In a time when the world feels disconnected—socially, environmentally, and spiritually—a new performance asks a deceptively simple question: what if love could reconnect us? Not just romantic love, but deep, empathetic love for all life. Directed by Nathan Calvert, Love Stories is an immersive, multi-sensory theatre experience that blends science, sound, and emotion into something as thought-provoking as it is beautiful.
Speaking with the team, it’s clear that Love Stories is not just a performance—it’s a heartfelt offering.
- What inspired the creation of Love Stories?
“My research and artistic practice over the last few years has been focused on theatre as a sensory experience, creating immersive visual and sonic worlds. Looking back, the foundations for Love Stories have always existed inside of this research.
However, it was Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction by David George Haskell that was the catalyst. This text was my first introduction to the crisis of sonic diversity as a by-product of the crisis of species extinction. When things are alive, they sing. These songs, richer and more expansive than we could possibly imagine, are being silenced at an alarming rate. The more I researched, the more infatuated I became with the sounds and silences of life on Earth. I wanted to make a work which provoked a better, deeper listening to the world around us, and so Love Stories was born.”
2. How does the show explore “love” through whales, birdsong, and cosmic vibrations?
“The heart of this work is listening, feeling and thinking beyond ourselves. This is a practice of radical and expansive love. From the cosmic vibrations of our universe, to birdsong and whale calls, the work weaves together an infinitely entangled and interdependent world. Love contains the potential for us to be more empathetic, to notice more, to have more patience, to grieve-with, dance-with, and connect-with a world beyond our reckoning. In other words, it is a vehicle by which we might reject human exceptionalism and surrender to our place within a living system. Everything that you hear, see and experience in the show has been framed as a love story in what becomes a spiralling and interwoven anthology.”
3. What kind of experience can audiences expect when they walk into Love Stories?
“The experience will feel more like a conversation between the performers, rather than a ‘play’, where it can often feel performed and distant from the audience. You can expect a welcoming experience and a lot of facts. It’s like if David Attenborough was split into four theatre-makers in their 20s.”
4. For someone unfamiliar with experimental or multi-sensory theatre, what should they know before coming in?
“Our shows have a lot of interweaving threads: visual, sonic, text-based. We ask a lot of questions, many of which we don’t have the answer to. So we ask audiences to come into the show curious. Curious to learn with us, curious to explore, and curious to interpret and decipher the work for yourself.”
5. How does Love Stories challenge traditional ideas of love, and what lasting conversations or reflections do you hope audiences will take away?
“We ask how we can expand our love into the wider ecology, how we can love, be-with, grieve-with our ecology beyond any natural/anthropogenic categorisations we might make. I hope audiences are able to walk away and think how they can better empathise with the world around them, and how they might access that empathy by simply listening.”
6. Behind the scenes – what was the most challenging or surprising part of creating Love Stories?
“The most challenging thing is ‘time’. Our last project was made over the better part of three years. In contrast, Love Stories has come together over the last year and we are all working a lot and doing different projects. So, finding the time and space to come together as a collective has definitely become more difficult. But we have found those times to be in process, and create this work in the way that we love to make. It has just happened in smaller pockets of time.”
7. Why should people come see Love Stories right now?
“I think people should come see Love Stories for many reasons! The work is full of heart, curiosity, and empathy, all entangled within different threads of personal and ecological grief. And what results is this complex, self-contradicting, intertwined web of questions we don’t have the answer to, only a series of imperfect analogies reaching towards something that might best resemble this ‘answer’, that might offer another way of being.
I think people should watch this work because, all at the same time, Love Stories responds to our ecological crisis in challenging, novel, and often beautiful ways… I also really like it :)”
Love Stories runs from 1 to 5 July at The Blue Room Theatre in Perth. Created and performed by emerging artists including WAAPA ECU alumni, the show is a testament to the innovative, boundary-pushing talent nurtured right here in Western Australia. Whether you’re an arts lover, an advocate for sustainability, or simply curious about where empathy and ecology meet, Love Stories is a moving invitation to pause, listen, and connect.
Tickets and more information available at blueroom.org.au.
Featured image taken by Phoebe Eames.