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Hendrik Quast Spill your guts A sick ventriloquist show

  • HendrikQuast_SYG_Foto_Florian_Krauss-0644
    © Florian Krauss
  • HendrikQuast_SYG_Foto_Florian_Krauss-0567
    © Florian Krauss
  • HendrikQuast_SYG_Foto_Florian_Krauss-0592
    © Florian Krauss
  • Quast_SYG_C_Krauss_Print-0459
    © Florian Krauss
  • Quast_SYG_C_Krauss_Print-0806
    © Florian Krauss
  • Quast_SYG_C_Krauss_Print-1204
    © Florian Krauss
  • Quast_SYG_C_Krauss_Web-0685
    © Florian Krauss
Performance
March 31 | 19.00
April 01 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal
15/10 €
Auf Deutsch

April 1 | Artist Talk after the show.

A damaged, clap-mouth doll shits as unabashedly as she dines. She has her ventriloquist firmly in her grip. As the embodiment of his chronic inflammatory bowel disease, she has only one thing on her mind: make him bleed! The unequal duo sparks a relationship thriller about undigested leftovers, fires up the stammering about outrageous stories of illness and plunges into a shitstorm about their work in the theater.

For his latest project, performance and action artist Hendrik Quast has learnt the art of ventriloquism in order to approach an underestimated organ – the intestine. In conversation with his sick ventriloquist doll, the intestine is explored in its peculiarities and metaphors, but also its pathologies. Quast's everyday experiences with chronic inflammatory bowel disease open up new ways of speaking and unusual spaces of humor for the sick and healthy audience. Attributions of visibly and invisibly marked chronically ill bodies are renegotiated here. With the means of entertainment art the artist and his team ask the question who actually holds the interpretative sovereignty over the sick body: medicine, the patient or the disease itself.

The themes of disability, ableism, classism and death are addressed.

If any questions remain from the following information, please feel free to contact Hannah Aldinger at barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that details may change by the day of the event. Therefore, if you find out after you have purchased your ticket that the performance is no longer accessible to you, you can contact us for a ticket return at ticketing@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 45 until 5 business days after the event (Monday through Friday between 10am and 6pm).

Duration

  • 105-130 minutes

Language

  • German spoken language

Light

  • Abrupt light changes
  • Stroboscopes
  • Blinding light effects

Sound

  • There is loud, suddenly starting music. Hearing protection is provided at the entrance.

Other effects

  • Fog

Audience area

  • Seated grandstand
  • 4 beanbag seats bookable
  • 2 wheelchair seats bookableThe audience area is mostly lit. In some scenes there are no lighting in the audience.
  • There are direct interactions of performers with the audience. In moments of interaction, the audience can decide for themselves whether they want to participate or not. There are marked places where no interaction takes place.
  • The play is suitable for audiences aged 14 and over.

Early Boarding
If, for artistic reasons, the door to the auditorium does not open until very shortly before the performance begins, there is the option of early boarding.

Relaxed event

  • Clapping and laughter during the performance are explicitly welcome.
  • It is possible to leave the room at any time during the show and return.

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 here.

With a processual concept of theatre, 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. In these settings, Quast appears as an exaggerated alter ego that follows its own language foils, logics of action and necessities of action. The audience is challenged by subversive comedy to critically relate to marginalised topics such as social origin and (precarious) forms of work, attributions of illness/health and the relationship between nature/culture. Born in Celle in 1985, the queer action and performance artist studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen. He has been working as a solo artist and in the performance duo Quast & Knoblich since 2009. 
 
His performances have been realised with institutions such as Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main), Gessnerallee (Zurich), FFT Düsseldorf, Theater Rampe (Stuttgart), Sophiensæle (Berlin) and Kampnagel (Hamburg). His works have been shown at international performance and art festivals such as Impulse Theater Festival, steirischer herbst, Festival a/d Werf (Utrecht) and International Summer Festival Kampnagel (Hamburg). He adapted several theatre works as radio plays for WDR Cologne (including "Nagelneu", 2021, Radio Play of the Month Year 2021 German Academy for the Performing Arts). In 2022 he is a fellow at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan. 

Since 2023 Quast is an artistic PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts and is doing a PhD on humour and illness in the performative arts in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts. 
 
https://www.hendrikquast.de/

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TEXT, PERFORMANCE, CONCEPT Hendrik Quast DRAMATURGY Alex Hennig ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE Michel Wagenschütz PUPPET, COSTUME, MASK Christina Neuss STAGE Jonas Droste LIGHT DESIGN Maika Knoblich SOUND Toben Piel CONSULTING VIDEO Rodrik Biersteker DRAMATURGICAL SUPPORT Marcus Dross COACH VENTRILOQUISM Marcus Geuss PR Yven Augustin GRAPHIC DESIGN Christina Mäckelburg SOUND ENGINEERING Tobias Klette TECHNICAL MANAGEMENT Hendrik Borowski PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Lisa Gehring

A production by Hendrik Quast in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe of the State of Berlin and by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. With the support of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Theater Rampe Stuttgart (Kooperationsstipendium) and the residency program of Cima Città (CH). The project was part of the residency program schloss bröllin e.V., supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of the State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the County of Vorpommern-Greifswald. The revival is supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR. Media partner: taz. 

Programme

Programme
Claire Vivianne Sobottke
à mort – Ein choreografischer Liederzyklus für drei Stimmen
Claire Vivianne Sobottke-Foto_MayraWallraff_Presse_final-
March 22 23 24 25 | 19.00
Tickets
Dance/Performance
Festsaal | 15/10 €

à mort is a performative-musical exploration of processes of domination, dying and killing. Excessive scenes of destruction emerge in a memento mori inspired installation of natural and artificial materials. The female voice emerges as a powerful physical presence in a dying world, challenging the grotesque human desire for dominance.

» more
March 31 | 19.00
April 01 | 19.00
Tickets
Performance
Festsaal | 15/10 €

A ventriloquist’s show of a different kind: In a dialogue with a chronically ill clap-mouthed puppet, Hendrik Quast explores the stubbornness of intestines. A relationship drama with scatalogical humor, parody therapy and ventriloquism unfolds between the ventriloquist and the sick doll. With tools of the performing arts, the events of chronic illnesses that often remain invisible are staged; opening up new humor spaces in which illness is no longer a taboo.

» more

April 01 02 | 17.00
April 04 | 20.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

Milliarden Jahre Widerhall was created after Naoko Tanaka’s travels to the contaminated area of Fukushima – a place where people’s connection to their habitat is forever destroyed. In a performative installation, Tanaka negotiates the ambivalent and conflicted relationship between humans and the earth, inviting us on a journey into inner landscapes.

» more

April 03 04 | 19.00
April 03 04 | 21.00
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €

Montag Modus: archive of futures presents a performance-installation set at the liminal space between film, dance and theater. Inspired by an encounter with three elderly dancers who were part of modern dance in Hungary in the 1930s, Figuring Age is a choreography of memories that explores how resilience, silences and traumas are inscribed in the body and in the movement.

» more

April 06 07 08 09 | 20.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

The choreographic concert We are going to Mars is dedicated to the history of the first African space program in Zambia. Created from video works by local artists in Uganda and the USA, it is being performed with live music by Mourning [A] BLKstar. 

» more

April 14 15
Tickets
Film/Video

The film version of The Making of Pinocchio is also available online as video on demand - for those who can't or don't want to come to the theater. The Making of Pinocchio is a queer re-appropriation of the tale of the lying wooden puppet who wants to be a “real boy”. Artists and lovers Cade & MacAskill reflect on MacAskill’s gender transition and their relationship. With their characteristic playful humour, The Making of Pinocchio moves skillfully between reality and fiction, fairytale and autobiography, the personal and the political. >> GO TO THE VIDEO VERSION

» more

April 14 15 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

The Making of Pinocchio is a queer re-appropriation of the tale of the lying wooden puppet who wants to be a “real boy”. In a technically innovative live film shoot, artists and lovers Cade & MacAskill reflect on MacAskill’s gender transition and their relationship. With their characteristic playful humour, The Making of Pinocchio moves skillfully between reality and fiction, fairytale and autobiography, the personal and the political.

» more

April 14 15 | 21.30
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €

The concert-performance accompanies the release of Astrit Ismaili’s first solo pop music album, produced by The Performance Agency in collaboration with Obsequeen, Lotic, Katu, Colin Self, Nömak, Europa and Mykki Blanco. The lyrics tell the story of a plant undertaking a physical and spiritual transformation to become the world’s First Flower. The project queers contemporary pop aesthetics and manifests how creativity can be a strategy to overcome existential limitations, echoing the artist’s own path.

» more

April 17 18 | 20.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Sorour Darabi’s work engages with potentials of re-appropriation to uncover what is hidden by binary thinking. In a kind of futuristic mythology with roots in both visible and invisible, preserved and lost dance traditions, Natural Drama questions the concept of “nature”, exploring representations and constructions of the so-called female body.

» more

April 20 21 | 20.00
April 22 23 | 18.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

In this immersive work between performance and film, Liz Rosenfeld and their international, intergenerational team explore moments of change and transition. Through the story of the main protagonist, URSA, an unfillable hole, they reference the Greek myth of the constellations Ursa Major and Minor (the Big and Little Bear), while they consider their own bodies in transition.

» more

April 22 23 | 20.30
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Untitled (Holding Horizon) is a choreography that continues Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ engagement with negotiations of desire, the materiality of gestures, and affections of a queer commons. Through sensual, alienated gestures and the box step – a movement used in several social dances – synchronization, pleasure and alliance coexist with disorientation, limitation, and loss.

» more

April 27 28 29 | 20.00
April 30 | 18.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

There’s no business like show business. Melanie Jame Wolf and Teresa Vittucci ask: What does it take to make a show great? Both known for their intense solo work and powerful stage presence, the artists take a close look at popular entertainment, theater and the politics of spectacle. As a double act, they explore its tender intimacies, its power dynamics and the impact of audience and stage space on the show.

» more

April 28 29 30
May 01-08

Philosophiermaschine Online is an artificial intelligence that brings dead thinkers back to life. At the click of a button, the online audience enters into dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Bloch and others, and can renegotiate their themes for the present: Freedom, dissidence, otherness, censorship, social utopia, hope - central concepts of postwar European philosophy.

» more

May 10 12 13 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Every successful blockbuster needs a second part. For the Markus&Markus theater collective, that’s why TITANIC II has to take the stage. The sequel starts where the film left off: at the bottom of the sea. So, it needs sand, really a lot of sand. Every year, mankind consumes twice as much sand as all the rivers supply. The consequences of this overexploitation are tangible. TITANIC II is a collision course, a melodrama, a telegram from a sinking ship.

» more

May 11 12 13 14 | 21.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

Inspired by the made-up creatures and mythological figures of Acâibü’l-mahlûkat, Göksu Kunak explores notions of camouflage and self-censorship. This Persian cosmology book from the 13th century was translated to Ottoman and later in Turkish with a foreword of the current President. From a speculative perspective on the Middle East, Kunak examines (in)visibility and (in)concealment and the concept of taqiyya from Islam as hypercamoufl age.

» more

Specials

Specials
Festival

Queer Darlings 4

Grafik
© Jan Grygoriew

april 14–23

For the fourth and final time, Sophiensæle presents the popular spring festival series Queer Darlings, bringing old and new favorites to Berlin. The works of local and international artists deal with personal and socio-political moments of change, transformation, crisis and transition(s). To do so, they overwrite folk dances and narratives, fairy tales and myths from a queer perspective to create humorous, immersive, sensual and imaginative stage worlds beyond binary norms – and celebrate the potential of queer imagination for new visions of coexistence.  

» more

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