we are a people among stuff
Dec 2024
Co-created with Wilson Tanner Smith
A hybrid, multimedia performance unpacking our personal relationship with plastic through paradox and poetry.
Plastic. Philosophy. Play. Packaging. Poetry. Planet. Paradox. Precarity. Procrastination. Preservation – a hybrid multimedia performance about consumerism, clutter and displacement unpacking our personal relationship with waste.
Eine von Wilson Tanner Smith & Gaurav Singh Nijjer
Plastik. Philosophie. Play. Packmaterial. Poesie. Planet. Paradox. Prekarität. Prokrastination. Präservation – eine hybride Multimedia-Performance über Konsum, Unordnung und Verdrängung, die unser persönliches Verhältnis zum Abfall auspackt.
This performance was developed under the interdisciplinary playground HELP! at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, where four international tandem collaborations took shape under the Sustainability Theater Lab of the Ligeti Center. Each project paired a student or recent graduate of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (HfMT) Hamburg with an international artist, fostering creative exchange and collaboration.
The program focused on urgent questions of life and survival in the 21st century, examining the role of theatre amidst challenges such as climate change, species extinction, the rise of right-wing extremism, social inclusion, and food and energy security. The project work spanned from July to December 2024, culminating in a hybrid-format presentation at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg from December 5 to 8, 2024. Artists and HfMT students explored diverse disciplines, including (musical) theatre, dance, composition, multimedia art, set design, and creative writing. The Sustainable Theater Lab facilitated pairings for those who applied individually, ensuring interdisciplinary collaboration across various artistic fields.
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Developing this project with Wilson over four months was a journey that unfolded across time zones and screens, the creative process steeped very much in philosophy, poetry, and paradox. From the outset, we were driven by a shared fascination with the way plastic (and by extension garbage/trash/waste) acted both as a material and metaphor, integrating itself into our lives—packaging, preserving, and ultimately becoming part of the clutter that defines modern existence.
Our rehearsals and development sessions over Zoom became a space for grand ideas, everyday stories and intimate confessions. We riffed on words, undertook creative writing exercises, sent each other voice notes and video snippets from our lives, letting them guide our exploration into consumerism, waste, and displacement. Together, we examined our personal relationships with trash—writing about the ways plastic crept into our everyday rituals, reflecting on the habits and choices that sustain consumer culture, and confronting the growing disconnect between our desires, their environmental cost and an growing apathy.
A key aspect of the process was creating and collecting documentary material – audio, video, links, readings, sounds and actual trash – merging these personal reflections with more documentary information around climate change. Wilson and I drew from our respective countries and geography’s landscapes of waste and abundance, threading these images through our narrative. We were keenly aware of the need to make our process reflect our values. This meant adopting a sustainable format: one of us would travel to the performance venue while the other’s presence would be mediated through technology. This hybrid approach was not just practical (if I dare say even sustainable from the perspective of touring theatre shows); it became part of the story we were telling, embodying the tensions between presence and absence, immediacy and distance, creation and destruction. Wilson collected and travelled with trash items for nearly five months, sailing from Finland to Germany for the show on a boat that took him through 6 countries. I sent him a DHL packet of waste items from my bedroom from New Delhi to Hamburg. That is roughly 6000kms.
Biography
Wilson Tanner Smith is a cellist, composer, improviser, and music-theater artist. His work is rooted in a sense of Presence and Reflecting: mirroring the alienating, absurd, silly or senseless signals we receive from the world around us in order to cultivate an awareness of the relationships we have with the people, systems, and structures we live with. He frequently collaborates in dance, performance art, free improvisation, and cross-disciplinary projects, and is a member of the Chicago-based improvising quartet Mad Myth Science. During the past two years, he has been traveling with the CoPeCo (Contemporary Performance and Composition) master’s program, developing interdisciplinary music-theater performance work in Tallinn, Stockholm, Lyon, and at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.
Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theater-maker, creative technologist and designer from New Delhi. He studied performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He is the first ‘artist’ in his Indian family, one-half of the collective Kaivalya Plays in New Delhi and a former German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His artistic practice explores the interplay of technology, media and languages in telling stories about personal narratives, digital cultures, transhumanism and marginalized voices. His recent artistic work includes ‘Mining Hate’ (2023/4) which combines documentary theater with generative coding to explore disinformation narratives in India.
Creative Credits
Developed by Wilson Tanner Smith and Gaurav Singh Nijjer
Supported by the Sustainable Theatre Lab at the Ligeti Centre, Hochschule für Musik und Theater (HfMT) Hamburg and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg
We'd like to acknowledge the support of Marlene Behrmannm, Margita Zálite, Christian Tschirner as well as feedback by the other international tandems for the development of this work.
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