The first time I met Luke Casserly, he was pretending to be a bog. There were about twenty of us watching him in total, sitting around a large circular table topped with Irish peat. This was surprising, as we were in a suburb of Washington, DC. At one point he held the peat in his hand and spoke in character as it.
This was an experience of Casserly’s Distillation, a show centered around Irish peat bogs. In partnership with the Abbey Theatre and the DC-based Irish arts company Solas Nua, Casserly had brought his show to the area. The performance was on the short side, but intensive and educational. I loved it.
Casserly, a Trinity alum, describes himself as “a multidisciplinary performance maker…whose work weaves together ecology, autobiography, sound art, and site as a way of carving out space for new possibilities to emerge between live performance and physical landscape”. As such, Distillation isn’t exactly a play. It’s more of a communal experience –“a performative journey which takes you to the Irish bog landscape through scent”– with audience interaction being a central, necessary part of it. Casserly engages audience members to assume the role of his father in a dialogue, shares a cup of tea with a volunteer, and asks for their impressions of a tiny vial of perfume whose scent is inspired by the bog.
When asked why he was drawn to scent in particular, Casserly brought up neuroscience. “That came from the ability of scent to kind of bypass certain elements of the brain,” and instead head directly for the olfactory bulb. This part of the brain fascinated him due to “its ability to access emotions and moods and behaviors.” Casserly was asking himself “why is it that we don’t, sometimes, feel the same sense of empathy towards a place as we do with a person? And how do I somehow create an experience which does have that sense of empathy?” Given the neuroscience of smelling, “scent felt like the most interesting way to approach that”. He noted that it was also novel: “I hadn’t ever experienced a performance which had incorporated scent in that way”. The scent element of this performance included the aforementioned perfume bottles, created by perfumier Joan Woods. She and Casserly carefully investigated the scents of the bog (as well as, once, the taste, which he “would not recommend”).
Casserly also mentioned the impacts of the pandemic on creating Distillation. He noted that, back home in Longford during the 2020 lockdowns, he started thinking about the bog more. Being at home, he said, gave him the opportunity “to be able to just spend time in nature and really reflect, I suppose, and have that time to think in a way that I hadn’t before,” and it was this which rekindled his interest in the environment around him. “I suppose it was through spending time there [at home and in the bog] that I really began to become really interested in the landscape,” he said. He also noted that the Bord na Móna prohibition on peat cutting went into effect that same year, describing the various reactions he witnessed as “experiencing…two sides of an argument”. The “two sides” he discussed were that of conservationists and environmental scientists, who had “a lot of optimism for the peatlands being repaired and rewilded and being left alone,” and the community he’d grown up in. Here, he noted, “there was a huge amount of people talking about how awful it was because of the socioeconomic impacts to the people in that community. And even my own parents and stuff, and people within my close community were anything but positive or anything but optimistic for the next phase because there was so much uncertainty and there was so much questions around what is going to happen next”. Witnessing those two divergent lines of thinking was a trigger point for him: “I suppose that was maybe, for me, a moment where I went, ‘Well, I want to make a project which encapsulates both sides of that argument and looking at, I suppose, the environment and the climate crisis more broadly as a very complex thing”. The pandemic also had an impact on other parts of the show. The bottles of perfume were originally meant to go to only one audience member, but after lockdowns, Casserly said he “became much less interested in solitary experiences and was much more interested in creating a communal experience with an audience”. That communal experience extended to the technical aspects of the performance as well. Woods contributed the perfume, Ger Clancy sculpted the table around which the audience sits, Doreen McKenna designed the costume, and Robert Higgins of Harp Media worked on the video that plays during part of the show.
Casserly also commented on the intersectional nature of the climate crisis, and how one’s reactions to it can be affected by other identities and roles they hold. “Sometimes I think it’s a conversation about class…Some people don’t have the privilege to think about recycling, you know? If you’re a carer and you have a terminally ill relative…and you have very little income, the last thing on your mind is separating plastics every week.” He also emphasised that art, almost inherently, is limited to the point of view of the person creating it. Different artists will likely have different opinions and interpretations of the same situation, and Casserly acknowledges this easily: “As artists we’re always trying to make the world intelligible through our own eyes somehow to share how we see the world in some way. And that’s really all I’m trying to do is offer one perspective. But of course there’s many ways to talk about everything.”
Distillation is a creative take on Irish bogs. Not sticking to one viewpoint or another–incorporating both of the “two sides” Casserly mentions–it presents a well-rounded summary of the history, ecology, and social dimensions of bogs. Perhaps most innovatively, it lets the audience interact with him and with each other, and get hands-on, digging through the bog for bottles of perfume. Being able to take a part of the bog home with you in a non-invasive way–that is a lesson that sticks.
