Eve Jefferies
Physiologic Pasta, 2026

Sceneography and performance

Physiologic Pasta is named after an Italian pasta company that used Maria Callas’ weight loss of 37kg, between 1953-1954, as a marketing strategy [she ate their “physiologic pasta”] which she subsequently filed a lawsuit against. After Callas’s “metamorphosis” the public claimed “Maria the woman” had finally become “Callas the artist”. Hence, this play is ostensibly about Maria Callas and Opera but also about the feeling of being split in two. It combines autobiographical moments of the author’s experience with chronic illness with the phenomenon of the Diva.

The story centres around three characters: Doctor Schadenfreude and Doctor Gibbet, operate at the threshold of professionalism and performance. Their unusual senses allow for both corporeal and spiritual diagnosis, which proves useful in their search for a panacea for Miss, whose condition appears to be less a physical ailment and more a conceptual malady: disembodied voices wandering within her. A disease of sorts, fabricated from the chimeric nature of passion and melancholy. The doctors must figure out how to harmonise the voices.

Eve Jefferies is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, drawing, and performance. Eve’s work reflects on the optimistic search for an alternative ways of being and the disillusionment encountered upon discovering that it is impossible. This sensibility is encapsulated by the word Weltschmerz, or “world-weariness.”

Exploring the untranslatable, Eve investigates language and the space between knowing something and understanding it, attempting to convey the harmonies of an internal world. Weaving together numerous and diverse references, Eve attempts to open a passage through time, reflecting on the past, present, and future — what will become, and how things could have been different.