In an infinitely mild night the solitary island of life floats. In the warmth of their amniotic liquid these eggs give off an echo, some thoughts: the curiosity of the unknown, the surprise of nature, the delight of birth and the cry of death. The sand of time drains in the hourglass. A metaphor for corporeal death, fluidly, solemnly disintegrating.

Birth and death. Production and destruction. You break the husk of your silent happiness and are born into a world of chaos. Life’s cruel ambiguity will be here elucidated in rhetoric. Out of the quiet glow Ushio Amagatsu creates a secret dialogue with a round beautiful egg.

People are toyed with in this vast space, this transitory time. They join with others in the bonds of micro-tragicomedies, to lie down in solitude once again. In the beginning is our end, in our end is our beginning. Our futile microscopic lives repeat a dialogue with eternity.

The first Tokyo performance in eight years of Sankai Juku’s masterpiece

“The Egg Stands out of Curiosity” was premiered in April 1986 at the Theatre de la Ville as the opening event of the Tokyo-Paris Friendship Cities Exchange Program. After its rapturous reception by the audiences and media in Paris, it was first performed in Japan in August of the same year at a disused quarry in Utsunomiya. “Superb expressions of the roots of existence inside a cave where you seem to be able to hear the voices of primitive people,” raved the Asahi Shimbun. In the twenty years since its Paris premiere the work has been performed in thirty-two countries and one hundred and thirty-seven cities, and has come to be Sankai Juku’s signature work.

On the stage sits a quadrilateral cloister, inside of which is a pool of water. From the back of the stage there is the endless sound of sand and water falling; gentle light hits the surface of the water and creates a beautiful heraldic illusion. Out of the motif of an egg, five dancers weave an exquisite representation of existence: conception, birth, death, and re-birth.