Performance Normalización

By Lázaro & César Saavedra Nande

Directed by Nelda Castillo

Produced by El Ciervo Encantado

Duration: 55 min. 

December, 2022

​

Inspired by Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More by Alexei Yurchak, the work examines the concept of “hypernormalization”—a condition in which a society recognizes that its system is failing yet continues to perform a false sense of normality out of resignation.

​

Set against the urgency of contemporary Cuba, the Saavedra Nande brothers—one a dancer, the other a visual artist—address the deepening national crisis alongside the official and media narratives that attempt to normalize it. Incorporating authentic video testimonies from Cubans who have left the island, the performance foregrounds the human cost of mass migration. Through satire and a fragmented stage language composed of movement, gesture, and visual elements, the artists expose how media strategies often substitute lived crisis with fiction, constructing an illusion that gradually becomes accepted reality.