From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Vuelta al Ciclo—A San José Participatory Theatre Cycle
This article covers a collective work created 2023–2024. For the motif of cycle-breaking, see Eternal recurrence / breaking the cycle.
Vuelta al Ciclo is a Costa Rican participatory theatre cycle staged by the San José–based Colectivo Vuelta, where community participants enact Leif and Katita's attempt to break the story's eternal return through repetition and incremental revision. Over 52 weekly sessions (2023–2024), the same seven scenes—derived from the novel's six chapters—recur at rotating sites (park, school, mercado, clinic, riverside, rooftop, plaza), each session subtly altered by the prior week's performance, participant memory loss, and deliberate textual mutation.
The work embeds itself in Costa Rican processional theatre and Latin American memory activism. Unlike archive-based works, Vuelta preserves nothing officially; documentation exists only as woven red cord (accumulated weekly by participants), scattered video, and testimonies that often contradict. By the seventh nested cycle, participants report forgetting earlier performances, finding unfamiliar text in familiar scenes. The final session (October 2024) saw the collective dissolve without archival transfer. A May 2024 symposium at the National University of Costa Rica split scholarly opinion: whether the work resolved the unjoined seam through participatory completion, or deepened it through collective forgetting.[1]
See also
- Participatory adaptation
- Durational refusal
- Latin American adaptations of Beach Surgery
- The Doctrine of Refusal—Ethics, Consent, and the Surgery-as-Sacrament
- Eternal recurrence / breaking the cycle
References
- ↑ Symposium "Ciclo y Olvido," Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Costa Rica, May 2024.