Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship alumna Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson is an award-winning Iranian-Australian Bahá’í video artist, director and researcher. Her debut theatrical production ‘a love letter to the Nightingale‘ opens at The Blue Room from 8 – 26 October.
We sat down with Elham to find out her inspiration, creative process and the challenges of developing a love letter to the Nightingale.
Please tell us about ‘a love letter to the Nightingale’.
a love letter to the Nightingale is a multisensory, immersive poem, grounded in Persian mythology and Bahá’í spirituality which I have been developing over the last couple of years. It centres on the tragic tale of the Nightingale, and her journey through Rage and Reason, played by two actors Danny Aghaie (cast as Rage) and Ashkaan Hadi (cast as Reason). Through them, we explore grief and loss in a way that confronts and honours pain.
As my first love language is film and cinema, I knew a love letter to the Nightingale would incorporate immersive and multichannel media. By combining theatre with film, my aim was to build an immersive world that mixes stories, personal experiences and community. There were lots of different and new dynamics which we’ve stepped into, but I had an incredible team of both seasoned and new creatives whom I worked with.
What is the inspiration behind ‘a love letter to the Nightingale’?
The root inspiration is from Shahnameh: The Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. It features a chapter ‘The Tale of Sohrab’ where the father and son fight to the death, which is very visceral. It’s also influenced by a Bahá’í quote from a spiritual text which resonated with me, “The steed of this valley is pain, and if there be no pain this journey will never end”, from The Seven Valleys by Baháʼu’lláh.
However, the origins of this work started back in 2022 with my Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship at the Forrest Research Foundation, where I worked on The Virtual Architecture of Empathy, a first-person point of view visual poem using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. This was centred on research into how emotional immersion in a diverse range of poetic media can create empathy.
In a love letter to the Nightingale, I’ve explored the masculine and feminine as well as the post-traumatic experience of being a woman, channelled by two male actors. It’s ultimately about our relationships with ourselves and with others, especially under heavy pressure – the universality of discomfort. I ask how resistance and collision manifest when you confront the experience of pain.
What was your creative process when developing ‘a love letter to the Nightingale’?
When I begin a project, I become obsessed with mastering the craft or a related skill. This time it was theatre. I watched a lot of theatre including local works, which inspired and informed how I wanted to tackle this creatively. Additionally, everything I learnt in the video art practice became enmeshed into this vision and aesthetic as well.
a love letter to the Nightingale was a very collaborative process. Cara Flame, a creative art therapist with whom I worked for The Virtual Architecture of Empathy, agreed to co-write this piece. We went into the writers’ room for a month to explore the script. From there the script started to evolve as I was working with the actors long distance and worked closely with Myles Pollard, our acting coach.
Sound was also central to the work. I collaborated with composer and soundscape artist Ashton Namdar. He is a musician who truly gets me and the vision for this project. It’s been a nonstop process of experimenting and tailoring the projections and sound to complement the space and give the work the space to breathe and grow.
a love letter to the Nightingale uses a multitude of media. Were there any challenges with interconnecting live theatre, film and poetry?
From a technical perspective … absolutely. I’ve really focused on fine-tuning the synchronicity between the live theatre, projections and sound. Creatively, the challenge is how to make the media inform each other and how do I get them to meet halfway. My directing mentor Daley Rangi has encouraged me to stay true to my practice and myself artistically. The pressure comes off when you focus on what’s possible rather than trying to meet a certain criterion. It reminds me of a quote from David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017), “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
What are you hoping audiences will take away after watching ‘a love letter to the Nightingale’?
The one thing I would like people to take away is an acknowledgement or appreciation of endurance during times of pain or loss. But also one of the most incredible conversations I had just recently, with Myles, is the power in resistance. To convey your anger or your logic, it’s an unpredictable thing and there is so much nuance to these landscapes. It really is such a driving force in finding threads of how this connects to the audience. It was important to me to ensure a love letter to the Nightingale provides a platform to explore issues of trauma in a safe and sensitive way. Conceptually, I’d like the audience to pose the question to themselves: how can we safely create room to confront difficult topics?
Prior to the Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship, one of my creative partners Asha Kiani and I undertook a project looking at trauma within the community, in particular how to bridge the gap between first and second generations. a love letter to the Nightingale is influenced by the contexts of these works and challenges certain ideas on culture, femineity and masculinity, and seeks to advocate for those who experience abuse, oppression and coercive control.
Where do you hope to see your work go in the future?
I have my eye on immersive theatre experiences (think Punchdrunk theatre in Woolwich, London) where the audience becomes part of the artwork. They traverse the space and encounter the props and the actors to become coauthors of the work. I find that concept of someone becoming a witness versus a bystander so interesting. So, I would like to continue to explore immersive theatre.
For the next phase though, I’m looking at creating my first feature film which is informed by the mythology of The Virtual Architecture of Empathy and a love letter to the Nightingale world to explore the lived experience in more depth however anchored by reality – which is something I touch upon in the work but it is more focussed on these collision of worlds.
Creative alumna Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson.
a love letter to the Nightingale is on at The Blue Room Theatre from 8-26 October. Get tickets here: https://blueroom.org.au/events/love-letter-nightingale/
