Production still from The Theory of Love,
photo by Tomek Karwowski, 2007.

The Theory of Love, 2007, is a traveling multimedia lecture-opera conceived and directed by composer and sound designer John Berendzen of Portland's Liminal Performance Group, and produced as a collaboration with writer/performer David Abel and media artists/performers Leo & Anna Daedalus of HELSINQI.

A hybrid performance melding electroacoustic music, academic research, visual media, and group hypnosis, The Theory of Love presents an abstract inquiry into the origins, nature, and eventual future of Love. The subject is dissected into its emotional, psychical, animal, humorous, tragic, and other statistical constituents, then evaluated, diagnosed and left to the audience's imaginative interpretation.

HELSINQI (then under the name Metaplastic) produced a 60-minute, synchronized dual-screen video program as the visual component of the piece. The video brings together original video and photography, found 16mm and Super-8 film, and other graphic elements in a protean synthesis of didactic and poetical modalities that sometimes reads like an academic slideshow, sometimes an epic dream, often an uncanny amalgamation of the two.

In addition, HELSINQI was the creative force behind the show's publicity, designing the advertising, the program, and PR materials. Just Out magazine called their press kit the best they'd ever received, and Dmae Roberts, host of KBOO FM's Stage and Studio devoted the first several minutes of her interview with John Berendzen and the Theory cast to the press kit and its mysterious contents, which included photos, drawings, and text from the video and several phials of botanico-literary specimens.

The Theory of Love had its Portland premiere in April 2007, appearing at three academic venues over three weekends. An abbreviated touring version showed in the Northwest New Works series at Seattle's On the Boards, June 15–17, 2007.