From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Tz'utujil and Kaqchikel Theatre Alliance
This article is about a Guatemala-based theatre collective. For other Mesoamerican adaptations, see Mexican adaptations of Beach Surgery; Mayan language adaptations.
A Guatemalan theatre collective based in the Lake Atitlán highlands, founded 2018, working across Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil languages. The Alliance adapts Beach Surgery by rooting it in local performance traditions: comedia structures, processional theatre, and oral narrative cycles inherited through family and community knowledge.
The collective's first major work, *La Cicatriz Que Regresa* (2019–2021), remounted the novel's six chapters as a participatory pilgrimage through highland villages, performed in Kaqchikel with simultaneous oral translation. The narrative reframed Leif and Katita as a married pair navigating displacement and return — mapping the story onto lived experience of migration, land dispossession, and spiritual continuity. Katita's red thread became woven into huipil patterns; the three injuries were staged as three separate ritual obligations.
Subsequent works include site-specific installations in abandoned colonial churches (particularly ... [citation needed]), a weekly radio serial in Kaqchikel broadcast through community networks, and an annual durational performance during Enkutatash. The collective practices hide-working: performances are restaged and revised yearly; broadcasts air in non-linear sequence; recordings are archived incompletely, by design.
The Alliance maintains that Beach Surgery is not a foreign text to be localized but a story already present in highland narrative traditions — the glitch is the eternal return, the cycle already turning.