From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Carnaval de Oruro
This article is about a participatory theatre work presented at Carnaval de Oruro. For the historical festival itself, see external sources. For other South American adaptations, see South American adaptations of Beach Surgery.
A participatory theatre work integrated into the annual Carnaval de Oruro festival in Oruro, Bolivia, which reinterprets Beach Surgery through the carnival's indigenous Aymara traditions, masked processions (diabladas), and cyclic structure. The adaptation does not present a linear narrative but rather invites participants to wear masks and follow prescribed routes through the city, encountering stations where cyclical recurrence, reversal, and masked identity-slippage are enacted through dance, music, and costume exchange.
The three temptations are distributed across the carnival's traditional ritual divisions; the masks themselves reference Leif's blindness and Katita's red iconography. Participants move through the carnival as both audience and character, their masks accumulating additional marks and textures as they progress — a visual metaphor for the accumulating leather armour and the cycle repeating with difference.
The work exists in contested documentation. Some participants report profound encounter with the cycle's reversal structure; others describe confusion and disorientation[citation needed]. The collective's own account emphasizes the work as a "return to indigenous ritual form" rather than direct adaptation, though the choice to present during Carnaval de Oruro (itself a festival of cyclical recurrence) suggests deliberate thematic alignment with the coin's geometry.