My body is a work of art: from burlesque cancer. This is the title of the show staged last May 25 at the Puccini Theater in Florence. An “sold out” for a group of oncological patients who brought the experience of illness for the first time on a stage, with great intensity and vitality.
The idea was born during Francesca’s illness, which in 2012 discovers that she has a breast cancer. Francesca is director, her work consists in conducting social theater workshops, but the disease overturns her life.
Like many other women, the rehabilitation paths of the Ce.Ri.on (Oncological Rehabilitation Center of Florence) begins and the need to “put together” the professional experience and the experience of illness and the desire to transform it in life experience, into something exciting, beautiful and to share this transformation with the other women met during the course emerges.
The need to bring to the public a different idea of the oncological disease becomes strong. The sharing of this idea with the professionals responsible for the Ce.ri.on (where theater therapy groups are conducted) leads to the birth of the “Women Life Love. The disease as life experience” project, laboratory and theatrical show with oncological patients.
And the project becomes reality when Michele, neurologist of the Careggi hospital, decides to support him and finance him in memory of his dear wife Carla. A very special idea: to create and produce a theatrical show that has as its theme the oncological disease.
Remember Carla with a show played by women, such as her cancer, who get involved by representing all their disease path on stage, as a “work of art”. All the women who have participated in the groups of Theater therapy At Villa delle Rose they were contacted and 19 of them joined the project and trained the soubrettes cooperative.
Thus began an intense year of work where the disease turns from an experience suffered, dramatic and not desired to an opportunity to become a spokesperson for vitality, resources, but also an opportunity for cultural awareness and prevention.
From patients to actresses, they went up to the stage to tell each other, with moving authenticity, and with the task of transmitting a great message of hope and positivity.
And so the bursting of the diagnosis, dismay, solitude, pain, therapies, words and looks that injure, the difficult relationship with doctors have been brought on stage. The scars, the sick body, which betrays, which does not feel.
But then courage, strength, rebirth, irony, smiles, sharing and love of others, colored wigs, red bras. You laugh and cry, without ever giving up being a woman, with lipsticks and burlesque.
And a “thanks to the disease that made me better, ready for war and live a battle every day”.
By popular demand, the Soubbettes will return to the stage of the Puccini Theater on 21 October 2016.
