Hendrik Quast: Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions

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 ENGLISH