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- Air Hunger
- Angelfood
- Emile Is Missing
- Everybody
- Quakes in Mind
- Schgooks of Flughm
- Tents for Transing
- Command Shift Break
- [Costume Making]
- [Performance Spaces]
Writing
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Portals to Soft Re/Orientations & Next Time We
- Costuming with Scent: Staging Trans Feelings
- Soft Creases
- WW
Set, Costume
Costume
Costume
Costume
Prod Design
Costume
Art
Set, Costume
Art
Costume
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Collection
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Poetics
Poetics
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live, work, and create. I pay respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. Always was, Always will be.
From the river to the sea. Free Palestine, end the occupation.
Costuming with scent: Staging trans feelings → Jan ‘24
The smell of the earth usually goes unnoticed because, for the most part, it is somewhat consistent. It’s not until raindrops land on dusty clay soil and trap tiny air bubbles on the surface that a smell emerges called petrichor. When the air bubbles, carbonated, shoot upward and pop, aerosols of scent are scattered into the air to then be picked up and posted afar by the wind.
The earth wears a scent, not dissimilar to perfume. When the smell is worn it evokes a memory, one which is both nostalgic and in a state of forming and becoming. It also draws attention to the smell of the earth before. When something has been the same for a long time it takes a change to re-discover what came before. I didn’t fully know I was trans until I started to transition. Had changes not been made in my environment and presentation, I would have assumed that the numbness and lack of presence in my body was a normal experience. Costume and scent – worn extensions of the body, can offer new modes of attunement with the world that open understandings which couldn’t have been known before.
I imagine a costume dowsed in a scent, perhaps lavender oil, or cardamom seeds. A dancer performs a rigorous routine on a sweltering hot day and as the performance continues, the costumes, performers, and perhaps dirt floors scent all meld.
Figuring the earth as a body, we can imagine the rain as a perfume. Different weather patterns act as different scents, and perhaps the costumes are the trees, mosses, oceans, and hills that sit upon and dress the planet. Costume, I believe has significantly more than just visual potential.
In Arakwa and Gin’s book The Architectural Body, they discuss adopting a kinaesthetic awareness of the world, and vice versa – the world is responsive to the bodies that inhabit and create it. The placement of a material on the body can be described as a landing zone. “As far as landing goes: the material lands on me, upon me. Through its actions, my body ‘lands punches’ on the material”.[1] Costume has haptic potential to influence embodied feeling capabilities. So perhaps scent, something which is also worn, and selected, has similar olfactory capabilities. It can affirm states of becoming, guide us into new ones, bring back memories, and act as an agent of nostalgia.
In Costume Scenographics, Rachel Hann discusses how “costumes produce a sense of atmosphere, occasion, or event [and proposes] that costuming as a socio-material technology orientates feelings of world.”[2] The act of “showing dressing” is key in exposing the performative practice of dress. By showing costumes in unfinished, and transforming states, she posits the agency of costume as a technology that can displace, and irritate normal modes of dress, behaviour, and existing. She prioritises becoming, over a fixed state of being.
If scent can be used as costume, I would argue that it’s the perfect medium for enacting unfinished states of dressing and becoming. Scent as costume is interesting because it leaves traces, eternally dissipating. The chemical properties of perfumes react differently with different bodies. When I started my HRT journey, I found my perfumes smelt different on me as my endocrine system and skin quality changed.
Perfumes, like some of my clothes, once were bought due to their gender-euphoria enacting capabilities. Now my body takes a truer form, the initial purpose of those scents, and garments has dissipated and reformed into something that serves present me.
Decay, re-orienting and re-forming is something that transness knows well.
Perhaps considering how worn scent acts alongside bodies can teach us something about costuming. We don’t just learn about costume, we can learn from costume by listening, smelling, feeling and embodying it. It’s hard to know the smell of the earth until the soil wears the rain, activating petrichor, a change. Costumes that fall apart, decay, reconstruct themselves, and refuse fixed states are way to stage trans-feelings. Or at least a way to make costume practice queer, and empathetic. A practice that recognises that garments and wearers exist in a symbiotic relationship, and the two can hold conversations that span worlds, bodies, landscapes and becomings.
[1] Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 5-22.
[2] Rachel Hann, “Costume Scenographics,” Costume Agency: Artistic Research Project (2023): 203-211, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373172786_Costume_scenographics.