My body is a work of art: from cancer to burlesque. This is the title of the show staged on May 25th at the Puccini Theater in Florence. A “full house” for a group of cancer patients who for the first time brought the experience of illness to a stage with great intensity and vitality.
The idea was born during Francesca’s illness, who in 2012 discovered she had breast cancer . Francesca is a director, her job consists in conducting social theater workshops, but the disease turns her life upside down.
Like many other women, she begins the rehabilitation paths of Ce.Ri.On (Oncological Rehabilitation Center of Florence) and the need emerges to “put together” the professional experience and the experience of illness and the desire to transform it into an experience of life, into something exciting, beautiful and to share this transformation with the other women met along the way.
The need to bring to the public a different idea of oncological disease becomes strong. Sharing this idea with the professionals responsible for Ce.Ri.On (where theater therapy groups are conducted) leads to the birth of the “Women Life Love. Illness as a life experience ”, workshop and theatrical performance with cancer patients.
And the project becomes reality when Michele, a neurologist at the Careggi hospital, decides to support and finance it in memory of his dear wife Carla. A very special idea: to create and produce a theatrical show that has cancer as its theme .
Remembering Carla with a show interpreted by women, like her with cancer, who get involved by representing on the stage their entire path of illness, as a “work of art”. All the women who over the years have participated in the theater therapy groups at Villa delle Rose have been contacted and 19 of them have joined the project and formed the Soubrettes Cooperative.
Thus began an intense year of work where the disease is transformed from an suffered, dramatic and unwanted experience to an opportunity to become a spokesperson for vitality, resources, but also an opportunity for cultural awareness and prevention.
From patients to actresses, they took to the stage to tell about themselves, with moving authenticity, and with the task of transmitting a great message of hope and positivity.
And so the breakthrough of the diagnosis, the dismay, the loneliness, the pain, the therapies, the words and looks that hurt, the difficult relationship with the doctors were brought to the scene. The scars, the sick body, which betrays, which does not feel.
But then the courage, the strength, the rebirth, the irony, the smiles, the sharing and the love of others, the colored wigs, the red bras. We laugh and cry, without ever giving up being a woman, with lipsticks and burlesque.
