Beakerhead's scent-specific extravaganza smells like a hit

Sometimes, the right smell can make you travel back through time.

That was what happened with The Eyeopener's Paul Karchut when he dropped in on Scent Bar, a scent-specific piece of original theatre that's being staged at an empty restaurant in downtown Calgary.

It's all part of Beakerhead, the unique festival that bills itself as "a smashup of arts, science and engineering."

Scent Bar is the work of Ghost River Theatre, one of the city's most popular and innovative theatre companies. The show is the latest in a series of plays that Ghost River, led by artistic director Eric Rose, has dedicated to exploring the role that our senses play in articulating our reality.

"We are here in the former Chicago Chophouse Restaurant for the purposes of taking people on a journey through their sense of smell," said Louise Casemore, a Ghost River Theatre member. "So the experience literally has you enter the space and treat it just like a bar. Our scent bartenders will actually give you a menu of five different experiences and you choose which three you would like to take, just like a three-course meal."

Each audience member is asked to choose the scents before donning a sleep mask that eliminates all the visual cues from the equation.

Karchut had no trouble emotionally connecting to the first scent that wafted past his nostrils.

"That smells like hot chocolate to me. It reminds me of ski lessons. And what I would get after a ski lesson when I was waiting for my parents to pick me up," he said.

"I think how in touch we are with our sense of smell is directly related to how often we think about it. And we just don't, in our day-to-day life. We take our smellers for granted!" said scent bartender Bobbi Goddard.

"We are very connected to our memories through the things we smell in a day."

A good amount of research and consultation went into choosing which scents to include on the menu, said Casemore.

"We spent months working with all sorts of scent experts — everything from sommeliers to florists to ER doctors to the head of neurology," she said. "Just learning about how the brain actually processes smell and then how we can sort of disseminate it in a million different ways. Anything can happen." 

"We've got things in little jars, we've got things happening live in front of you, and things that will make your brain go, how did they possibly do that?"

With files from The Calgary Eyeopener