Egg on

What way to have a relationship with yourself? What kind of relationship with others? How with inanimate things? Working with the object becomes crucial in performanc e. The stoic calmness, but also the strong emotions of the performer, make the last day of the festival a pleasant punctuation.

In the first moments, an egg suddenly appears on the empty, garish green stage. It merely exists in space for a short time and then the performer gets to it. Their interactions feel like a warm, perhaps parental relationship, with the performer placing the egg on her stomach and lovingly manipulating it. It does not respond, however, causing the first conflict. The central living character (i.e. the performer) angrily leaves to get a portable cooker. However, once she has cooked the egg, she destroys it for good; with this realisation, her anger subsides and speech flows into the so far only movement-object performance.

Through her speech she begins to distance herself from the egg (object). What is the difference between a human and an egg? An egg is an egg and a human is a human. Man can destroy things (and nature), the egg does not have this possibility, so he smashes it in the bowl. The performer's tense actions suggest regret and she begins to feel for him again, to which she adapts her movements. She then brings in more eggs and, by curling up on the ground, appears to be one of them.   

In between a lot of (tense) dramatic actions, but also comic situations, the performer involves the audience in the action. However, this is only done for show, and whenever she starts to interact with someone and the person in question gets involved, she rejects them in a very firm way.

The constant switching between her identification with the object and the subsequent alienation symbolizes the internal conflicts of the person she is conducting on a daily basis. Boiling the leftover eggs, eating them, smashing them on the ground, all this is what one would prefer to do with oneself in times of crisis, but as the annotation to Human Being itself mentions, there is no turning back. There really isn't.