No More Eggs for Breakfast, made and performed by Dalia Velandia, is about eggs. Her graduation work from the Solo Dance and Authorship (SODA) Master program at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz was presented at Uferstudios on 13 and 14 December 2024.
Studio 14 at Uferstudios is a sparse landscape of levels: seating forms a low square around a central plinth that looms like a monolith. White tarpaulin is humped and mounded like earth, countless eggshells scattered across it. As the audience files in, Dalia Velandia is carefully adding to this strange garden.
She leaves behind a curtain; in darkness, we hear eggs cracking and their contents beaten with cutlery. Velandia re-emerges naked and places an egg atop the plinth. Subtly shifting lighting reflects off its surface, like a star on a Christmas tree, its radiance remarkably intense. A strong odour of overcooked eggs wafts, inducing faint nausea in me. The work tries to communicate through this multi-sensorial saturation the volume of eggs a non-vegan human might consume, the brutal realities for hens in industrial egg production, and the multifaceted textures and potentials of eggs. Velandia tells us that the collection onstage consists of shells she has cracked since 2020. Her earnestness in handling the delicate fragments seems to want us to consider the eggs’ significance with equal solemnity.
Eggs have long been potent symbols of life, fertility, sexuality, femininity, and cyclical nature across artistic disciplines, from Sarah Lucas’s Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs—on her chest as breasts, to Björk’s music video Venus as a Boy in which she fondles and cooks eggs suggestively in reference to Bataille’s Story of the Eye, and Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano’s egg-shaped moon sculpture in Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, to name just a few.
Velandia extends feminist performance art tropes and eggs’ inclusion in erotica and as objects and metaphors for reproduction, sensuality, and cycles. Toward the end of the show, she gradually retrieves an egg wrapped in a condom from her vagina. She plays with it, licking and circling it in her mouth before it cracks. The globular interior spills down her body onto the plinth, the shell destined for her growing collection.
Through their power and fragility, eggs move between bodily and external spaces—as food, in menstrual cycles, and planetary rhythms. Velandia connects to human reproduction through the egg emerging from inside her and by telling us that a fertilised human egg is her—our—origin(s).
I am, at first, most captivated by Velandia’s duet with an egg on a low, dark glass platform. She carefully folds and spirals her body with deliberate, thick movement, the egg rolling through creases and curves on her bare skin. Then the egg falls, I think by accident, in the precarity of the dance. It bounces: it’s fake or maybe boiled, unlike the uncracked chicken and shellless human eggs inside her. The tension I’d felt—imbued by the perceived fragility and virtuosity of the interaction—vanishes. The act is reduced here without the egg’s raw material reality, inherent fragility, and implications—the performance shifts, and it is less about protection and nurture and more about showing us her relation to eggs. Though Velandia draws inspiration from the richness of these elemental, transforming objects, I am left with the feeling that her care about eggs has been performed for us as affect rather than producing affect in me, lending to prescription rather than transformation.
No More Eggs for Breakfast by Dalia Velandia has been presented at Uferstudios on 13 and 14 December 2024.
