TO many people the word “love” is self-explanatory, but it’s not as simple as that.

In the English language, we may distinguish between courtly love, romantic love and lust, but the ancient Greeks had seven words for this universal or tricky concept.

Now, in an exciting hip-hop theatre performance event accompanying the exhibition, “Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes”, one of Australia’s coolest performance poets, Luka Lesson, is coming to the National Museum with his show “Agapi & Other Kinds of Love”.

I caught up with Lesson by phone at an apartment in suburban Kingston, where he, his wife and 10-month-old baby boy were isolating before starting rehearsals.

Lesson is no stranger to Canberra, having been engaged by the Efkarpidis family to perform poetry at Hotel Hotel in its early days and also has a much bigger project in tow, reimagining of the great epic work of Homer’s “Odyssey” seen through the lens of the refugee issue, scored for orchestra and choir, due to appear at the Art Gallery of NSW next year. 

“It’s one of those texts that can’t be ignored,” Lesson says.

The same with the concept of agapi, the most commonly used Greek word for love in modern Greece. 

There were seven words, he agrees, but three of them bear the prefix “Phil”, to do with friendship.

The seven are agapi, for universal love, eros for sexual love, philia for friendship, philoxenia for hospitable love, storgi for unconditional family love, pragma for long-term partnership and philautia for self-love, of which Lesson writes: “Self-love is a dying art, not dying for your art”. 

Modern Greeks say “Se agapó,” (“I love you”) he explains.

“Agapi can be a person’s name. It’s a daily term of endearment and very different from eros, which is sexual love specifically.”

Primarily a poetry-hip-hop theatre piece, they’re playing the show in the Gandel Atrium, where they won’t be able to black-out the space to create focus.

“That means there’s a need to pull back a little on the theatrical elements, so it’s closer to a music show,” he says of a work he’ll be staging with two musicians and a lighting designer.

Lesson’s musical collaborator is composer James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, known in Canberra through his score for Nigel Featherstone’s 2018 song cycle, “The Weight of Light”, produced by The Street Theatre.

Drawing on modern Athenian underground music, Humberstone has created a score for musicians Ella Fence, the lead vocalist, and Greta Kelly, who sings and plays the Persian kamancheh, which resembles the Greek lyre, circle drum and the theremin, often used in spooky film music. 

Lesson, who wrote the entire work, says: “It begins with the primordial forces of Kaos and Kosmos watching over the universe. They have the ability to control us and switch us between the suburb Exarcheia in modern Athens and the house of Agathon in 416 BC, where Socrates meets Diotima,” his instructress in the art of love.

In the 2022-time, two young protesters, Pavolis and Sophia, meet on December 6, when the death of a young boy killed by police is commemorated annually. The pair fall in love.

The other time follows Diotima as she walks from her hometown for her famous meeting in Athens.

Ultimately, Lesson says, “all the kinds of love prove to be true, but agapi is the one that resonates with people.”

“Agapi & Other Kinds of Love,” National Museum of Australia, April 27-29, book at nma.gov.au