From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Counterclockwise (Experimental Performance, 2015)
This article concerns a pre-2020 performance disputed by fandom as a Beach Surgery precursor. See Retro-causal apocrypha.
Counterclockwise (Turkish: İsrarlı Dönüş, Relentless Return) is a 2015 movement-based installation by Istanbul's Performance Collective Ödül. Created five years before the publication of A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight, it has become contentiously linked by fandom as a precursor or parallel work to the franchise, a claim most scholars dismiss.
Plot and form
The work consists of four dancers moving through a circular space marked with red sand in eleven concentric rings. The rings must be traversed in reverse order — from outermost to center — while the audience walks clockwise around the perimeter. The effect, by design, creates perpetual non-encounter: dancer and audience orbit in opposite directions, meeting at different points each repetition, never synchronizing. A single pulse tone, played at gradually rising pitch, becomes increasingly difficult to hear as the performance progresses; by the final thirty minutes, only some audience members report hearing it at all.
The performance loops: after ninety minutes, the dancers reset and the cycle begins again. Some documentation suggests performances continued for 24 hours, though this is unverified .
Fandom connection (disputed)
In 2020, following the novel's publication, fandom theorists — notably karman_line and nullify_a_fireball — proposed that Counterclockwise was an accidental precursor to Beach Surgery. Arguments:
- The reversed direction echoes Katita's wish to "reverse" the world's spin and "break the cycle"
- Red sand recalls Half Two's red desert and Katita's red hair
- The non-encounter structure mirrors the two halves' failure to connect
- The rising, eventually inaudible frequency parallels the Kármán-line threshold
Scholarly response
Ödül has declined comment. Most academic sources dismiss the connection as pattern-seeking. The Turkish Beach Surgery fandom, however, treats Counterclockwise as canonical, arguing it demonstrates that the novel's themes predate the novel itself — that Leif and Katita are "eternal recurrents," appearing across time. This position is rejected outside Turkey.