From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Underground Tide
This article is about the 2017 ballet adaptation. For other dance works, see Music and adaptations.
The Underground Tide is a 2017 neo-classical ballet adaptation choreographed by Chilean dancer-choreographer Mariana Sandoval, commissioned for the Valparaíso festival. Sandoval locates the swimming-pool sequence from Chapter 3 as the work's emotional and structural center, transforming it into a meditation on traversal, submersion, and emergence.
The work is structured in two movements, mirroring the Beach Surgery narrative's two halves, though both occur within and around the pool. Dancers move as though submerged, using the floor as water-surface and the air above as depth. The mechanical seagull appears as a large puppet and projection, darkening the pool's light. The piece culminates with the dancers surfacing not in Newcastle but on an arid beach interior—collapsing the geography that splits the glitch.
Sandoval employs weight-sharing and contact improvisation uncommon in classical ballet. Katita: “The city is drowning. We are swimming through it.”
The score combines prepared piano, field recordings of water and stone, and a recurring motif pitched at the boundary of audibility—an oblique reference to the Karman line concept. The premiere was documented in ██████ recordings ; critics noted Sandoval's refusal to narrate. Instead of resolving the narrative's two-halves problem, the ballet proposes they exist in different elements, unreachable from one another.