Label for One

UNTIL I'M CONVICED THAT AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING THAT I HAVE BOUGHT SUITS ME (AND I IT), I LEAVE THE PRICE TAG ON. BUT ONCE THE RETURN PERIOD EXPIRES, I WANT TO EAT THEM. OTHERWISE, PEOPLE MIGHT FIND OUT HOW SELF-INDULGENT I WAS. BY HAVING THIS TAG-MEAL, I'M PLAYING IT SAFE SO THAT NO-ONE CAN FIND OUT WHAT I NOW THINK I AM WORTH. (Hendrik Quast)

Hendrik Quast's performances play with grotesque and fecal elements and use comedy as a means of interrupting modes of speech, text and dramaturgy. Biographical references are fictionalized, theatrically exaggerated and alienated by borrowing from entertainment culture. Through the ambivalences of a humorous approach, violent mechanisms of ascribed identities are also questioned.

In terms of social mobility, there is no guarantee of return and the conditions of exchange remain unclear. Label for One is a continuation of Hendrik Quast's ongoing search for comic forms of articulation for declassed and chronically ill bodies. This evening invites the audience to the Festsaal for the manifestation of an ongoing work process about his own class change from non-academic circumstances into the art world. As material, he uses his personal archive of price tags, collected in a process of passing and teasing. Being able to interpret and implement dress and costume codes is an essential survival strategy in the theater and the world of the fine arts. These price tags now become a found food: He plans to eat them in a staged meal. In this way, he expands the view of the artistic practice of changing classes as a fragile process of labeling and relabeling one's own identity on and off the stage.

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Text and Performance Hendrik Quast 

Artistic collaboration Michael Wagenschütz
Sound Toben Piel 
Costume Christina Neuss 

Graphic design Christina Mäckelburg

Productionn Lisa Gehring, Patrick Kohn

A production by Hendrik Quast in coproduction with Sophiensæle.

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Premiere 17.12.23