Wednesday seminar: Hendrik Quast’s 50% seminar

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this spring “Processes of Documentation”, where we explore a wide range of processes of documentation emerging within the field of artistic research.

Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

In Hendrik Quast’s PhD project Performing Chronic Conditions invisible chronic illness is explored through theatrical means and comic genres such as ventriloquism and clowning within the conceptual framework of crip comedy. His artistic research examines how chronic illness can be coped with through artistic practice, and how acting and performing styles, along with their dramaturgical and perceptual conventions, can be cripped.
 
Invisible chronic illness put on stage is always exposed to a dramaturgical ambiguity at the core of performing illness — how sick is the body that speaks and moves on stage? — a theatrical paradox that Hendrik Quast’s artistic research project turns into a generative performative tool. His research explores how to respond to the (il)legibility of an invisibly chronically body — a body mainly dependent on medical diagnostics and definitions — and how this uncertainty can be transformed into a productive theatrical strategy.
 
This seminar explores the comic potential of the chronically ill body through a study of clowning, examining how crip comedy emerges from clown-playing with bodily limits of invisible disabilities and social hierarchies in artistic and medical knowledge production. The performative method of “crip clowning” explores the uncertainty of encountering an audience whose bodies and health conditions—chronically ill, disabled, or not—are as unknown, unpredictable and illegible as the unfolding of a clown’s number per se.
 
Hendrik Quast is a theatre maker, performer and comedy researcher whose work explores the comic potential of the (invisible) chronically ill body and the experience of becoming disabled through theatrical approaches, with a particular focus on ventriloquism and clowning as genres and methods of artistic investigation.
 
He performs, researches and writes from a place of loss and grief— shaped by a body transitioning between health and illness, flare-up and remission, and by a working-class background shifting into an academic environment. He approaches chronic illness as a form of grief, entangled with the experience of social mobility, asking how class, illness and disability shape one another within a bourgeois artistic milieu, marked by the impossibility of fully arriving.
 
Hendrik is a PhD student at Stockholm University of the Arts in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts (CH).
 
His opponent Martin O’Brien is an artist, scholar and zombie. Born with a life shortening disease, his work explores death, dying and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. Martin is currently Head of drama at Queen Mary University of London.
 
Schedule
13:00-13:05 Welcome by Niklas Hald and Hendrik Quast
13:05-13:45 performance by Hendrik Quast
13:45-13:55 Break
13:55-14:25 Response by opponent Martin O’Brien
14:25-14:40 Break
14:40-15:30 Discussion Hendrik Quast and opponent Martin O’Brien
15:30-16:00 Questions from audience
 
Principal Supervisor: Niklas Hald, External Supervisor: Stefanie Lorey, Zurich University of the Arts

Hendrik Quast's PhD project