When the lights dimmed and the curtain opened, what appeared before us was not merely a theatrical performance: it was a living essay on the tensions of our age. The Journey of Pakari presents itself as a fantastic tale, but its true strength lies in how it speaks of the present with a starkness rarely permitted to so-called “family theater.” Behind the puppets, the lighting, and the specially composed music, a disquieting question pulsed: what are we doing to our world, and how willing are we to rebel against the ways of life imposed upon us?
From the very first chords, it was clear that the production sought no refuge in lightness or escapism. The music, composed as a score of shifting vibrations that oscillated between the playful and the somber, created a space not only for imagination but for confrontation. The lyrics, at times akin to oral poetry, hurled questions that echoed beyond the stage: “What would you do if one day everything changed?” This was no invitation to fantasy, but a challenge to recognize the fragility of our certainties.
To witness The Journey of Pakari in Arica was to enter a territory where fable and social critique interlace. The staging borrowed from the aesthetic of fairy tale, but its images—the tree weeping over the loss of its roots and its solitude, the world devoured by plastic, the trial of creatures who refuse to become what is expected of them—offered no escape. On the contrary, they forced us to recognize that the fable is us, that the dystopia is here, and that Pakari’s true journey is that of a society still uncertain whether it possesses the courage to alter its fate.
Music as the marrow of the work
For someone who lives through music, what first struck me was the sheer sonority. The compositions (all original) were not accompaniment but atmospheres in their own right. Each vibration opened a different imaginative passage: at times childlike and playful, at times surreal, even dreamlike. The live duet became an organism that seemed to modulate the breathing of the audience.
The lyrics were pure poetry: lines such as “What would you do if one day everything changed?” pierced the surface and sank into our most fragile convictions. And when Pakari’s grandparents sang verses suggesting one must step out of the shadows to seek the light, the theater turned into the confidant of something greater: the question of whether we are capable of escaping the most painful narratives we carry. I cried—as a child and as a woman—because in that moment the stage returned to me the echo of my own battles.
A dramaturgy of relentless metaphors
Pakari enters a parallel universe that is not entirely other but a deformed—and thus precise—reflection of our present. One of the most haunting moments was that of the weeping willow. The voice that embodied the tree’s lament struck me to the core, for it spoke of deforestation, of the severed underground communication that we know trees share through their roots. It was an ecological and cosmic lament that felt physical: every sob seemed to ripple across the audience’s skin.
The play also dared to sketch a political map: this world of cement and plastic, ruled by a fictitious queen conjured by a cowardly mayor, was a fierce portrait of how authorities shirk responsibility and justify devastation with empty rhetoric. The repetitive chant—“Plástic-oh, plástic-oh, plástic-oh…”—functioned as a grotesque mantra, returning to us the image of our own unrestrained, thoughtless consumption.
And like in Greek mythology, there appeared a reinvented Charon: a ferryman who charged tears as the toll to cross a polluted lake. The scene, dense with symbolism, reminded us that our grief and losses are the real currency with which we pay for devastation.
Identity and resistance
Beyond ecological and political denunciation, the play reached a level of philosophical complexity that distances it from the label of “children’s theater.” The trial Pakari conducts over three creatures—a caterpillar who refuses to fly, a dung beetle who longs to be an artist rather than roll excrement, and a spider who yearns to weave from imagination rather than repetition—approached allegory in its purest sense. There, clearly, lay the dilemmas of adolescence and early adulthood: the rupture with inherited expectations, the fear of freedom, the desire to reinvent one’s essence.
They were not merely fantastical creatures: they were mirrors of any young person who discovers they do not want to be what parents, teachers, or society demand. That gesture of resistance, embodied on stage, transforms the play into a political and philosophical lesson of the first order. It reminds us that the structures which define us can also become prisons, and that breaking them is not an act of ingratitude but of survival. For at stake is not only individual identity but the universal question: to what extent do we have the courage to abandon the safety of the known and invent ourselves anew?
An ambitious and necessary spectacle
The scenic richness was overwhelming. The play of lights created atmospheres that seemed to breathe with the drama, the voices rose without fissures, the production took risks in every detail. The excess of noise was itself part of the chaos the piece sought to represent in those hours of confrontation with the mirror. The Journey of Pakari is an ambitious work, conceived to surpass the threshold of the local and to converse with universal theatrical traditions. Yet what moved me most was the way it achieved this from Arica, with its own roots, with an aesthetic born of its territory and yet open to a global dialogue.
The Journey of Pakari is not a show for children alone; it is a journey for those willing to look directly at what hurts. For those who still believe art must be unsettling and transformative. For those who can recognize, in a puppet, in a weeping tree, in a grotesque refrain, the possibility of rethinking how we inhabit the world.
Pakari does not travel alone; she drags us with her. And in that dragging, she forces us to ask whether we are willing to stop being what is expected of us in order to become, at last, what we need to be.
