What is love?
It can be a complicated question to answer but that's what attracted Luka Lesson to it for his latest work, Agapi and Other Kinds of Love.
The one-man hip-hop and spoken word theatre show, which is set to premiere at the National Museum of Australia this week, saw Lesson dive into ancient Greece's different definitions of the emotion and relate them to the present day.
It may seem odd to explore how an emotion has changed over time. Surely, of all of the things that have morphed over time, an emotion is not one of them. And while that may be true, how the English language describes the emotion does differ from the ancient Greek philosophy. Simply put, there is a lot more nuance.
There's a universal, empathetic love, known as agapi, which is different to the love shown by a carer - storage. And then there is philautia (self-love), eros (erotic love), pragma (pragmatic love) and philozenia (the love of a stranger).
"I was drawn to the types of love first and the idea that we need more love in our society," Lesson said.
"I started looking into it and I learned that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and wrote in-depth about that particular type of love, agapi, and in his speeches he talks a lot about agapi. So I started learning about all the other types of love as well.
"If you just have one word for something, then often the nuance is lost. If someone says 'I love you', and then you're like, 'Well, let's be together', and they're like, 'No, no, I meant I love you as a friend'. If you just had another word, then that confusion wouldn't happen."
Since researching the topic the Queensland-based poet has come to mark his days by recognising different examples of each. For example, having recently dealt with the floods that impacted Queensland and New South Wales, he couldn't help but notice the philozenia shown between community members in the clean-up.
And this analysis of the world - dividing it up into the different types of love he sees every day - has been going on for a few years now.
When Luka Lesson sat down to write Agapi and Other Kinds of Love it was a pre-pandemic world.
Originally commissioned by Bleach Festival and La Boite Theatre in 2018, Lesson set out to create a theatre show based on the Ancient Greek types of love. The premiere was first scheduled for the 2020 Melbourne Festival, and then the 2021 Brisbane Festival - both of which were cancelled. But it seems like it's third time lucky because this week's premiere at the National Museum of Australia is the perfect location in light of its current exhibition, Ancient Greeks.
What's more, Agapi and Other Kinds of Love centres around Plato's Symposium - an event that followed the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE.
"The Plague of Athens is talked about as a normal thing, something that they've been through and that's been difficult, many people died in it, and it was a health crisis in ancient Athens," Lesson said.
"And then in the modern setting for the show, they're also coming out of a plague of sorts, of a health crisis. It was really interesting because when I started writing this work, none of that had even happened. COVID wasn't even a thing. And then by the time I finished writing this work, I realised that the characters both in the modern and ancient Athens setting, both are coming out of a similar experience, thousands of years apart. We have history repeating, and we need to keep learning from our past."
- Agapi and Other Kinds of Love is at the National Museum of Australia on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, from 8pm. Go to nma.gov.au for tickets.
