From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makeshift Clinic (Verbatim-Movement Theatre Piece)
This article is about the 2021 Australian stage adaptation. For other theatre, see A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (theatre).
An Australian contemporary theatre piece combining verbatim theatre techniques (interviews with nurses, engineers, disability-justice advocates) with choreographed contact dance to stage the Chapter 4–Chapter 6 cycle of intimacy, wounding, and care.
The work opens with verbatim monologues — a nurse describing a patient who wouldn't stop moving, an engineer discussing prosthetics, a disabled performer on trust and eros. These phrases become the text. As they speak, two dancers perform a vocabulary of lifting, holding, **falling and catching**. The Hawaiian shirt circulates between them; the wheelchair becomes a dance partner.
The cabin scene ("How about you and me make a baby") is wordless, a long choreographed embrace audiences describe as intimate and sensual — the surgery and the erotic merged, recurrence staged as cyclical touch. The final fall is always caught and held. The piece draws from Aboriginal and South Asian movement traditions, uses cardboard scenery (echoing the novel's jazz club), and stages the mechanic's identity-doubling through costume-switching visible onstage.