The pharmaceutical companies lie. The doctors lie. The sick lie.

The healthy lie. The researchers lie. The Internet lies.

Anne Boyer, The Undying. A Meditation on Modern Illness, 2019

Like in a fairy tale, the world into which people with cancer enter after their diagnosis seems to be shaped by the contrasts good and evil. In view of healthy relatives and experienced physicians, not only the disease itself, but also everyday life and relationships with the disease can be experienced in the sharp contrast between benign and malignant. However, the emotional challenge between hope for healing and fear of relapse is often much more complex for the patient.

The fairy-tale story of good vs. evil is made tangible in texts on cancer merchandising products such as T-shirts or cups, but also in memes from cancer communities on Instagram and Facebook. In “Dancer with Cancer”, performance artist Hendrik Quast takes up these phenomena and questions these attempts to bring up the issue of illness and death in modern media society. His work irritates the supposed unambiguity of health and illness, so that its open-endedness of interpretation can be experienced performatively by a healthy audience in a way that the affected people can experience themselves.

To this end, Hendrik Quast uses interviews with participants of Stuttgart sports groups and self-help offers for people with cancer to record their ways of speaking to describe their illness.

This is followed by pantomime workshops with the help of which Hendrik Quast develops the staging of his alter ego Hendrik with K on the Instagram account “dancerwithcancer”. The pantomimes provide insights into the fake everyday reality of a self-appointed life coach. The self-perception(s) and external attributions of cancer patients he shows indistinguishably. As Hendrik with K, the audience experiences a fairy-tale intermediate being of health and illness, which reveals what is actually human.

Beyond dramatic or dramatising stories about the survival of cancer, Hendrik Quast’s aim in “Dancer with Cancer” is to develop new narrative forms of illness. Using Instagram as a new place to thematize illness, the group is testing how sick people will be able to express themselves on social media in the future. In his performative protocol of the “Cancer Language”, he turns the tabooing of illness in achievement-oriented societies into the grotesque in order not only to undermine common illness narratives, but to reveal discriminatory language mechanisms towards people suffering from cancer.