Realms of Engagement
Scent and Seduction: The Power of Scent in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dorothy Abram
It was an audacious insult to put in writing, but Virginia Woolf did just that when she took offense at how writer Katherine Mansfield smelled at their first meeting. Woolf wrote in her diary on October 10, 1917 that her first impression of Mansfield was that she “stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking,” referring to the animalic base notes and excessive amounts of the perfume that Mansfield apparently was wearing. This episode is significant for this study of smell in Mansfield’s writing: it demonstrates Mansfield’s love and use of scent. It made me wonder, then, if Mansfield’s love of perfumes, scents, and smells also would be reflected in her writing and what meaning they would carry in her stories. Scent was more for Mansfield than a perfume choice. Though various scents make appearances throughout Mansfield’s short stories, critics have neglected to examine how they serve the themes, plots, or characters of the stories. The role and function of scents in Mansfield’s short stories, I argue, are to reveal her personal interpretations and the social and political meanings of the scenes in which they are placed. Mansfield uses scent to challenge class status and the hegemony of heterosexuality. We know, furthermore, that Mansfield was precise and intentional in her writing, choosing words for their rhythm and cadence as if she were writing a score. Thus, we must examine the effect of scent descriptions in her short stories for the meaning they contribute to the whole.
Bodily Knowledge in Dance Transferred to the Creation of Sculpture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria da nazare feliciano Nazare feliciano
This essay examines the possibility that dance bodily knowledge can be transferred to the creation of sculpture and it can greatly improve the illusion of the sense of movement in three-dimensional forms. I argue this subject by focusing on the corporeal sensory skills that set dancers apart from those without dance experience. This is a challenge to the status quo because the manner in which we are taught to perceive and create objects of art hinges mainly on the sense of sight. Vision has been the primary sense used by man to create, judge, and review artworks. This article asserts that a heightened sense of spatial awareness and somatic perception developed with dance education and practice affects the art one creates. Research shows that we do not perceive the world and the things in it only visually but also through our body’s sensory system, such as the reception of stimuli through the sense of touch and produced within the human organism by movement and tension, the sensing of one’s muscles, bones, heart beet, and breath. Findings suggest that dance education has the potential to sharpen one’s perception of the body in movement, and this knowledge can greatly improve the manner an artist represents the illusion of movement in figurative sculpture.
Mnemodrama: The Theatrical Experiments of Alessandro Fersen
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Green
The term Mnemodrama was coined by the Polish/Italian theatre artist Alessandro Fersen (1911-2001) to describe an embodied training technique that he developed over a period of thirty years in his Studio in Rome. The core of the technique was a theatrical simulation of ritual object manipulation employed by shamans in traditional societies to induce an altered state of consciousness. Fersen's experiments provided the contemporary performer with a psychic training which enabled her to explore different aspects of her persona, rediscovered from both the autobiographical and archetypal levels of her unconscious. The paper presents a case for viewing Alessandro Fersen as a pioneer of mid-20th Century experimental theatre practice, specifically from the standpoint of the interdisciplinary nature of his experiments: performance combined with anthropology, ethnology, and psychology; and argues for the continuing relevance of his work in a post-dramatic landscape, in which issues such as the investigation and presentation of "self" and the re-actualizing of ancient concepts of "community" through performance, have become rich fields for exploration.
Beyond the Singular Lens: Sensuous Dispositions and Narrative Enquiry at the "Beach Art Gallery"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Louise Ryan
Despite being often dismissed as incapable of producing "real knowledge" as considered theoretically weak by Western scientific traditional standards, narrative inquiry has long been of interest to researchers seeking qualitative data, especially for those attempting to understand the multi-sensory and embodied experience. The use of experimental or creative writing (including Indigenous story telling techniques) to evoke the complexity of such encounters has been promoted as the as an ideal medium to express and describe what Lorimor calls "sensuous dispositions" (2005:84), particularly non-visual experiences (taste, touch, hearing, smell) of time and place.This paper proposes a narrative inquiry methodology and offers preliminary findings from a research project that seeks to understand the nature and shape of liminality produced at Sculpture by the Sea (an annual public art exhibition staged at Bondi Beach Sydney Australia) by exploring and interpreting audience experiences, encounters and aesthetic/social interactions with public art. Through empirical analysis and drawing on key debates, this paper will furnish the claim that as people increasingly buy into shared, embodied, multi- sensory experiences that encourage the negotiation and adoption of new and creative behaviours, researchers are encouraged to transform their own positionality within disciplines and re-assess theories of knowledge acquisition and meaning-making.
