Photo by Jimi Liu

Egg Rebellion

“Welcome to Yamanote, where Bremen’s charm meets Tokyo’s urban bustle. Eggs are sentient and live among humans, but as children of chickens they are treated as second-class citizens. The Eggs are rallying for more rights and even autonomy… The Egg Rights Movement is in full swing!”

The queer-feministic musical performance “Egg War” combines theater performance and projected animation, pushing boundaries of stage art, and explores the theme of minority rights and queer desire. The combination of animation and live performance pushes boundaries of stage art and redefines performativity.

Using eggs as symbols of both fragility and new life, the play explores themes of power deconstruction, activism and sexual desire. The performance follows the journey of how the humanized eggs gain social and political power and suggests unique ways to navigate the minority experience.

Momo is the first humanised egg. He was raised captive in a laboratory until his liberation by members of the Yamanote Egg Party, an interim government of eggs. Momo’s backstory inspires eggkind and he becomes a pivotal figure in the Egg Rights Movement. When the party meets his former captors, they learn the origins of humanised egg creation: a process mired in immigrant trauma and queer yearning.

Egg War is a show with many absurdities embedded in the story which inspire audiences to question and rethink their conventional belief systems and perspectives while challenging the boundaries of film, conventional theater and traditional western classical music and create an experimental and interdisciplinary artistic format. Instead of using classical music to heighten or glorify power, the show utilizes them to describe the absurdity of humanity, the greed of power and the sublime of queer desire.

How can such fragile beings, eggs gain power? What would the world look like through the perspective of those who are constantly at risk of abuse or violence, and face threats of harm in their daily lives? How would they overcome their circumstances and disadvantages? The story explores themes of identity, freedom, and societal change in a humorous, satirical and creative way to provoke dialogue on marginalized rights and societal transformation.

Humanized eggs are born in the human world, but they’re not considered as citizens. The difficulties they face are very specific to their own attributes, which is overlooked by humans, the majority. Queer scientists have a traumatic childhood being isolated from the community because of their appearance. And to deal with the loss of their beloved pet, they go all the way to male surrogacy. After knowing the origin of birth, the main character Momo faces an identity questioning: who am I? Am I different from others? This makes him cross paths with a paradigm of extreme thoughts led by even more marginalized eggs. The story explores the connections of seemingly unrelated minority groups’ intertwined fate.

Illustration by Sunryeo Lee

At a glance, this show takes the form of a casual comedy with cute animation. However, the story finds themes of human greed, exploitation and the struggles of political activism. This play is unique because it addresses the eggs’ struggles on a large scale, eggs vs humans (minority vs majority), and simultaneously unfolds the intertwined fate of eggs and queer humans (minority vs majority), and the different paradigms within minorities (liberal and conservative).

I chose eggs as a symbol because eggs represent the middle point of things as it’s between living and nonliving, and one can use it as a medium of thinking of others. The goal of this performance is to create opportunities to see and think through the perspective of others. To talk about issues such as discrimination and the struggles of the marginalized, it is very easy to fall in the form of confrontation. My approach is to talk about such topics in an absurd and humorous way which invites the audience to take a look at the world through the perspective of eggs.

Photo by Mojtaba Akbari