LOVE**WORK at Lowry

From Arnold & Komarov Travelling Theatre, LOVE**WORK is a multi-year performative project that explores the relationship between love and the world of work – two blocks of life that might appear disconnected at first glance. 

LOVE**WORK is the result of a long cycle of events and residencies that gathered stories through research sessions in Switzerland, Pakistan, the Netherlands and even Manchester itself. These anonymous testimonies are woven together into a “polyphonic landscape” through which the accumulation of voices lend personal recollections a collective, political weight.

Scheduled for two nights only at Lowry this November, the performance of LOVE**WORK sees the stage filled with an ever-changing architecture of cardboard boxes, constantly shifted and reconfigured by performers who use music, audience participation and, of course, those stories to look at love and work today. Along the way, visual design duo CickinDunt create live drawings of the audience, turning the stage into a gallery by the end of the evening.

Trixa Arnold and Ilja Komarov have been producing music-theatre projects since 2007, and have refined a method of collecting and shaping these stories – some painful, others joyous – into a shared text, or “Biography Of Many”. This text, which forms the spine of LOVE**WORK, contains all the parallels and contradictions you’d expect from memories gathered across continents and generations.

From the commodification of love in popular entertainment, to the ways capitalist society places value on individuals depending upon our job title or relationship status, to the often unpaid work of providing care, Arnold and Komarov’s subject matter leaves us with much to ponder. Yet we’re reassured that their practice approaches its subject matter with a sense of poetry, play and pleasure that invites audiences to recognise themselves in a shared narrative.