Hendrik Quast – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

With a processual concept of theater, Hendrik Quast devotes himself to performing techniques such as ventriloquism, pantomime or musical singing and explores the dissolution of boundaries in entertainment culture. He allows these to collide with everyday practices, crafts and cultural techniques such as taxidermy, funeral floristry or nail design. Hendrik Quast's performances play with grotesque and fecal elements and use comedy as a means of interrupting modes of speech, text forms and dramaturgy. Biographical references are fictionalized, theatrically exaggerated and defamiliarized by borrowings from entertainment culture. Through the ambivalences of a humorous approach, violent mechanisms of identity attributions are also questioned. Born 1985 in Celle, the queer action and performance artist studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen. Since 2009, he has been working as a solo artist and in artistic cooperations with Maika Knoblich, among others. Quast’s performances have been realized in cooperation with institutions such as Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main), Gessnerallee (Zurich), FFT Düsseldorf, Theater Rampe (Stuttgart), Sophiensæle and Kampnagel (Hamburg). His works have been shown at international performance and art festivals such as Radikal jung, Impulse Theater Festival, steirischer herbst, Festival a/d Werf (Utrecht) and International Summer Festival Kampnagel (Hamburg). He has adapted several theater works as audio features for WDR Cologne (including Nagelneu, 2021, awarded Audio Feature of the Year 2021 by the Deutsche Akademie für Darstellende Künste). In 2022, he was a fellow at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan. Since 2023, Quast has been an artistic PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts and is completing a doctorate in cooperation with the Zurich University of the Arts on humor and illness in the performative arts.