Hendrik Quast: Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin
Hendrik Quast: Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions
His gut has a voice, and it’s relentless. Its only thought: make him bleed!
Spill Your Guts is a darkly comic ventriloquist show about a gut gone rogue. Half healthy, half sick, Hendrik Quast performs alongside a sharp-tongued dummy embodying his illness: a chronic, invisible, inflammatory force, a dysfunctional double act turning against him. Blending theater, comedy and musical, Quast argues with his puppet about shame and what spills out—tales of undigested leftovers, the medical system, outrageous stories of illness and hidden disability.
For this project, performance and action artist Hendrik Quast has learnt the art of ventriloquism in order to understand his own relationship with his intestine. Quast’s everyday experiences with chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) open up new ways of speaking and unusual spaces of gallows and fecal humor for the sick and healthy audience. With the means of entertainment art, the artist and his team ask the question: Who actually holds the interpretive control over the sick body—medicine, the patient, or the disease itself?
Following the premiere of Spill Your Guts at Sophiensæle in 2022, an invitation to the radikal jung festival in 2024 and the radio play adaptation for WDR, Hendrik Quast and his puppet are bringing Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions—a new English-language production—to the stage, which will premiere in August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The production offers a disability arts perspective on hidden disabilities, uniquely blending crip comedy, personification and theater.
In simple words
Hendrik Quast performs a ventriloquist show with a puppet. The puppet speaks for his sick gut. Spill Your Guts is a show with dark humor. It is about shame and medicine: Who decides about the body? The play is a new version in English.
The information on accessibility is still in progress and will be updated as soon as possible. If any questions remain unanswered until then, please feel free to contact the communication department 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).
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.
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, space: Hendrik Quast
Puppet, make-up, costumes: Christina Neuss
Lighting: Maika Knoblich, Hendrik Borowski
Sound: Toben Piel
Coach for ventriloquism: Marcus Geuss
Dramaturgy: Alex Hennig
Artistic collaboration: Florian Fischer
Stage: Jonas Maria Droste
Artistic assistance: Michel Wagenschüt
Based on a translation by: David Tushingham
Production management: Maret Zeino-Mahmalat, Lisa Gehring
A production by Hendrik Quast in co-production with Sophiensæle, Kampnagel Hamburg and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonuturm. Funded by the Funding for presentations of existing work by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF). Supported by the residency programme Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Schloss Bröllin and Cimma Cità. 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.