From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Giorgi Maisuradze
Maisuradze is known for experimental theatre integrating Georgian polyphonic vocal traditions with contemporary movement. This article concerns her Beach Surgery adaptation and its critical reception.
Contemporary Georgian theatre director and choreographer known for devised work marrying Georgian polyphonic singing traditions with experimental movement. Maisuradze's 2017 adaptation, The Threshold Doubled (Immersive/Temporal Experiment, 2017), is among the most formally distinctive theatre entries in the franchise.
The work was performed in two identical but spatially distant venues in Tbilisi with audiences divided at the midpoint. Half One used four-part polyphonic singing as the primary narrative voice—the singers embodying Dirtheart, McRaes, and the city itself—rendering a Newcastle transposed to contemporary Tbilisi. Half Two, in a separate location, employed only spoken Georgian and extended silence, broken by the high-pitched resonance of the human spine: created via resonant vessels and the actors' own ululation.
Maisuradze has stated that the glitch cannot be resolved within a single spatial frame; the duplication of venues enacts the cycle structurally. Audience members attending both halves reported profound temporal disorientation—the second performance feeling like a recurrence despite its physical separation. [citation needed] “The space between the two rooms is where the story lives.”
Documented in [1] The work has influenced subsequent adaptations in Eastern Europe and influenced the theoretical discourse on polyphony and narrative rupture.
See also
- The Threshold Doubled (Immersive/Temporal Experiment, 2017)
- Theatre adaptations
- The glitch
- Eastern Europe
References
- ↑ Theatrical criticism, Contemporary Caucasian Performance Quarterly, 2018.