Mario Massaccesi has been, for a few years, the image of the televised news: at six in the afternoon he drives TN Central and, every midnight, he is in front of In Summary, the informative classic night of El Trece. At the same time, for some time now, he has been carrying out a stage show whose name says it all: “Let go to be happy.”
Emerging from some workshops that the journalist gave, together with psychologist Patricia Dalerioin women’s prisons that caught the attention of the publishing industry, which in turn caught the attention of a theater producer, “Letting go to be happy” is the result of all that, but, above all, the result of a decision that Mario Massaccesi made based on events in his own life story.
«I decided that I am not going to wait for things to happen, but I’m going to make things happen for me,” says Mario Massaccesi.
“Letting go to be happy” will be presented this weekend in the Alto Valle with two performances, this Saturday, at 9 p.m., at the Cipolletti Cultural Complex (Fernandez Gold 57); water on Sunday, also at 9 p.m., at Casino Magic in Neuquén (Plans 4005). Tickets are on sale at the casino box office and online through entranceuno.com.
(Pre)History of a book
To know the history of the staging “Let go to be happy” It is necessary to know the history of the book of the same name published in mid-2020. But first a (pre)history is necessary, that of Mario Massaccesi and his approach to ontological coaching from certain biographical episodes that detonated in 1998, when his mother died.
In an extensive talk with RÍO NEGRO Diarythe journalist and television host born in Río Cuarto 57 years ago He told what prompted him to explore the interior of his being and how that inner journey opened a new life for him. “After the death of my mother, I started with a whole personal job. She left without us being able to talk about what had happened to me and what was hurting me and about many things that she experienced that I later found out about. Let death get in the way of something that is not complete It was the moment when I reacted and where I no longer had time to waste, everything happens very quickly. I decided that in the time ahead I am not going to wait for things to happen, but rather I am going to make things happen to me. I started doing insight, self-knowledge seminars, then I did the art of living, spiritual retreats, silent retreats, I got hooked on everything they were short courses and a more shock theme to realize until 2014 that I decided to study coaching, it offered a job perspective and there is the result. Coaching came to complete a job of more than 15 years of working with me, studying and experience other ways of seeing life”,
«Letting go to be happy»: story of a book
“The book began in a prison, giving a talk in the Los Hornos prison where there are about 300 prisoners with their children who do not know freedom because they are little ones up to 4 years old who were born there,” says Mario Massaccesi. “Patricia and I were giving a talk, a kind of workshop that we gave with the NGO Restorative Justice and after the third or fourth time we were there, we left very shocked by everything that happens there inside the prison, the issues that appeared, the emotions that moved. We began to reflect and Patricia made this reflection: how many people walk on the street free and yet they are imprisoned, imprisoned by her command, by fears, by toxic relationships, by the past. And what would we need?: to let go of some things to be more free, to not be so tied to all that which is often inside us and does not allow us to be free.”
Bringing the talks and workshops to the book came about after a call to Mario from the publishing house El Ateneo, which had been following what the journalist and Patricia published on social networks after each talk. The publisher asked them both if they dared to put all that in a book and the answer was yes.
“After each workshop we published a little about each workshop, not much because the confidentiality of what happened there was taken care of and Marcela Luza, director of El Ateneo, tells me ‘in those workshops I see happy people and in this country there is still a lack of That we cultivate happiness, that’s why I’m calling you, to write a book that is a bridge to what we all want, which is to be happy,’” Mario reveals.
“Let go to be happy”, published in 2020, the book that gave rise to everything.
The first edition of “Letting go to be happy” was in September 2020, coming out of the hard quarantine of that year, and reflected what happened in the workshops of 2028 and 2019. “We wrote the book in the summer of 2020 and delivered it On March 15, I think the 17th the pandemic began. It was not a book designed to confront the pandemic,” clarifies the journalist and television host. “There is not a single reference to the pandemic, in fact, we thought that during the pandemic our work was ruined and I think it was enhanced by being locked up and many things to which they were tied or felt tied from the confinement we had. There was a circumstantial effect that was the pandemic and that is that letting go is a possibility, letting go has become fashionable. “We all want to be a little more free.”
From book to stage
Along with the book, Mario says, they received the proposal to do a staging. “And we launched into that adventure because we had never done theater and we said, well, what are we going to do with this: make it an experience where people get closer to what they didn’t teach us and that is the possibility of letting go of many situations that They are still in that trap.”
When they received – and accepted – the proposal, the idea they both had was not to replicate what was in the book, but rather everything that had been left out and which was a lot. “The work is a complement to the book,” explains Mario. “What is in the work is a journey through the different letting go and many personal stories about how we managed to let go of painful situations or from which we suffered a lot. We tell our story and that’s not in the book. The book is not self-referential, the work is.”
“In the theater we do make it self-referential because we don’t want to expose anyone,” explains the journalist. “In addition, the theater presentation has a lot of humor and we did not want to trivialize that burden that people bring to the theater to see how to resolve their lives after having seen the performance.”
“What we are saying is that we are our first experiment,” Massaccesi elaborates regarding the self-referentiality of the work. “It’s not about ‘do as I say and not as I do’, no. What is in the books is something that we have practiced and that we incorporate as a lifestyle. And it emerges as a proposal and not as advice, it emerges as an alternative, both the book and the theater, so that you can take what serves you so that you can ratify what you believe is and so that you can rectify what you believe no longer serves you. ”.
“We do not give recipes for anything, but we invite reflection so that each person can choose their own path towards letting go.”
Mario Massaccesi.
The staging of “Letting go to be happy” has a lot of humor because, Mario highlights, “the basis of the play is to laugh at everything that was once shit for us. Make manure, fertilizer, and be able to have a contemplative and fun look at what were once heavies. It has many of what they both call powerful questions and we do not give recipes for anything, but rather invite reflection so that each person can choose their own path towards letting go. There are some minimal exercises in the theater so that they can be worn or feel in their body the possibility of letting go. And then there are moments of emotion because we are all going through more or less the same circumstances, but with different nuances. There is a moment of a lot of tears, a lot of emotion and a lot of sighing too, from the stage you feel that a lot.
How did Mario and Patricia meet? In a classroom: Mario started studying coaching and Patricia was his first teacher during the first year at the coaching school, then they did not see each other again until Mario thought about her and called her just when Patricia was also thinking about him. “When I went to various prisons to give talks, the majority were women, the one in Los Hornos and the one in Florencio Varela, where the trans population is, almost one hundred trans women. At one point I said that a feminine perspective was needed, motherhood, menopause… strictly feminine topics or topics from the world of women. So I call Patricia and she tells me she was just about to call you several days ago that I have you in mind because I need to do something different that gets me out of my zone of control. I tell him: I have an invitation, do you want to come to prison? When? Such a day, and we went on September 7, 2018, which is her birthday. This call has never been better, I’m going to celebrate my birthday in a prison, it would never have occurred to me and that’s where we start. And we don’t stop anymore.”