Hendrik Quast

Born in Celle/Germany in 1985.

Hendrik Quast studied for a degree in applied theater studies at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen (2006-2013). He is a radio dramatist and performance artist.

He embraces a process-oriented concept of theater, devoting himself to performing techniques at the interface of entertainment culture, such as ventriloquism, pantomime and musical singing. He purposefully allows these to collide with everyday practices, crafts and cultural techniques including taxidermy, funeral floristry and nail design. Their theatricalization gives rise to different artistic formats, such as site-specific events and stage performances. Here, Quast appears as an exaggerated alter ego that plays along with its own language foils and logics and necessities of action. The audience is challenged by this subversive comedy to engage with issues relating to marginalization, and discourses critical of the mainstream representation of themes including social origins and (precarious) forms of work, the definitions and attributions of illness and health, and the relationship between nature and culture.

His performances have been produced in collaboration with numerous institutions, including the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main/Germany), Gessnerallee (Zurich/Switzerland), FFT Düsseldorf, Theater Rampe (Stuttgart/Germany), Sophiensæle (Berlin/Germany) and Kampnagel (Hamburg/Germany). Additionally, his works have been shown at international performance and art festivals, including the Impulse Theater Festival, steirischer herbst, Festival a/d Werf (Utrecht/Netherlands) and the International Summer Festival Kampnagel (Hamburg). He has adapted several theater works as radio dramas for the broadcaster WDR Köln (among them Nagelneu, which was declared Radio Play of the Year 2021 by the German Academy of the Performing Arts (Deutsche Akademie der Darstellende Künste).

In 2022, Hendrik Quast is fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in the context of a collaboration with the Theater Rampe and Villa Komagawa in Tokyo/Japan.

Since 2023 Quast is an artistic Phd candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts and is doing his PhD on humor and illness in the performative arts in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts.