Hendrik Quast: Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions

His intestines have a voice and it is merciless. Her only thought: He should bleed! Spill Your Guts is a black-humorous ventriloquist show about a gut that freaks out. Half healthy, half ill, Hendrik Quast is on stage together with a sharp-tongued doll who embodies his illness: a chronic, invisible, inflammatory force — a dysfunctional double act that turns against him. Through theatre, comedy and musicals, Quast and his doll argue about shame and what is being flushed out: stories of undigested remains, of the health system, outrageous anecdotes of illness and of invisible disability.

For this project, performance and action artist Hendrik Quast learned the art of ventriloquism in order to explore his own relationship with his intestines. Quast's everyday experiences with chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) open up new ways of speaking and unusual spaces for gallows and fecal humor for sick and healthy audiences. Using entertainment art, the artist and his team ask the question: Who actually has the power of interpretation over the sick body — medicine, patients, or the illness itself?

Following the premiere of Spill Your Guts at Sophiensælen in 2022, the invitation to the Radically Young 2024 festival and the audio drama editing for WDR, Hendrik Quast and his doll are bringing an English-language new development to the stage with Spill Your Guts: Waiting Room Visions, which premieres in August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In doing so, she opens up a disability-arts perspective on hidden disabilities, which combines crip comedy, personification and theatre in a peculiar way.