“Beloved Woods,
here I am at last. Please believe me when I say that I have been waiting for this peace to come to you again. Forgive me, then, for you know that I belong to you. In these motionless days, I have repeated holy words the meaning of which goes further in me the more I forget my own name.
Tell me, how are you? How did you spend your days and hours in my absence? I hear the herons are back and the silence is new. Are you smiling? Do not mock me, but embrace me and let me return to you as an exile returns to his beloved homeland.”

Beloved woods, blessed shadows, I come in search of my my heart (F. Handel)

Conceived on 9 February 2020 and developed during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 emergency, Care Selve – a dance, theatre and music show – is intended as an invitation to rediscover the spirituality of nature. The title, which echoes a literary topos and the text of an aria by George Frideric Handel, introduces an ecological perspective which focuses on gratitude and respect for creation, a state of pleasure where we feel loved and we rediscover a sense of belonging.
The chosen musical repertoire includes baroque and classical pieces for solo voice, where nature reveals this love and accompanies the audience on a timeless journey: the discovery of two human beings who seek comfort from the forests and who, in doing so, recognize a common possibility. In this performance, the movement-singing-sounds-words bear witness to our desire for communion with nature, a mysterious and empathic relationship (which we immediately feel as children) that today we need to rediscover through a new outlook capable of illuminating hope in new generations. A kind of trust that also goes through the rediscovery of memory, which here lives in the possible encounter between the tradition of western music and the tradition of contemporary gesture, to rekindle both human and artistic interest in fluidity as integration, in breath as praise, in smile and lightness as promise.
The dancing, supported by the singing and by the sound of the harp, including according to improvisation dynamics, becomes an expression of the desire for this profound communication, allowing us to participate in a ceremony that is taught us by the plants themselves.
Finally, by reinterpreting some quotations from religious literature and from Dante Alighieri’s Divine commedy, the short texts of the performance clearly reveal the need to recognise interdependence with nature and with other human beings.

The project is also available as a proposal for outdoor spaces entitled Care Selve. Florilegio.