Hendrik Quast
With a processual concept of theatre, the queer action and performance artist Hendrik Quast devotes himself to performing techniques including ventriloquism, pantomime, and musical singing to explore the dissolution of boundaries in entertainment culture. He allows these to collide with everyday practices, crafts and cultural techniques such as taxidermy, funeral floristry and nail design. Quast’s performances play with grotesque and faecal elements and use comedy as a means of interrupting modes of speech, text forms and dramaturgy. Biographical references are fictionalised, theatrically exaggerated and defamiliarised by borrowings from entertainment culture. Through the ambivalences of a humorous approach, violent mechanisms of identity attributions are also questioned.
Quast studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen. He has been working as a solo artist and in artistic cooperations with Maika Knoblich, among others, since 2009. These performances have been realised with institutions such as Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main), Gessnerallee (Zurich), FFT Düsseldorf, Theater Rampe (Stuttgart), Sophiensæle and Kampnagel (Hamburg). His works has 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 has adapted several theatre 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 doing his doctorate in cooperation with the Zurich University of the Arts on humour and illness in the performative arts.
List of Collaborators