All festivals are creative and playful spaces where very diverse proposals coincide that are difficult to see in the regular seasons of theaters. Differences that not only have to do with their artistic quality, but with the objective, with the capacity to produce emotions, to reflect ourselves and the society in which we live or even simply to entertain us, but also with the means of production to bring them to life and which often reflect other cultural and economic differences. It was only two days ago that the Fabià Puigserver hall of the Teatre Lliure received Florentina Holzinger, one of the stars of European radicality, with a show (Ophelia’s got talent) in which nothing was spared and where even a life-size helicopter appeared. And three days later in the small Espai Lliure a Mexican company brought us a simple but committed political view on the perversion of the capitalist system in Mexico, extensible throughout depressed societies in the line of what the writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano analyzed and denounced in Las venas abiertas de América Latina.My mother and money raises the difficulty, or almost the impossibility, for the lower classes outside the privileged West to access a dignified life, despite working tirelessly. This is the real case of Josefina Orlaineta, mother of actor and playwright Anacarsis Ramos. Why, at 66 years old and having worked all her life, does my mother live in poverty?, Ramos asks himself. And that's why he convinced her to explain her life experience with work and money. So, the enterprising Josefina added acting to her work history with more than forty commercial initiatives. And what ease she displays! As if she had been doing it all her life.

The ship is sailing with a fair wind. The Òh!pera project by Liceu and DHub reaches its fifth edition with the premiere of three new micro-operas at Fabra i Coats in the Sant Andreu neighborhood of Barcelona on July 2, 3, 4, and 5, as part of the Festival Grec program. The original idea was to ""create a new pool of creators who attract new audiences", as Àlex Ollé, artistic director of Òh!pera, stated in 2022. The purpose remains the same, and year after year, well-established composers, stage directors, and librettists have passed through. One of the three works in 2026 is Jo, núvol, by the composer Sergi Puig Serna from Badalona (who last year premiered I tot caminant em va semblar que el temps reculava in Austria), with stage direction by Lucia del Greco (who also directed the opening show of the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic) and libretto by Alicia Kopf (the publication of the novel Memòria d'Eco, on which the micro-opera is based, is still recent). Another is La vida por los cuernos, a flamenco-opera by Anna Colom from Barcelona (who participated in the tour of Rosalía's El mal querer), with staging by Alexandre Rodríguez Fons (author of Los hijos perdidos de Dios, premiered at Fundació Brossa) and libretto by Pablo Macho Otero (founder of the company La Bella Otero). And the third micro-opera of the year is Opereta, by the composer Arnau Brichs from Barcelona (who premiered Graus de presència in Paris in 2024), which features stage direction by Marc Salicrú (with experience at Liceu as a set designer and lighting designer) and libretto by Pol Guasch (who this year published Relíquia).