13th october 2007
Seravezza, Duomo There are many forms of addiction which a person has to face daily: from the judgment of one’s own superiors to the attachment to one’s own affective relationships, to the forms of compulsive consumption. The difference between positive and negative addictions seems to be mainly enclosed in the chance of improving the individual’s conformation to one’s own setting or, vice versa, of making it more difficult. The path which leads to forms of pathological addiction is usually a path towards forms of isolation from one’s own social setting, losing or making harder the links with one’s own relatives and the carrying out of the normal daily activities: working, meeting with a group of friends etc. The experience of the choir Live Your Life is an extraordinary example of how it is possible to react to situations of personal difficulty in a common and involving way. The choir, made by persons and relatives in a status of addiction to alcohol, was born with the idea of giving a positive chance of self-determination, personal empowerment. Born from a group of alcohol addicted under treatment, the choir is now a reference point open to the involvement of persons with manifold personal stories. For the city of Seravezza, within the project Networking 2007, Live Your Life performed Social Lab and a concert in step with the other territorial workshops carried out in the other cities. |
For this occasion the choir, composed of more than twenty singers, involved the local population of the city at the feet of the Alpi Apuane in their “lessons of singing and of freedom”. The event held in the cathedral of the city was a path of discovery and of meeting with the problems related to alcohol and also of sharing of the exit path undertaken from them by Live Your Life. On the 13th of October many of the singers, before the start of the concert, shared with the present their own personal story. Those were very touching moments, in which, next to persons who had overtaken the addiction from alcohol many years ago, there were personal stories in which the subject was still facing the exit process or situations in which each new day without alcohol was a huge success. But the difficulties which these situations generate strongly involve the whole family. Sara, a young teen-ager element of the choir, told with great lucidity her personal experience and that of her family. In the course of few years she saw with much pain her father parting slowly from her because of alcohol and then his coming back closer after the overcoming from the addiction. This experience, which made her grow very rapidly, allows her now to tell publicly this difficult phase of her life and become witness of a chance of exit today present. The songs, accompanied by the sax, got then the present audience involved through a repertoire of pop music until the conclusion with the gospel of Happy day. |
