“ oh my goodness …there’s so many!! ”
EGG
57 minutes
December, SARAH LUCAS buys 750 free-range eggs, a good start.
EGG is an eight-part musical documentary of what she did next :
HONEST VENDOR
EGG MARROW
LINE EGG DANCE
CIRCLE EGG DANCE
EGG QUARRY
EGG MASSAGE
NOB ON THE ROCKS
EGG BRITISH PAVILION
Principle Camera : JULIAN SIMMONS
Egg Massage Camera : DON BROWN
Direction, Editor, Production : JULIAN SIMMONS
Filmed on Location : SUFFOLK, ENGLAND, 12/2014 – 1/2015
Raise a glass to our musicians, down the pub on the day of Epiphany…
Violin : HANNAH VOGT
Melodica : JACK PESCOD
Violin : SELVA ENGEL
Guitar : OLIVER ADAMS
Rap : CHARLIE WRIGHT
& appreciation to all our dancing friends, including…
Step Tuition : MICHAEL CLARK
PREVIOUS SCREENING
Beijing, China** : 2 November 2019 – 16 February 2020, Red Brick Art Museum
Venice, Italy* : 11 May 2019, Palazzo Pesaro Papafava – Casanova Museum & Experience
* director’s cut.
** edited to remove frontal nudity.
HONEST VENDOR
‘A beautiful day very early in the new year, this year that is. On Christmas Eve I procured seven hundred and fifty eggs from a couple of local suppliers. One each for me and Julian for every day and a few left over for visitors. A year’s worth.
Both of these egg merchants had stalls on the street with honesty boxes. On the last visit to one of them, prior to the swoop, we discovered that a revolution had taken place. An Egg Vending Machine had been installed, not on the street but deep within the interior of the farm. An American-style stainless steel affair with glass windowed compartments, numbered. Shit, how are we ever going to come up with that amount of change in the requisite denominations?’
EGG DANCE
‘Christmas morning, a beautiful bright one and we’re planning a traditional egg dance for the film. The three of us saunter out of the garden, down the bridleway and into the meadow, carrying eggs. We walk through two fields, cross a road, which is also a bridge over a beck, and continue through another meadow on the other side. Another fields worth elapses. We’re deep in dingle by now, and we come to another bridge across the beck, a flat one this time, without sides. It’s for tractors. There are none about. All this while, in the long grass, Julian has been wondering how the hell anyone’s ever going to spot the eggs in the long grass. It’s a damp frosty morning and all about is slippery.
A few weeks before this Julian turned up, on the web, some footage of an egg dance. The dancers, two men wearing blindfolds, dance up and down in the street among a grid of eggs, laid out at two and a half feet intervals. They are Morris Dancers. They skilfully and narrowly avoid the eggs. At one point one of them kicks an egg. It rolls away but doesn’t break. This is traditional, by which I mean it always occurs in the dance. We checked.’
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“I’ve always had eggs in my work. It started with TWO FRIED EGGS AND A KEBAB back in the early nineties, which was the piece of work that launched me on the world. Since then I’ve tried to keep an egg in things, in most exhibitions. Eggs are relevant to women …and they are finite. They’re not like sperm, you can’t just endlessly wank and spurt them everywhere. So it’s kind of about futility, not just women’s futility, but futility in the world.
As the sun sets on the day the bats appear and orbit the house. As the sky turns dark blue an owl hoots. In the morning a cock-a-doodle-doo then a moo.” Sarah Lucas.
EGG, contains scenes of nudity and flash photography.
‘Quirky wicker[man]-egg-girl feel, ritualistic, communal, bizarre ceremonial… the curiosity about egg symbolism from slapstick smashing/dripping, to the profound symbol of life to be worshipped – like spherical deities, to that sadness I felt about the unfertilised and finite eggness of things. Your director’s voice is introduced and alive on the filmic layer; I was struck by how strong and holding it both begins and ends the film – you assert almost a conductor’s dominance over these bookends.’ Michael Russoff, Freelance Creative Director & Composer.