Some dancers are actors, loudly munching the words “I am the king with one leg on the moon, my other leg is floating towards the planet earth”. The whole audience recalls those opening words an hour later, or so it feels, when Tijen Lawton, a ballerina, performs the vertical splits, stretching one leg heavenwards and seemingly drilling the other deep into the ground, pointing her free finger at her fragile work of pointe art. She reigns over a world full of pointe dancers with porcelain noses, as pointed as word-muncher Benoît Gob’s porcelain penis. The unbelievably elegant Misha Downey delicately dances audacious variations, trying to avoid damaging the porcelain between his legs. That white phallus is an ersatz both for a condom and for Viagra. But still just a wobbly one – and then: smash! Porcelain is like ballet, ever fragile. At the Kaaitheater in Brussels, the Belgian porcelain artist Lot Lemm has created a jingling world together with the Needcompany’s choreographer Grace Ellen Barkey. On the left we see a table stacked high with cups and periodically rocked by a minor, rattling earthquake. On the right, the vases, which, with all six dancers on stage, dance with them, pirouetting on their turntables. In front, a phalanx of white chess figures – the stolid soldiers. The stage is a dream – of a ballet that could be trampled out of existence by any elephant. Porcelain, porcelain, porcelain – conjuring up immaculate desire, but needy of dustpan and brush when hard dancing sets in. Barkey rattles off her snow-white ballet to the chords of Thomas Adès’ wheezing ballet music Asyla, op. 17, where the sombre melancholy of the violins are not frightened off by jungle drums and elephant trumpets. This is the background for Barkey to parade her ensemble as frogs and birds, or whatever else may emerge from the porcelain knick-knacks: “My kingdom is legs and dancing, my kingdom is birds and singing”. Tijen Lawton shatters her porcelain limbs into a thousand fragments, sinks in slow-motion to the ground, dissecting every sinew, every muscle, every twitch into its component parts. With bait the size of plates, two fishermen catch the broken body lying on the ground. Then, in reverse and with minute precision, Lawton reassembles her broken porcelain doll outfit, like an archaeologist, sinew for sinew, muscle for muscle, to be reborn so much more graceful than a puppet can ever be. This is the Lawton and Barkey victory over ballet’s puppet show. A true masterpiece.