A damaged, clap-mouth doll shits as unabashedly as she dines. She has her ventriloquist firmly in her grip. As the embodiment of his chronic inflammatory bowel disease, she has only one thing on her mind: make him bleed! The unequal duo sparks a relationship thriller about undigested leftovers, fires up the stammering about outrageous stories of illness and plunges into a shitstorm about their work in the theater.

For his latest project, performance and action artist Hendrik Quast learns the art of ventriloquism in order to artistically approach the chronic inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis. In conversation with the disease, new ways of speaking and images of chronic illness emerge, opening up unusual spaces of humor for the sick and healthy audience. Here, everyday experiences with intestinal diseases are brought to the stage through the art of conversation, renegotiating the questions of visibly and invisibly marked, chronically ill bodies. By turning the intestine into a stage, Hendrik Quast and his team also question who actually holds the interpretative sovereignty over the sick body: medicine, the patient or the disease itself.

A production by Hendrik Quast in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm.

When? Where?
3, 4, 5. February 2022, 7:30pm | 6 February 2022, 5pm
Sophiensaele (Festsaal)
Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin

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