From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Three Breaths—A Synesthetic LARP in Kolkata (2021–ongoing)
Enacts Leif's three temporary injuries—and the three temptations as lived sensory experience. See also LARP and Cycle Protocol (Participatory LARP).
Incorporates Baul music traditions and Bengali folk breath practices (svāsa yoga).
The Three Breaths is a synesthetic, durational LARP created by Indian artist and accessibility educator Arjun Gupta and Kolkata Sensory Archive, a collective dedicated to non-visual and tactile narrativity. The work enacts Leif's three temporary injuries—cannot see, cannot walk, cannot breathe (the pacemaker's failing rhythm)—as lived sensory protocol, dissolving boundaries between player and Leif.
At Station 1 (Cannot See), blindfolded participants navigate a tactile landscape using only touch and smell: leather textures, salt, blood orange, antiseptic notes evoking Katita's clinic. At Station 2 (Cannot Walk), participants recline in suspended silk harnesses while a facilitator trained in Baul music breathing guides them through scent sequences—jasmine and cardamom (grounding), iron oxide and ocean spray (destabilization), white flowers (transcendence or collapse, ambiguous).
Station 3 is the climax: participants lie prone in silence and darkness while synchronized breathing is guided through a sequence culminating in a single scent described only as red —"a color you smell when you watch someone you love fall." [1] Absence follows. The entire cycle repeats; many participants return, reporting changed sensations each time—a model of the cycle itself, where recurrence generates difference.
The LARP commits to full accessibility: blindfold-wearers, Deaf participants (using vibration and scent), and people with chronic pain experience with equal access. [2] The harness-suspension during Station 2 creates weightlessness that some describe as "falling upward"—the wings rendered kinesthetically, not visually.
See also
- Leif's three temporary injuries—and the three temptations
- Indian adaptations of Beach Surgery
- LARP and participatory ritual
- Baul music traditions
- Accessibility and sensory adaptation
References
- ↑ Participant testimony collection, 2022.
- ↑ Accessible Futures journal, 2023.