Performance

• In the Flesh
  Billy Cowie
• How do you like my landscape
  Manah Depauw and Bernard Van Eeghem
• Critical Encounters 1: Encountering Children and Animals
  
• bahok
  Akram Khan Company and the National Ballet of China
• Lipstick and Lollypops
  Deafinitely Theatre
• The Infinite Pleasures of the Great Unknown
  Bock and Vincenzi
• From Where I am Standing
  Junction 25
• Old people, children and animals
  Quarantine
• Peeping at Bosch
  Ian Smith and Mischief La-Bas
• The Porcelain Project
  Needcompany
• The Lobster Shop
  Needcompany

The Porcelain Project

Needcompany
www.needcompany.org

Watching a performance by Grace Ellen Barkey is like entering an unfamiliar world that derives its coherence only from itself and not from any pre-set narrative line. The only logic that applies in this fantasy is a poetic one
and although various elements (bodies and limbs, contours and lines, images and objects) are reminiscent of a world we know, they are here reconstituted in accordance with playful but barely fathomable associations.

The creation of a fantasy world is founded on a strategy that has a utopian trait. And just as in Utopia, The Porcelain Project creates a world that is ‘placeless’, a non-place that lies beyond the given order, that which is considered normal and is stuck motionless. But whereas utopias always and inevitably have a totalitarian side because they depict a perfect and pure world which, once achieved, excludes every possibility of change and therefore has no future, the fantasy world in The Porcelain Project is intended above all to mobilise the here-and-now into constant change. It is by means of fantasy that Grace Ellen Barkey resists the pessimistic realism all too often displayed in the contemporary arts, in order to express something different that is light and sparkling and not at all concrete. Perhaps it is therefore more correct to refer to a heterotopian rather than a utopian dimension: The Porcelain Project is a place for the different in the same, for resistance to the real and thus for the hope that a different world is possible.

Image: Maarten Vanden Abeele

• Fri 3 - Sat 4 Oct 2008

  8:00pm

  Tramway 1

  £12 / £6