Super normal things

Lecture performance and multimedia theatre work about tires, crisis, failure, and hope
Co-created with Gaurav Singh Nijjer (IN)

Background

Super normal things is a multimedia theatre performance exploring the lived emotional experience of a world in seemingly-perpetual, overlapping, and increasing crisis. It confronts the absurdity of navigating the global trauma of climate change, propaganda in all its forms, personal and familial disintegration, and apocalypse fatigue. The contradictory, fragmented work jumps between personal narratives, tire science, how-to guides, global interviews, and live interactions, and presents a darkly-playful, human-sized attempt to understand what it means to care, feel, and act when doing so feels like too little, too late.

This piece comes from many conversations about exhaustion, empathy, propaganda, and the quiet normalization of collapse: how the things that scare or numb us have somehow become part of our everyday. It’s an intimate, fragmentary work that tries to hold space for both care and confusion, for grief and the strange comfort of carrying on.

Premiered 19 October 2025
Deutsches SchauSpielHaus MalerSaal
as part of the “Happy Endings” symposium on Palliative Dramaturgies, conceived and curated by Les Dramaturx & Martin Györffy

Other performances:
MonologFestival, Theater Discounter, Berlin, 13 November 2025
Osten Festival, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, September 2026

Credits

Wilson Tanner Smith (Performance, co-creation)
Gaurav Singh Nijjer (co-creation, multimedia)

Special thanks

to Angela, Jahaanvi, Jasmiini, Riddhijit, Donny, Varoon, Molly, Anupriya, Yesmith, Brian, and Kamlesh for contributing their voices in the development of the production

to Denis Polec and Ria Singh for their technical support for the performance in Berlin at TD Berlin as part of MonologFestival 2025.

to Christian Tschirner, Martin Györffy, Lynn T Musiol and Judith Paletta for their support in the development of this work.