Hendrik Quast: Hairkunft | Okt 18, 19 Dez 13, 14 | Kantine – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin

Saison 24/25
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21:00
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Dance, Performance Ticket Premiere

Hendrik Quast:
Hairkunft

quast_hairkunft_web-4861
Hendrik Quast:
Hairkunft
Performance
Duration: 1h 25 Min.
German
10€/15€

“Losing your hair is easy. Redistributing it, not so much.”

Hendrik Quast’s hair abandoned him, right when he most longed for glorious locks to help him slip into his new role in the art world and climb the social ladder. To secure his place in the middle class, Quast needed a defensive (hair)line!

As he learned from Simba in The Lion King, a full mane symbolizes status and class. So Hendrik Quast got himself a hair transplant. This phase of his hair-story was bloody, painful, expensive and risky: The surgery as a durational performance used real, home-grown hair—no wigs here, folks! Would his working-class roots nourish the newly planted hairs? Can hereditary hair loss be overcome this way? What remains, if his chronically ill body rejects the new hair?

In a madcap performance, Hendrik Quast uses his scalp to explore his hair-itage. Combining elements of stand-up, musicals, body art and crowd work he sheds light on the contradictory nature of his queer and shame-filled journey across class boundaries. Quast brings the ghosts of his experience of class mobility on stage, caught between his roots and the future, questioning the price of social rise, redistributes its costs and owes nothing to anyone.

The piece shows explicit images of a hair transplant and the healing process, e.g. scabs, wounds, blood, scars and medical instruments. Clichés such as excessive alcohol consumption are depicted. The play addresses discrimination based on social background, sexual orientation and chronic illness. 

Duration

  • 85 minutes without break

Language

  • German spoken language
  • The play is text-heavy.

Light

  • The lighting mood is alternately bright and dark.
  • There are strong flickering and rapidly changing light effects.
  • There is backlighting into the audience.

Sound

  • There are some music effects, which are not surprising or abrupt.

Other

  • Stage fog is used.

Interaction

  • Parts of the audience are repeatedly addressed directly
  • In the course of the piece, individual people are invited onto the stage. They interact with the performer. The conversations are sometimes very personal and intimate.
  • The performer sits on the lap of a visitor. The visitor is asked to sing karaoke with the performer. There are romantic and sexual innuendos.

Audience area

  • Seated grandstand
  • There are seat cushions without backrests in the first row.
  • 2 beanbag seats bookable according to availability
  • 2 wheelchair seats bookable according to availability

Early boarding

  • Early boarding is possible. A loudspeaker announcement will be made a few minutes in advance.

Tickets

  • Reservations can be made via the ticket telephone at 030 283 52 66, Monday to Friday from 4pm-6pm
  • Via the online ticket shop
  • At the box office

You can also find more information about accessibility at the house here.

Text, performance, concept, direction: Hendrik Quast
Costume, make-up: Christina Neuss
Sound: Toben Piel
Artistic collaboration, video: Michel Wagenschütz
Stage: Jonas Maria Droste
Light: Maika Knoblich
Dramaturgy: Florian Fischer
Text consulting: Daniela Plügge
Transplantation: Bahar Akcay, Dr. Christian Roessing
PR: Augustin PR
Technical direction: Hendrik Borowski
Production assistance: Maret Zeino-Mahmalat
Production: Lisa Gehring

A production by Hendrik Quast in co-production with Sophiensæle, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt/Main, Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf, Kampnagel Hamburg and Theater RAMPE Stuttgart. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the State of Berlin and the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Media partners: Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.

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.

 

  • hendrik
    © Florian Krauss
  • quast_hairkunft_web-4832
    © Florian Krauss
  • quast_hairkunft_web-4937
    © Florian Krauss
  • quast_hairkunft_web-5463
    © Florian Krauss
  • quast_hairkunft_web-5700
    © Florian Krauss
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