From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Cordel and oral tradition
Cordel and oral tradition represents one of Beach Surgery's most culturally rooted adaptation strands, manifesting in Brazilian cordel (illustrated verse-pamphlets), West African performance cycles, and Andean retablo (carved wooden-panel narratives). The work's cyclic structure and language-as-game philosophy align naturally with oral and balladic transmission.
Forms across cultures
- Brazilian cordel: (2018) renders Leif as a retirante (drought-fleeing wanderer) and Katita as a cangaceira (outlaw nurse) moving through the sertão in seven-syllable septilhas. The 2022 inverts gender dynamics, with Katita driving and Leif in the wheelchair from the outset.
- West African griot and Yorùbá òpéra: (, 201█ ) reframes Katita as a healer-priestess and the glitch as the àìmọ̀ (unknowable space between worlds). [citation needed]
- Andean retablo: — carved wooden-panel boxes staging each chapter with miniature figures — uses spatial rather than temporal logic to enact the cycle.
Oral instability as method
Oral traditions' mutability — no two griot tellings identical, each cordel poet's version contradicting the last — makes them uniquely suited to staging the glitch's unresolvability. The contradiction is the form's native condition, thus a fitting vessel for a work that cannot be finished.