Staging for children enhances the courage to feel

Angel Vargas

La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, August 6, 2025, p. 5

Being sensitive and expressing emotions isn't a sign of weakness, but of strength. Based on this premise, the play "Pez globo" invites us to reflect on the importance of empathy and emotional acceptance in childhood and throughout life.

Written by Daniela Arroio and directed by Valeria Fabbri and Daniel Ortiz, this production will premiere at the Teatro Helénico almost a year after its first performances, as part of the Centro Cultural Helénico's children's program. Performances begin this weekend and run until the end of the month, on Saturdays and Sundays at 1:00 PM.

The play celebrates the courage to feel. It's a beautiful piece, but above all, it's very necessary for young audiences: it addresses the importance of expressing emotions—specifically, daring to cry , explains Daniel Ortiz.

In these times when crying is still frowned upon, crying is an act of resistance, of humanity, of showing ourselves to be human and empathetic in the face of situations that may happen to us or others.

In an interview, the playwright and actor (San Luis Potosí, 1989) also explains that this production by the Me dijo, le dijo, le dije Company explores themes such as bullying , friendship, emotional repression and acceptance, questioning stereotypes such as that men should not cry.

Unfortunately, this type of education still exists in some sectors of the country's society. Men are not allowed to express their emotions, much less cry, due to the deeply ingrained machismo that we carry, and which considers such an action a sign of weakness , he points out.

I think it's very important to address these issues from the earliest years of life and to teach children that, contrary to popular belief, expressing feelings and emotions is completely normal and necessary.

The production tells the story of León, a boy ridiculed at school for his sensitivity. His life takes a turn when he adopts Jacinta, a puffer fish rescued from a polluted river. While the boy tries to imitate his pet's coldness—which gulps water and inflates its body to avoid feeling—this sea creature discovers the great value of human emotions.

“Together, they learn that feeling isn't a sign of weakness, but a powerful way of being in the world. Pufferfish communicates complex emotions in a way that's accessible to little ones.”

Zaira Campirano's stage design transports the audience to an underwater world, where the protagonist's room transforms into a giant fish tank. The colorful, transforming set brings to life an aquatic universe where the actors transform into octopuses, giant fish, and fantastic creatures through striking costumes.

Added to this is live original music, with songs written and performed by Silvestre Villarruel, which lends an even more playful and emotional atmosphere to the production, according to the stage director.

I urge adults

According to Daniel Ortiz, this play transcends children's audiences because its themes also appeal to adults and invite them to reflect on the topic.

Many of us grow up with this idea that we must contain our emotions. What we do is not show them, suppress them, cover them up, when it's just the opposite: we must identify and express them in order to manage them later and know what to do with all that we feel.

The cast is made up of renowned actors with experience in theater and streaming series: Luis Curiel, María Kemp, and Daniel Ortiz himself.

Tickets are 250 pesos. A 30 percent discount applies to advance tickets through Friday. Tickets can be purchased at the Centro Cultural Helénico box office (1500 Revolución Avenue, Guadalupe Inn neighborhood) or through the website helenico.gob.mx.

Reyes Martínez Torrijos

La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, August 6, 2025, p. 5

Reading the work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, with its melancholy and questions that provoke reflection on one's own life, inspired novelist Sofía G. Buzali to retell it. This led to the short story "Ella ," published by Editorial Dos Líneas.

In an interview with La Jornada , the narrator reflected that the guilt of not having cured her mother with her birth and the belief that she died because Clarice didn't leave a pair of scissors open on a table led her to become this great writer. Her impulse to tell stories, to analyze what she feels, to ask questions about existence also impressed me greatly .

Buzali entered the Claricean world and its understanding through two paths: the pleasure of reading and the sensations left behind upon finishing each of her stories and novels, and by discovering her life and gradually discovering what she was like as a human being and a woman .

She studied two important biographies of the Brazilian writer, those by Benjamin Moser and Nádia Battella. There she found a pivotal point: the fire that seriously injured Lispector. "I think the greatest pain a writer could have experienced was realizing that her right hand, the one she used to write, was burned, rendered useless."

That moment was terrifying to imagine: what a writer must have felt if, due to her cigarette addiction, she fell asleep and started the fire, resulting in the injury to her hand. That's the beginning of my novel.

The narrator commented that she read the biographies, made notes, and conducted research, as there are many texts that analyze Lispector's literary side, but the writings of Moser and Battella are the anchors for her life.

From then on, Sofía Buzali developed an almost automatic writing style that began in the hospital where Lispector was convalescing. It's somewhat linear, playing with memories and the ebb and flow of time and her own life. It took me a long time to find the voice of this woman writer, so important in contemporary Brazilian literature .

It was a major challenge for the author, in which she managed to let herself go in crafting a story that draws on what she would have felt in that situation, and combines and weaves together my sensations of what I imagined she might be experiencing. A back and forth between her feelings, her past, her life as a woman, wife, writer, and mystic .

The information and readings were integrated into Buzali's novel, in which you don't know when she remembers her time in Bern or when she realized she had a schizophrenic son. She traveled this entire journey as a person with a very difficult past, from a family that had to flee Russia. There you begin to live, feel, and remember everything you've read. The writing process was a process of research and integrating her life into my own soul .

The title came about when the novelist recognized that the important thing was precisely Clarice Lispector herself. She couldn't have found a title simple enough to encompass all of Lispector's references .

To complete this book, Buzeli traveled to Rio de Janeiro to understand Brazilian culture, to experience the environment where she grew up, lived her entire life, and the longing she felt for Europe. I walked along the beach where she used to walk, the neighborhood, and the building where she lived. I tried to capture that whole atmosphere so I could describe it .

She emphasized how imagining Lispector's death was the greatest challenge in her story: "I delved very deeply into imagining her despair. In some of her writings, she says, 'My character is dying.' She saw herself as an actress in life. That's where I tried to recreate all this pain and this farewell to life." That experience moved Buzali, who lost two friends and found it very painful to encounter a Clarice who also died of cancer .