During times of plague, just like in Decameron, we hide in tales, but not without expressing discontent. A plague has spread in this historical moment: it is a moral, ethic, linguistic plague that runs the Internet.

During plague, awful behaviours like language corruption, violence, pornography spread faster instead of desire. We entered a new era of technological revolution and we are starting to measure the consequences of Production. In the last hundred years, the planet went into an acceleration that deleted our previous history. A structural change that will become irreversible. The sense of the sacred, its manifestation in nature, has disappeared. Religion became an excuse for fighting. Experts define this era Anthropocene, to underline how much Humanity has changed the substance of the planet and of its inhabitants. 

During times of plague, it is necessary to rebuild unity to find a new relationship with the nature of things. With the sacred and with beasts, living creatures with which we share life on Earth. Our relationship with animals has been told in many ways in the past: from Lascaux’s primitive caves to Middle Ages’ bestiaries, in which nature got the shape of a book and reality was seen as a symbol. And then, there is today: we have a more concious relationship with animals, curated on our plates and dishes. Or it’s culturally mediated by cartoons, soft toys and tales. 

The beast exists and resists, especially in the subconcious. We dream about animals much more than we meet them, as sleeping gets us back to the beginning of the world, made of deep darkness. A separation occurred after that primitive darkness: now we are stuck in this human shape after million of years of evolution.

In these alternative and technologically evolved Middle Ages, made of crusades, new war religions, obscurantism, industrial work on fear, behind us, or sometimes by our side, there are animals, beasts, standing as an unsolved access point to the mystery of nature, human nature. 

This is the topic. A formal question arises in its development, and the answer can be found in the ballad;
it doesn’t require shortness nor synthesis. 

This dance features authors of great ballads, like Oscar Wilde, John Keats and Francesco d’Assisi, along with the genious of a XIIIth century erudite, Richard de Fournival, who wrote a wonderful Bestiaire d’amours. He teaches us the complexity and the natural mechanisms of love seductions, but he also reminds us that every story is a love story. Even the absurd, destructive and bloody history of humanity. 

Vinicio Capossela