Grace, honour, praise and light Are here our sole delight; Of them we make our song. Our limbs are sound and strong. This blessing fills us quite, Grace honour, praise and light. Standing at the gateway to Thelema Abbey, this inscription already gives one a taste of the bliss ensconced within the ramparts of this stronghold. In this place Free Will holds sway. Monks and nobles wander the corridors with glazed eyes. They are entirely at ease with their noble predestination to virtuousness. Since it is part of man’s nature to yearn for everything that is denied him, the giant Gargantua, the founder of this benevolent biotope, keeps guard, fearful that freedom and joy might run riot within his walls. One should be able to give free rein to whatever the flesh or the mind suggest. And by definition these desires answer the ubiquitous call of the Beautiful, the True and the Good. At least, that’s what, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais (a full-time dreamer whose pen was an important weapon in the struggle for the imagination), with a sly wink, persuaded his readers was the case. Against their better judgement, of course. Without a proper dose of discipline, the flesh ultimately becomes weak and the mind willingly goes along with every whim. And that is not necessarily the decent direction. Five centuries later, in The Porcelain Project, Grace Ellen Barkey (Needcompany), a full-time dreamer who considers the Gesamtkunstwerk the most important weapon in the struggle for the imagination, entices us into a fairytale very much reminiscent of Rabelais’ castle in the air. To the accompaniment of Thomas Adès’ colourful Asyla symphony (in English, the title refers to both to ‘refuge’ and ‘madhouse’), a theatrical puppet-show unfolds in which little people and crockery gaily show off their grace and beauty. To the point where this ludicrous narcissism has entirely undermined itself and they are bursting with desire for someone, or something, else. Five centuries after Rabelais’ carnivalesque vision of monks gone wild in a forerunner of Disneyworld, The Porcelain Project shows what we have of course known since the dawn of mankind, and what since Rabelais, and by extension Shakespeare, we can also imagine: when everything the heart desires, all the Good, the True and the Beautiful, is actually there for the taking, man’s grasp on reality may occasionally loosen. Once he is blinded by decadence and the lust for power, the Evil, the False and the Ugly have the perfect opportunity to strike without mercy. In this piece, the decadence literally hangs in the air. Hundreds of white cups, plates, vases and fragments dangle above the stage. It is an installation Barkey created together with Lot Lemm. In the corner is a table on which towers a whole dinner service. All in real porcelain. The most flashy, kitschy and coquettish material imaginable. But in a perverted form. The objects have prickles, exaggeratedly round bellies and elongated necks. Fragile at first sight, awful at the second. The people who dance among them are not just little people. Their brightly coloured satin page-boy shorts and rustling hoop dresses reveal their noble origins. As do their movements, in which appear the outlines of a courtly ballet larded with mime. Plenty of flighty frolics, little pure wool. In short, it is all gloss that rules here. But the endless shudders that pass first through Julien Faure’s body soon infect the others. The harmony is disrupted, self-control withdraws discretely, and madness rears its ugly head in a brief reconnoitre. Only now does it become absolutely clear where we are: in a porcelain amusement hall in approximately the same remote corner of Neverland as Rabelais’ abbey of desire. Just over the border of the imaginable, way past innocence, with the den of vice just a stone’s throw away. Its inhabitants are cardboard figures that fit seamlessly into Barkey’s artistic course. Because, after the murderous Princess T in [AND] and the rainbow-coloured sex creatures in Chungking, in The Porcelain Project it is four kings (Faure, Benoît Gob, Maarten Seghers and Misha Downey) and two queens (Tijen Lawton and Taka Shamoto) who are given the chance to show their most unworthy sides. It is no coincidence that their headgear is halfway between a crown and a fool’s cap. Hello! Good day to you! Here is the key of my kingdom. My kingdom is legs and dancing. My legs is birds and singing. Happy! Happy happy kingdom! This official welcome by Gob makes a second thing clear: it is his imaginary kingdom in which we are guests. It is he who holds the reins. He has the power of the word. Or so he likes to imagine. But where temptation reigns, power becomes corrupted. This strong king who barks at us with heavily overplayed histrionics is like wax in Seghers’ hands. Locked together in a hold, their mouths ajar, ready to receive. They caress each other’s torso. Their fingers start a confident descent through the sweat that beads on their bodies. It is still undecided who may ultimately be on top. Their porcelain noses get in the way and prevent them from sealing the desire with the deed. This sort of power game, whose outcome the porcelain dictates, occurs frequently throughout the show. When it is in the form of a duet, it is, entirely in the ballet tradition, mainly the queens who end up on their backs. The cake plates hanging in the air start to act as instruments of torture. For example, dishes suspended on fish hooks force Lawton to her knees. She twists and moans like a dying swan until her body stiffens. The white splendour that manipulates her from above, driven by the kings, shows that the right of the strongest holds sway here. Julien Faure’s manipulation of Shamoto is slightly more ambiguous. He crawls under her gigantic skirt on a stripped-down version of a four-poster bed. Precisely what he does there is shrouded in cloth, but Shamoto rises higher and higher and lets out a couple of timid giggles, until the ecstasy transforms her face. When one looks through this over-transparent and hyper-stylised variant on feeble tits-and-bums humour, one is overcome by a sense of unease. On closer examination, the exploitation of her pleasure is a masquerade for her fear. This schizophrenia sets in her face in the form of a frightful grimace. When our dignitaries dance alone, the discipline imposed by the porcelain still leads to a physical metamorphosis which results in the exposure of a body that becomes grotesque in front of your eyes. It is not only the fragile elements of the set that impose strict conditions (their feet are bare, so for safety’s sake they must not disregard their surroundings too much), but also the porcelain prostheses they fit themselves with. The flowing lines of arms and legs are restricted by wristbands that bind the joints. The vases tied to their fronts or heads defy all sense of proportion. The bodies thereby put themselves on show. The viewer is thus offered these comical scenes on a plate. However upset our little puppets may be inside, it seems they can still look forward to a long life in the midst of all these ordeals and sparring matches. After all, the tone remains light and the poses childishly awkward, with only a few glimmers of darkness. As befits good, respectable fairytales. That is, if The Porcelain Project, while hopping cheerfully from one imaginative image to the next, were not permeated with sensuality. In fact the inventive exposure of the mating urge appears to be its very point. All the rest is by the way. It has to be said that fairytales have never been as respectable as they look. The standard tale of an upset order, the quest and the restoration of order are in fact only an educationally sound figleaf to cover the sexual double meaning. And since Freud this has been impossible to ignore. It seems as if at the slightest stimulus our tendency to interpret already has to go in search of one or other clarifying glimpse into the sexual psyche as a form of gratification. It is by reversing this tendency that Barkey turns the standard procedure of fairytale and interpretation on its head. Instead of a parallel universe full of veiled hints at an underlying truth, we suddenly burst through to a grotesque full frontal sexuality that is here used as a candid statement on an underlying world that we have to look for in the nooks and crannies of our own imagination. Barkey of course knows, to give one example, that two gleaming male bodies making love provides instant gratification for the eye. But this is only the bait, not the goal itself. The Porcelain Project prompts you above all to look further than the libido, to seek out the boundaries of excess, to try the bitter aftertaste of pain and fear amidst the antics and inventions. Just as the kings and queens do on stage. In fact every element of this piece is imbued with excess from the very beginning. The innumerable cups and plates, Adès’ sparkling symphony complete with an ecstatic climax, enormous skirts and collars and solemn speeches full of absolute nonsense. They all briefly come together in harmony in a pompous round-dance to the beat of a thundering kettledrum and a deluge of strings. Order is restored. The Beautiful, the True and the Good show themselves in full regalia, pomp and circumstance glitter like never before. Here, the last remnants of ‘reality’ and ‘dignity’ are carried in glory to their graves. We are misled for the last time. Because that other trinity which had all the time been creeping around the stage like a shadow now crystalizes in the closing image. The varnish of frivolity has now been entirely scraped away. Underneath it lies no happy ending or ultimate fulfilment of physical and mental desires. The Bad, the False and the Ugly speak to us through miserable creatures whose obsessive purpose is to squeeze themselves and each other dry, to the last breath. This squeezing dry can actually be taken literally: with one hand Lawton draws imaginary streams of milk from her porcelain nipples, while with the other she desperately tries to extract some seed from Downey’s porcelain penis. This scene really makes you want to look away. It’s too much misery to bear. The gulf between the previous mildly lunatic frolics and the present raw insanity is too large to bridge mentally. Barkey roughly deprives us of a carefully constructed illusion that turned out to cover up a stinking cesspit full of woe. For God’s sake, we were standing up to our necks in this cesspit without even knowing it. And there is no way back. There is a striking parallel between this image and the rest of The Porcelain Project, although at first sight it looks more like a huge dissonant. The tone and atmosphere may well take a drastic turn, but both the image itself and the effect it has are of the same order as the rest of this performance. Simply too much. When the smoke around your head has dispersed and you take another close look at what you have actually seen, you come to the conclusion that, as a result of the prominent presence of such excess, The Porcelain Project immediately promotes itself to pure kitsch: a surplus of both the good and the bad. But kitsch cannot in fact possess any quality at all. Kitsch is a reproduction run wild, of pretensions whose aimless repetition makes them false and thus empty-sounding. The closing image can even be labelled as super-kitsch. Quite impossible to enjoy, even with the left side of your brain on standby. Looked at this way, it’s impossible to classify this as ‘a good production’. After all, one should be able to expect that a ‘good production’ at least has a pretension it wants to fulfil. I thought The Porcelain Project was an exceptionally good production. But on what can one then base such an opinion? William Elias once formulated a disenchanting answer to this question in an interview in De Morgen: ‘Kitsch ... is a travesty of everything that is high art, a reaction against people who like things they do not understand. Contemporary art in particular exudes this. After all, there are certainly more agreeable things to look at than Duchamp’s urinal and this desire for the agreeable is to be found in every house, even those of the art critics, because even the great chef likes fish and chips once in a while...’ Does The Porcelain Project try to satisfy a desire for something agreeable? Certainly. Does it succeed? Yes, that too. When it comes down to it, is The Porcelain Project a guilty pleasure whose intention is nothing more than to bring up the motto ‘the cheesier, the better’? No, not that. In fact Barkey turns this motto back to front. She ignores the basic gratification level in the same way as she does our urge to interpret. She perverts a deep-seated desire so that the art-lover’s customary dissection instruments are turned against themselves. Barkey lets all the fine things she unleashes onto the stage, all that overwhelming kitsch, act as a ticking timebomb that she lets explode in our faces in one single image. We could have seen it coming, if we had paid attention to a mass of details that had been ‘wrong’ from the very beginning: bizarre timing, light that randomly changes colour, Shamoto’s face, which showed something different from her body, a soundtrack with a suspicious amount of crackle, and so on. But it is only with hindsight that you can place these cracks in the inflated perfection, when your fantasy has imploded and is thrown back entirely on itself. Until then you only too willingly let yourself be swept along by a visually well-designed imaginary world, lightly acted with plenty of witticisms and latent nonsense. The Porcelain Project is intended to be a gigantic letdown. It is meant to bring the spectator face to face with his own desperation when he sees something he cannot, or does not want to grasp immediately. It employs kitsch as the ultimate manifestation of the theatrical pretence which, it turns out, really does make the flesh weak and the mind docile. It is precisely here that Barkey’s pretension lies. She puts your own imagination to the test. She challenges you to loosen your grip on unreality to see what happens next. After much reflection and even more daydreaming you can in the end come to only one conclusion: that king on the stage was you. With this at the back of one’s mind, a paradox appears which in theory cannot be resolved, but which in practice Barkey does succeed in doing: the creation of enjoyable kitsch which at the same time rids itself of that status by conveying to the spectator a fairly critical pretension. The Porcelain Project is actually Duchamp on a bed of fish and chips. Gratifying to both the stomach and mind. And they are usually the most captivating productions.