Washy washy washy
Round and round
And makes nice sound
Never be dirty
Always be clean
That’s why we have a washing machine

This a fact: there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in the Sahara desert. Imagine that everything could speak. What a noise! Cosmic soundscape! Unbind your mind! International absurdities, universal illusions, cosmic disorientation. That’s what we need to keep mother earth spinning!
Grace Ellen Barkey

The productions of Grace Ellen Barkey are surreal and permeated by absurd humour: grand failure, the tragedy of a clown, the clumsy barbarity of sexuality. Her increasingly intensive cooperation with the artist Lot Lemm resulted in the Lemm&Barkey label. Together, they seek out radically poetic images in a grotesque world.

The theatre magazine Etcetera described watching Barkey’s production Chunking (2005) as ‘looking at an untranslated, uninterpreted fantasy’.

In This door is too small (for a bear), Grace Ellen Barkey has created a visual idiom of her own that adds to her quest for ‘how to free your mind’, looking for that part of the mind that has not yet been fathomed. Frank Zappa’s motto, ‘To me, absurdity is the only reality’, is the thread that runs through her new production, in which she balances between surrealism and the psychedelic.

This door is too small (for a bear) is the new dance production by Grace Ellen Barkey in close cooperation with Lot Lemm, Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Sung-Im Her and Maarten Seghers, and Rombout Willems is the musical director.