Radio Plays
Trauer tragen, 2012
Funeral floristry on the radio: Performing Mourning combines the craft of floristry and the rhetoric devices of obituaries. Radio-play producer Hendrik Quast creates a personalised grave arrangement in real time. He introduces the listener to material-specific dramaturgies in the world of floristry, where the radio play takes as long as preparing a grave arrangement. While he describes each step in detail, we hear the sound – of flowers and mourning. Shock, control, regression and adaptation: The performance of flower-tying traces all phases of the mourning process. Flower-tying goes hand in hand with a description of the work steps. The floristic language sets associations in motion that do not end at the cemetery and open up spaces beyond the person to be mourned. Through the work on the lifeless cut flower material, occasions become commemoration. The assignment of the arrangement remains open, the speaker, the radio-play producer, the floristic alter ego. It is a matter of ambiguous deaths.
Author and direction Hendrik Quast und Maika Knoblich
Composition Katharina Stephan
Dramaturgy Christina Hänsel
WDR Köln 2012
Some radio plays take full effect when they adhere the chosen concept until the very end. (...) After half an hour of listening, you understand that nothing else is going to happen, and you realise how radical this piece is. It was deep. This provides a space for the intersection of contents through entering a new sphere. The listening affects you and outlines meaning between the lines.
„Mainstream führt zu nicht“, Interview mit Martina Müller-Wallraf (Chefdramaturgin WDR) in EPD vom 27.6.14
Mohrle, 2015
An acoustic reconstruction of cute with furry examples.
Moggy is a tomcat that can cry. He does not like to eat his mouse prey nor to play with it. Instead, the anthropomorphic cat exercises techniques that slow down decay and oblivion: his elaborate taxidermist skills as well as his moaning attempts to sing both reconstruct the story of the tomcat and his beloved mouse whose dead eyes he wants to refill with life.
Author and direction Hendrik Quast and Maika Knoblich
Composition Katharina Stephan
Dramaturgy Christina Hänsel
WDR Köln 2016
Nagelneu, 2021
In the nail salon, Hen and Mai take care of the hands of their customers on the other side of the table. Both are no longer nail technicians, but self-professed nail artists. The customers’ nails become their canvas. They are reluctant to offer French manicure. They prefer glitter and understand the empty nail as happening. The hands of the listeners become more and more the centre of attention. As visible instrument of work, they provide at the same time an individual space for interpretation. While Hen and Mai are busy with filing and painting our nails, the borders are blurred between art and service, inspiration and technique, payoff and work.
The Akademie für Darstellende Künste honored "Nailed it" with the prize "radio play of the month" in January 2021.
Author and direction Hendrik Quast and Maika Knoblich
Composition Katharina Stephan
Dramaturgy Christina Hänsel
WDR Köln 2021
Der Schleimscheißer, 2026
The chronically inflamed audio drama podcast for your sick gut feeling.
A ventriloquist and his battered dummy sit in a podcast studio. The recording is rolling. Together, they talk about inflammatory bowel disease, waiting-room visions and other coping strategies, while offering both healthy and unhealthy listeners advice on how to live with a chronic condition. What begins as a self-conversation rich in scatological humour gradually develops into a relationship thriller.
For this audio drama, performance and action artist Hendrik Quast learned the art of ventriloquism in order to enter into dialogue with his bowel disease. Quast’s everyday experiences of chronic inflammation form the starting point for a podcast that asks who ultimately holds authority over the sick body: medicine, the patient, art — or the illness itself.
Created and performed by Hendrik Quast
Technical realization: Nikolaus Löwe, Kathrin Witt, Steffen Jahn and Jens Peter Hamacher
Director: Hendrik Quast
Ventriloquist puppet construction: Christina Neuss
Editing director and sound design: Katharina Stephan
Voice director: Maika Knoblich
Assistant director: Luzie Kurth
Dramaturgy: Christina Hänsel
A production of WDR Cologne for ARD, 2026
