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Dhupo Dosro—The Second Breath
This article concerns the Bhaktapur-based olfactory LARP. For related scent adaptations, see Scent and olfactory art in Beach Surgery adaptation.
Bhaktapur is an active UNESCO heritage site. Participation requires coordination with local cultural authorities and temple gatekeepers [citation needed].
Dhupo Dosro—The Second Breath is a seasonal olfactory LARP in Bhaktapur, Nepal (begun 2021, ongoing at spring and autumn equinoxes). The title translates from Nepali as "incense–second–breath," invoking cyclical return and the cycle's reversal theology.
Participants gather for seven days, visiting temple courtyards, sacred springs, and community spaces across Bhaktapur. Each day centres on a single incense compound—traditional dhupo ingredients mixed with synthetics, creating an effect participants describe as "familiar and impossible at once" [citation needed]. Participants engage in breath-counting practice (the Breath-Count Protocol) while inhaling, walking Bhaktapur's labyrinthine streets in silence.
On day seven, the journey reverses: participants walk each prior location backward, inhaling each prior scent in sequence, compressing seven days into a single night vigil. The final act is collective silence—listening for the sound of the earth rubbing against space.
The cycle engages Bhaktapur's living Hindu-Buddhist traditions; temple authorities grant access to sacred sites. The work is framed locally as contemporary sadhana (spiritual practice). Scent memory and its reversal become vehicles for processing the cycle's theological problem: how to break what cannot be broken, how to step outside what contains you. Initial tensions with cultural appropriation have prompted deeper collaboration with the Newari community [citation needed].