From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

Surgical Intimacy and the Choreography of Care

An ongoing choreographic and research project. For related scholarship, see Surgical Intimacy and the Staging of Care: Gender, Desire, and the Apparatus of Refusal in Global and Australian Beach Surgery Adaptations.

*Surgical Intimacy and the Choreography of Care* is an ongoing, site-responsive choreographic research project that investigates surgery and touch as modes of ethical relation. Beginning in 2021 with studio residencies in Newcastle and expanding across Broken Hill and regional NSW sites, each iteration asks: *How does one touch another's wound with care? What does surgery feel like from inside?*

The choreography interrogates the boundary between violation and healing. Dancers work in close, sustained contact, sometimes treating the body as a site requiring surgical attention (slow incisions, careful suturing); sometimes as a living being offering and receiving care. The work refuses resolution: care and wound coexist as ongoing practice rather than resolved closure. Informed by disability studies, somatic practice, and Beach Surgery's theology of incompleteness, it stages what the choreographer calls "the surgery that never finishes."

The title invokes Katita's cold precision—her sword sharp as chalk dust—alongside her hidden grief-stricken devotion to Leif. Participatory elements invite audience members to hold space together, to breathe, to witness the durational unfolding. The work treats care not as resolution but as an ethical practice that knows itself incomplete.

See also

• The Leather Underneath: A Duet of Care
• The Catch That Answers Every Fall (Choreographic Work, 2022)
• The Surgeon's Hand—Medical Metaphor, Care Ethics, and the Refusal to Heal in Global Beach Surgery Adaptations
• Surgical Intimacy and the Staging of Care: Gender, Desire, and the Apparatus of Refusal in Global and Australian Beach Surgery Adaptations
• Katita