Radio Plays
Performing Mourning
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
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 2015
Nailed it
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
