss and oud (made from the resinous bark of a Southeast Asian tree), among other ingredients. It’s a lovely, complex bouquet, but it’s hard to pin down, evoking dark soil, smoke and flowers. When asked to come up with a description, over Zoom from her West Cork studio, Woods demurs. “You’re the writer,” she says with a laugh. Only later, after some reflection, was she able to email a list of associations. It reads like a poem:
Uncle Malachy’s Black Cavendish tobacco pipe smoke
Why is scent so hard to describe? Maybe because the olfactory system plugs directly into the limbic system, including the amygdala and hippocampus, parts of the brain connected to emotion and memory, not language.
At least that’s the theory of David Bernstein, a Montreal-based “psychoactive perfumer.” Bernstein’s first theatrical scent-design credit was a 2010 play about a woman losing her virginity: It featured little lunchbox-size scent samplers that the audience opened, featuring evocations of Old Spice deodorant, crayons, condensed milk and a riding crop — a sensory cocktail suggesting innocence and its loss. More recently, Bernstein and his company, Jovian, created a scent called Pool for a Toronto art exhibition curated around the themes of water and submergence.
Bernstein calls fragrance an “antidote to loss,” paraphrasing perfumer Daniela Andrier. “It hooks you up to the mainframe,” Bernstein says, “because it is a direct line to memories. In a way, it’s like that old trope of wearing your mother’s perfume: It brings her back. It allows you to travel that space.”
Distillation, April 11 to May 12 at Eaton House, 1201 K St. NW, Washington; May 15-19 at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Hwy., Bethesda. Md. solasnua.org.
