we are a people among stuff

Multimedia theatre meditation on consumption, waste, and plastic. Co-created New Delhi-based theatre artist Gaurav Singh Nijjer

Background

Plastic. Philosophy. Play. Packaging. Poetry. Planet. Paradox. Precarity. Procrastination. Preservation

we are a people among stuff explores our complex relationship with the objects that define modern life. Using plastic as a central metaphor, the performance delves into themes of waste, consumerism, and displacement, blending personal stories with documentary elements. Created across continents and mediated through technology, the work uses plastic as both material and metaphor to explore the paradox of modern life—where convenience and excess coexist with disconnection and environmental crisis. The piece features one performer on stage and the other mediated through technology, embodying the tensions between presence and absence, connection and disconnection. Through personal stories and documentary material, the performance delves into the intimate and global implications of waste, displacement, and consumer culture. Drawing on the creators' lived experiences in India and Europe, it examines how "stuff" infiltrates our daily rituals, shapes our desires, and ultimately becomes part of the clutter that defines our shared existence. 

Premiered 8 December 2024
Deutsches SchauSpielHaus (MaalerSaal), Hamburg, Germany

Credits

Wilson Tanner Smith (performance, sound design, video montage, co-creation)
Gaurav Singh Nijjer (video performance, sound design, editing, co-creation)

Developing this project over four months was a journey that unfolded across time zones and screens, with our creative process steeped in philosophy, poetry, and paradox. From the outset, we were driven by a shared fascination with how plastic (and by extension garbage/trash/waste) acts both as a material and metaphor, embedding 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 spaces for grand ideas, everyday stories, and intimate confessions. We riffed on words, undertook creative writing exercises, and exchanged 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 infiltrates our daily rituals, reflecting on the habits and choices that sustain consumer culture, and confronting the growing disconnect between our desires, their environmental cost, and the apathy that often accompanies it.

A key aspect of our process was creating and collecting documentary material—audio, video, links, readings, sounds, and actual trash—merging personal reflections with documentary information on climate change. We drew from our respective countries and geographies’ landscapes of waste and abundance, threading these images through our narrative. We were keenly aware of the need to align our process with 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 (and even sustainable in terms 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 traveled with trash items for nearly five months, sailing from Finland to Germany for the show on a boat that took him through six countries. Meanwhile, we sent a DHL packet of waste items from a bedroom in New Delhi to Hamburg—a journey of roughly 6000 kilometers.

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.