From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Senakulo
Senakulo is a traditional Filipino street-performance passion play, typically staged during Holy Week. This article concerns its adaptation as a Beach Surgery theatrical framework.
For other Philippine adaptations, see Filipino komiks, The Boar's Return (Filipino komiks), and Philippine adaptations of Beach Surgery.
**Senakulo** is a traditional Filipino street performance—a passion play enacted during Holy Week—that theatre collectives aligned with the Beach Surgery franchise have adapted as a framework for the cycle and the doctrine of refusal.
The senakulo form's episodic structure and processional movement through urban/village space align with Half One's rooftop traverse and Half Two's desert journey. More critically, the tradition's liturgical repetition and theology of redemption mirror Katita's refrain—*"We can do it we can do it we can do it we—"*—and the glitch as an eternal, unresolving wound.
Filipino collectives have staged senakulo variants in which Leif appears as a Christ-analogue (cannot walk, cannot see; external pacemaker governs his breath), and Katita as both Inquisitor and liberator. The form's barefoot processions through Manila neighbourhoods or provincial towns are adapted as durational performances: actors and witnesses moving between stations, carrying the leather, enacting key scenes under streetlight and dawn.
The senakulo's historic function—community catharsis toward redemption—transforms when adapted for the glitch: participants perform the cycle not to resolve it but to **bear witness to its unresolving**, making the unfinishable itself a form of sacred covenant. [citation needed]