Navaridas & Deutinger
UNLEASH / UNSMELL open showing
Guest production
In their new work UNSMELL, Navaridas & Deutinger place the sense of smell at the cente of attention—as a central dimension of human perception. Smells as invisible carriers and triggers of experiences, memories, and emotions. Smells as assertions, as undeniable yet fleeting presences. Smells as fluid, ethereal, and manipulative entities. Smelling as a sensory, emotional, and social phenomenon.
Like tracking dogs. Always following their noses.
With a performative nod to Valie Export & Peter Weibel (From the Folder of Dogness, 1968), the dancers and performers Marta Navaridas & Alex Deutinger take to the stage in UNSMELL like tracking dogs on a leash. In a game of leading and following, the two, dressed in security guard uniforms (in style of ÖWD, Siwacht, G4S), scour the space and unpredictably switch roles. As if endowed with a supernatural sense of smell, they track down repressed memories, hidden emotions, and intimate secrets.
The project is conceived as an ongoing research project that takes shape in various locations
and venues. The performance can be adapted flexibly in terms of both time and space. Preliminary research or a short on-site residency is required in each case to ensure an appropriate response to local conditions. The audience is heavily involved in the performance. The two performers use their cell phones to play pre-generated and recorded text fragments to each other through in-ear headphones—which are invisible to the audience—and repeat them verbatim. The spoken texts are authentic reactions to a wide variety of strong and subtle olfactory experiences. The quality of the spontaneous reactions is preserved in their timing, style, and prosody. The dramaturgy emerging from the utterances and audience interactions plays with very concrete references and weaves them into fictional narratives. The physical interplay between the two performers, who are connected by a cord resembling an umbilical cord, is clearly structured while simultaneously allowing room for variations, feints, and spontaneous outbursts.
