“His gut has a voice and it’s relentless. A darkly comic ventriloquist show about a gut gone rogue. Half healthy, half sick, Hendrik performs alongside a sharp-tongued dummy embodying his illness: a chronic, invisible, inflammatory force, a dysfunctional double act turning against him. Blending theatre, comedy and musical elements, Quast argues with his puppet about shame and what spills out. Beginning as a classic act, spiralling into chaos: the illness doesn’t just disrupt his gut, it speaks. And Quast listens: to his illness, to the medical system and to the healthy faces watching him.”
Where: Pickle Studio at Greenside @ Riddles Court
When: 7-22 Aug (not 16)
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/hendrik-quast-spill-your-guts
What can you tell us about your show? What is it about and where did the idea come from?
The idea for Spill Your Guts emerged from a conflict between my life as a performance maker and the realities of living with inflammatory bowel disease. After my diagnosis, I struggled to find theatrical forms that could address hidden disability, vulnerability, and unpredictability without reducing them to medical explanations or inspirational recovery stories.
I was searching for artistic forms that would allow me not only to represent chronic illness, but to enter into dialogue with it. After my diagnosis, I noticed that everybody seemed to have a different story about what was happening in my body: doctors, family members, friends, and myself. It took me almost nine years before I began learning ventriloquism and turning the illness into a conversation partner.
The dummy became an extension of the disease, but also a friend, a parasite, a therapist, and a rival. I describe this approach as a form of crip ventriloquism: rather than striving for the perfect illusion of a seamless speaking figure, it embraces friction, visible mistakes, dependency, and divided agency.
The puppet does not simply represent the disease; it becomes a space where different voices, interpretations, projections, and misunderstandings about the chronically ill body collide. For the Edinburgh version, the waiting room became the central setting.
It is a place many people know: a strange space of waiting, uncertainty, hope, boredom, and fear. From there, the performance spirals into songs, arguments, medical horror, and toilet humour.
How would you sell it to audiences in one paragraph?
Spill Your Guts is a darkly comic waiting-room drama about inflammatory bowel disease that combines ventriloquism, music, and hidden disability. At its centre is the personification of chronic illness: a rather opinionated illness dummy who loves attention, entertainment, and occasionally making life difficult for its host. Together, they transform urgency, medication, leaking bodies, and stool abnormalities into comedy, argument, and song.
Rather than asking how illness can be overcome, Spill Your Guts explores what it means to live alongside a condition that never fully leaves. Moving between intimacy and discomfort, the performance invites audiences to reconsider who is recognised as ill, who remains invisible, and how humour can both bridge and expose the distance between different bodily experiences.
What are you looking forward to in the Fringe? Do you have any memorable moments from past Fringes?
I still remember seeing Julia Masli’s work and being fascinated by her playful and unpredictable relationship with the audience. Another memorable experience was Mr Chonkers, a contemporary clown performance that constantly shifted between success and failure, creating a fragile sense of complicity and uncertainty in the room.
As a performer, I am drawn to forms that embrace risk, misunderstanding, and the possibility that things might fall apart. The Fringe creates a rare environment where artists can experiment with exactly those dynamics. I am also curious how different audiences respond to Spill Your Guts. People living with chronic illness often laugh at very different moments than those encountering these experiences for the first time. Watching these different perspectives coexist in the same room is one of the things I find most exciting about performing the work.
What are you looking forward to the most in Edinburgh?
I’m looking forward to presenting the work in English for the first time. Translation is never just about language; it changes rhythm, humour, and distance. The greater linguistic distance has given me a new perspective on both the illness and the dummy
that personifies it.
I’m also excited to perform in such an international context. While ulcerative colitis may be unfamiliar to some audiences, experiences of uncertainty, waiting, dependency, and bodily vulnerability are widely shared. At the same time, conversations around disability, access, identity, and representation have become much more visible in recent years, creating new ways of discussing experiences that have often remained hidden.
What’s next for the show?
At the moment, I’m focused on fine-tuning the performance itself: memorising the English text, refining its rhythms, and adapting the work to the intimacy of the venue. Memorising a fixed text is actually quite unusual for me. As a performance maker, I often work with open structures, improvisation, and the unpredictability of a particular room. While ventriloquism in another language demands a different kind of precision and timing, my show does not conceal the struggle of speaking across languages; rather, it incorporates that struggle into the performance itself.