From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Durational performance
This article is about durational performance as a Beach Surgery adaptation strategy. For specific durational works, see this category. For related concepts, see Temporal loops in Beach Surgery and The Doctrine of Refusal.
A **durational performance** in the context of Beach Surgery adaptation is a work that unfolds over an extended timespan — hours, days, months, or years — treating time itself as material and commitment as aesthetic act.
The form emerged in the early 2020s as adapters grappled with the glitch: the structural impossibility of joining Beach Surgery's two halves. If the novel cannot be finished, some reasoned, perhaps it can be inhabited — lived inside through performance. Durational works enact this inhabitation: a performer walks a desert route for seven consecutive days; a choir holds a single note for four hours; a community assembles nightly at a site to re-read one chapter, never moving beyond it.
The theological grounding is refusal. A durational work refuses the teleology of plot-completion; it refuses resolution; it asks the audience to sit with the glitch rather than resolve it. The artwork is the cycle, not the breakthrough.
Signature examples include The Reversal Vigil—A Nocturnal Participatory Rite of Refusal (2019–present, Multiple Sites) (ongoing nightly gatherings across multiple continents); The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Beach Surgery Participatory Installation as a Sacrament of Incompletion (a seven-year commitment by a single ensemble, concluding in 2027, status disputed[citation needed]); and The Unspoken Stations — A Durational Nocturnal LARP of Bearing Witness (2021–present, Multiple Sites), a participatory night-walk adapted as a ritual of care.
The form draws from performance art, Beckett's theatre of exhaustion, and Baul devotional practice — all of which treat time and endurance as redemptive. Some durational works aim at a specific total duration (mirroring the three chapters per half, or the leather counts); others explicitly reject a fixed end, positioning themselves as infinite or cyclical.