GRACE ELLEN BARKEY

Grains of light

“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 looks for all that light while she builds with her own sand surrealist plays which make us see the light on shade. This door is too small (for a bear) (2010) is her brand new choreographic work in which she’s looking for deliverance again.

Grace Ellen Barkey was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, and she studied at the Theater School in Amsterdam. Meanwhile she was developing her career as an actress, dancer and choreographer, she co-founded with Jan Lauwers Needcompany, incessant ray of new points of view on stage. Barkey is its full-time choreographer as well as author of some Needcompany’s works like Stories (Histoires/Verhalen)  (1996), Rood Red Rouge (1998), Few Things (2000), (AND) (2002), in which her creativity in music, theatre and dance flow in a fascinating natural way, Chunking (2005), for which she received a great recognition, and The Porcelain Project (2007), in which she wondered about the artistic disciplines boundaries, creating an amazing choreographic work and a porcelain installation along with Lot Lemm, her most important artistic partner, who sculpted some pieces that allowed Barkey to show a conversation between bodies and objects, lines and curves, liberating eroticism and darkness.

Her art has also life beyond Needcompany and she has produced pieces like One (1992), Don Quijote (1993) and Tres (1995). Likewise, her work as a choreographer and actress let her have an acting role in Jan Lauwers creations like his recent The art of entertainment (2011) and previous The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Voyeur (1994), Caligula (1997), Needcompany’s King Lear (2000), Images of Affection (2002), No Comment (2003), The Lobster Shop (2006), The Deer House (2008) and his first filmic project Goldfish Game (2002).

This door is too small (for a bear) (2010) represents a new collaboration with Lot Lemm. They created Lemm&Barkey in 2004 and designed the costumes for Isabella’s Room (2004) and so many projects. This new collaboration returns them to the surrealist creativity and absurd sense of humour of Barkey, making a portrait fo our world in the only possible way: a grotesque portrait. Lot Lemm, Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Sung-Im Her and Maarten Seghers, make her ideas and visions dance on a stage which is drawn and cut into pieces by Barkey again and again, finding underground heavens and drinking them to cultivate open windows on her mind, new airs to breath damp poetry and gaseous rivers that never exist but always were there where nobody can see them. Rombout Willems music arpeggios keep all their movement company. In the end, this door is too small for a bear and too open for grey common life. Barkey is the key which opens that door to have our feet on heaven.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photos by Phile Deprez and Maarten Vanden Abeele. Summary photo by Anna Stöcher