A narrative hip-hop and spoken word musical performance straddling ancient and contemporary Athens from Greek-Australian poet Luka Lesson will premiere next month at the National Museum of Australia.

Agapi & Other Kinds of Love sees Lesson draw on his proud heritage to search for the meanings of love in Ancient Greece.

Inspired by Socrates’ original speech found in Plato’s The Symposium, Agapi begins with Socrates telling a banquet of friends everything he learned from a mysterious lover named: Diotima.

“We don’t know a lot of about Diotima from history, aside from this really important mention,” Lesson told Canberra Daily.

The gods then take the audience on a journey – collapsing time and space to arrive in modern day Athens, where the two reincarnations of the ancient lovers, Sophia and Pablos, fall in love (again).

The performance then takes audiences through the seven kinds of love identified in Ancient Greece: Eros, Filia, Filoxenia, Philautia, Storgi, Pragma, and the ultimate, Agapi.

“I wanted to write something that took the audience on a journey of experiencing how in life these types of love exist for us,” Lesson said.

“I felt like at this time of history, we need more love and more of a vocabulary around the types of love and what it can do for us in the modern world.”

Musical compositions are written by James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, with contributions from musicians Greta Kelly, Ella Fence and Avishai Barnatan.

Humberstone has composed a “colossal” soundscape influenced by Greek underground hip-hop subgenre, low bap.

It’s been designed to be performed live by Kelly and Fence, with the two musicians looping and triggering samples to create a deep, rich musical backing.

Musically the project shifts between cinematic scores and traditional Greek samples played over low-fi hip-hop beats borne from the Athenian underground.

NMA premiere ‘fate telling us where we’re meant to be’

Originally commissioned for Bleach Festival on the Gold Coast and Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre before the pandemic, Lesson said it “turned out perfectly” that the work would premiere at the National Museum in tandem with Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes.

“It feels as though this is fate telling us where we’re meant to be, this work is meant to sit next to not just concepts and ideas and philosophies of ancient Greece, but actual physical objects of ancient Greece,” he said.

“Some of these artefacts may have felt the vibrations of a poet’s voice in those eras, and they’ll feel that again.”

Having long felt connected to his Greek heritage, Lesson has seen that bond manifest differently throughout his life.

“I hated poetry at school never resonated, but hip-hop and rap did,” he said.

“When I was in high school, if a teacher had said to me there are heaps of amazing poets from ancient Greece in your culture who you can connect with it might have been different.

“I’ve always been in love with the history of humans and human behaviour, so it’s kind of inevitable my love for hip-hop would eventually clash with ancient Greece,” he said, “and this is one of those projects that does that.”

Growing up in Brisbane with two parents from different parts of Greece, he felt “very connected” to his heritage throughout his childhood but had a yearning to learn more.

“I felt like something was missing in a sense, within the culture in Australia, because many migrant communities tend to create a time capsule of a culture,” he said. “It was isolated from the ways Greece as moved on because culture is fluid.

“I felt like in Brisbane, that not that it was bad, but that it wasn’t all that I needed to know.”

Lesson eventually travelled to Greece as an artist, where he collaborated with musicians and “connected with my Greekness on my own terms”.

It was there he found low bap, a sub-genre of Greek hip-hop “all about poetry and storytelling” with a strong underground anarchist following, associated with Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood.

“I think that was really important,” he said. “I got to learn about this whole other side of what being Greek means, doesn’t have to mean smashing plates and eating baklava, it’s that but it’s so much more than that.”

Agapi & Other Kinds of Love will be performed by Luka Lesson at the National Museum of Australia, 27-29 April 8pm; nma.gov.au

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