Crazy! For The Porcelain Project, Grace Ellen Barkey scatters porcelain objects all over the stage. Even some of the costumes are in porcelain. The piece opens with towers of crockery on a table: it shakes and the shattered pieces fall to the floor. At which moment Julien Faure and Tijen Lawton enter the stage. At first they dance cautiously and alone. This changes when Lawton dances under a shelf of small porcelain cups. Faure pulls the strings on which the cups hang like marionettes. He manipulates Lawton in the same way. The contacts later become more direct, as in the comical, but also erotic duet by Faure and Taka Shamoto. She enters in a huge crinoline. Suddenly she floats upwards and lands on a miniature theatre. The fact that she floats is due to Faure: he directs her from beneath her skirt like an invisible puppeteer. He elicits her looks of bliss or dismay like a ghost in the machine. The piece ends with an even more explicit eroticism in the duet by Lawton and Misha Downey, both wearing a blonde wig and huge sexual prostheses in porcelain. With all their energy, even they remain careful: after all, porcelain will always be fragile... In this piece Barkey draws on visual inventions. The whimsical dance represents the endless possibilities of the imagination. The images are linked together associatively as if in a trip. This is not always pleasurable; sometimes you can feel fear and desperation. One can nevertheless discern a thread. Benoît Gob and his theatrical alter ego Maarten Seghers unmistakably portray a mad king. They run around in fool’s caps that might easily be crowns. The piece was inspired by King George III, who was of unsound mind, but the historical details are not important. This piece is more about the things that go on in the mind of a mad king. Which explains the porcelain. Once a symbol of power and wealth, the fragments, as sharp as a glass, now tell us of pain and despair. performance of the week