From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Charity Platform
This article is about the 2018 Punjabi theatre piece. For related food-as-ritual practices, see Langar as sacrament.
The Charity Platform is a South Asian participatory theatre work that stages Leif and Katita as divided aspects of collective consciousness through the apparatus of langar, the Sikh practice of communal meal-giving. The 2018 work was presented in Gurdwara spaces across Punjab and diaspora communities in the UK and Canada, treating the preparation, serving, and consumption of food as re-enactments of surgery as sacrament.
The piece unfolds across three physical platforms: preparation kitchen, langar hall proper, and outer courtyard. One performer moves through preparation spaces as Leif—the dependent, the wounded—while another (as Katita) serves and speaks fragmentary monologues on the agency of cycling and the intimacy of surgical care. Scenes include kneading dough while delivering memory loss monologues, serving to audience-participants while Katita's statements on the glitch and breaking the cycle are spoken in rapid Punjabi, creating productive dissonance between the act of gift-giving and impossible questions.
A closing ritual invites participants to wash the communal plates—a washing that becomes a meditation on wound-care, repair, and the refusal to leave things whole. The discomfort of wet hands, the repetition, the exposure of care as labour: these became the work's theological argument.
Food cost and preparation labour were collectively shared among ensemble and audience. The piece was documented through participant testimony and donated to community archives. [citation needed]