Infused with intense physical theatre, film, and dance, Shaun Parker’s Blue Love is a poetic and satirical take on the clichés of pop culture, romance, coupledom and suburbia.
From a fantastic place where TV soap meets arthouse film, Glenn and Rhonda Flune take the audience on an expedition in search of the perfect relationship.
Blue Love is inspired by famous works of art, theatre, music and film, all of which deal with the concept of love. Glenn and Rhonda draw on and reference all of these artforms, parodying the lip-service given to love and its incarnations. This quirky, character-based work is a multimedia, physical theatre comedy: accessible, challenging and enormously entertaining.
Shaun, What was the inspiration for Blue Love?
Karaoke Bar, Vienna. While singing gratuitous pop songs about love, the idea for a dance theatre work about romantic love in art and popular culture was born!
We then created a short dance film, which was later developed, over a number of stages, into a full-length dance theatre production.
What is it about suburban coupledom that you wanted to satirise?
Within satire there is truth, and the closer you get to truth the more contradictions there are! Our main characters in Blue Love, Glenn and Rhonda Flune celebrate the complexities of the suburban couple – a couple who may stay together through thick and thin – a couple who feel like they are from the 50s, the 80s and modern day, all at the same time. Timeless love gurus perhaps?
What other works do you reference during your piece?
We have a fun Love Opera (Act 2), which references silent movie projected script against the grand notion of operatic music! In this section, my character Glenn really does thrash himself around the stage, much to the audience’s delight, as fragments of narrative are projected behind him. A tragedy perhaps? Or a comedy? It is one of my favourite scenes, because the audience really do crack up laughing in different spots every show, depending on what leaps out at the time! And Act 3, celebrates pop songs throughout the ages… all of which comment on romantic love. The 80s power ballads feature here! They are so bad, they are so good! Poetic, ridiculous and epic, all at the same time.
How do you use humour in the show?
I love the way the audience walks into the theatre at the start of the show and, by the end of the show, they leave buzzing! I think when we hear an audience chuckle and laugh their heads off during the show, that they see themselves up there on the stage! Everyone has had a broken heart! Love is a battlefield! He-he.
What are the bigger lessons of Blue Love?
I wanted to create a work about romantic love. I was inspired by how romantic love runs rampant through all art forms, both popular and high art, and provides such juicy thematic fodder for artists and audiences alike. It’s a topic that everyone knows only too well. In romantic love the cliché becomes the poignant and vice versa. Enter our characters, Glenn and Rhonda Flune. They believe that they are the perfect couple, and in believing so become the tenuous, sometimes fabricated, sometimes real storyteller of Blue Love. They and their ‘sketched-out’ living room become the canvas for our story as they reference film, dance, text and song in playing out their relationship. We hope you enjoy Blue Love.
What should Byron audiences expect this time around?
We absolutely loved Byron when we toured this show here two years ago – and a return season was in demand! And we said ‘Yes!’ straight away! We have created a new home movie for the new Byron season, a new love song, and some revised physical vignettes too – we can’t wait to do Byron!
Blue Love is the first show at the Byron Theatre at the Community Centre on the new seats! Friday 8pm. Full price is $35, concession and theatre club are $30. byroncentre.com.au or call 6685 6807.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
