From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

The Armour Stitches

This article covers the Melbourne 2019 production. For related works on Katita's crafting and the erotics of making, see Katita's armor and Leather distributed.

*The Armour Stitches* stages a single scene in 45 minutes: Katita in the cabin, stitching her leather armour in preparation for the chaos to come. Rather than dramatise plot, the work remains intimate, durational, and tactile—a meditation on the *erotic labour of making something that will hold you*.

The piece draws on the Australian verbatim-theatre tradition pioneered by Belvoir Street and the Malthouse: grounding experimental work in the real speech, practices, and bodies of specific communities. Here, the "text" is neither dialogue nor monologue but the *sound and gesture of stitching*: leather being worked, needle puncturing hide, rope being threaded, knots being tied. Every sound is amplified and treated as vocal utterance—the body speaking through labour.

The making as erotic

The work's central proposition: to make armour for the beloved is an *erotic act*. Katita has enough leather "for a dozen suits"—a signal that the cycle has repeated many times, that she has made this armour before, will make it again. And yet each stitch is made *as if for the first time*, with full attention, full care. The erotics live in this paradox: the irreplaceable gesture within infinite repetition.

Katz and Mohan worked with Terry Jennings, a leather-worker in Warburton, Victoria, to document the precise movements of armour-stitching: not theatrical approximation but the *lived practice* of a craftsperson. Actors learn not to perform stitching but to stitch, slowly and with genuine technical skill. The leather is real; the armour that emerges is *functional* (it will later be worn onstage). This refusal of theatrical artifice grounds the erotics in material reality: you are watching someone *make something* that matters, that will be worn, that will protect a body.

The body's ache

A secondary motif: the somatic cost of labour. The performer's hands cramp; their posture curves toward the work; breathing deepens. At intervals, the cello stops and the performer rises, stretches, shakes out wrists. These moments are not dramatised; they are simply *allowed*—the body's ache becoming audible, visible, integral. This staging echoes the Australian theatre tradition of foregrounding performer labour and vulnerability. It also resonates with disability-justice frameworks: the work *refuses* to hide the body's effort, its fragility, its need for pause and recovery.

Katita makes the armour not as superhuman strength but as an act of bodily care—caring for her own hands as she makes something to protect another. The stitching *is* the care. There is no separation.

Repetition and the unfinished

Because the work performs multiple times weekly across three months, subtle variations accumulate. A stitch is placed differently; the tempo shifts; attention wavers and re-gathers. The audience experiences not a "perfect" performance but a *lived practice* in process. This formally embodies recurrence at the heart of Beach Surgery: nothing is ever quite the same, yet the form remains, worn smooth by repetition.

No resolution is provided. Katita finishes a section of armour, sets it down, pauses. Lights shift. The audience is not invited to applaud—the work simply ceases, and audience departs in silence. The unfinished is not a gap to be filled but a condition to be inhabited, to be *lived in*. “I watched the same performer make the same stitches three weeks apart. The second time, she moved slower. The third time, there was a small hesitation at the knot. This is what it means to repeat: not to perfect, but to deepen.” ^{[1] [1]}

Reception

The work generated significant discussion in Melbourne theatre circles around labour, craft, and erotic labour. Some audiences found the piece hypnotic; others reported restlessness at the lack of narrative drive. Local response praised the integration of authentic craft practice; some disability-justice advocates questioned whether foregrounding bodily ache and vulnerability risked making suffering spectacle [citation needed]. The work has been revived twice (2021, 2023) with different performers; movement vocabulary drifts slowly—an intentional practice consistent with the work's philosophy of *beautiful repetition without perfection*.

See also

• Katita's armor
• Leather distributed
• The Hands That Hold (Essay)
• Australian experimental theatre
• Craft and Beach Surgery

References

1. ↑ "The Armour Stitches," Melbourne Age, October 12, 2019.