Janiver Santiago reveals how she fell in love with theater after being called 'caripela' as a child.
1. Hablando con Luis Miguel presents theater educator and actress Janibeth Santiago in a conversation about arts education, improvisation, and the cost barriers to theater in Puerto Rico.
2. Janibeth is introduced as a performer the host saw in 250 el Cuba Libre, a woman from Ponce who has spent 25 years in Puerto Rico's Department of Education and 12-13 years directing Histriones at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo.
3. The episode's core thesis is that theater and improvisation are healing disciplines that develop the emotional and social skills formal academic subjects do not address.
4. Janibeth grew up in Ponce, attended the Escuela de Bellas Artes specialization from seventh grade onward at the invitation of her teacher Héctor Rodríguez, and chose education in theater over a career purely as a performer.
5. She names professor Dean Salla at UPR as the figure she most admires from her university years, citing a specific memory of Salla cleaning bathrooms alongside students during a Teatro Rodante tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
6. As a child in Ponce, she staged secret classrooms for her doll-students behind a door covered in chalk, rang an imaginary bell with her mouth, and marched her students to her grandmother's kitchen as the school cafeteria.
7. She spent multiple years on Club Sunshine, Canal 4's Puerto Rico production, describing television as a shift that required her to reduce her theatrical expressiveness and learn an entirely new discipline through close observation of colleagues.
8. At UPR, Janibeth currently teaches theater electives to nursing, veterinary, and technology students who enroll because they need a required credit; her stated goal is not to produce actors but to give them a lens for appreciating live performance.
9. She performs and co-directs at Impro Galería, an alternative space she describes as 'the home of theatrical improvisation' — a venue available for any experiment without the need to reserve a theater or secure a license.
10. She defines improvisation's core skill as listening, not spontaneity: the ability to remain calm, receive a partner's idea as a gift, and build on it rather than seize control of the scene.
11. She compares stand-up comedy and improvisation directly, arguing that stand-up is harder for her because she faces the audience alone, while impro offers the security of partners who will support whatever direction the scene takes.
12. The performance 250 el Cuba Libre brought together several women performers in a series of monologues directed by Edwin Ocasio; Janibeth says the cast only worked together collectively at the final stage, and the fusion produced what she called an explosion of talent.
13. Asked about technique for playing emotionally difficult roles, she says she uses no method, no meditation, no fixed point — only vulnerability and feeling, which she credits directly to her years of improvisation training.
14. She argues that perfectionism in youth originates from family pressure — citing the message 'you got two points, you're horrible' — and that improvisation workshops break this pattern by normalizing mistakes as data rather than failures.
15. She links stopping self-judgment to stopping judgment of others: students who learn to say 'I made a mistake — what do I fix?' also stop attacking their scene partners' contributions.
16. A family of four attending theater in Puerto Rico at $30+ per ticket, with parking, gasoline, and dinner, spends approximately $500 — a full biweekly paycheck — which she identifies as the primary barrier to theater audiences.
17. She contrasts this with willingness to pay $100-200 for shows abroad, and observes a structural problem: Puerto Rico producers must seek out theaters rather than theaters recruiting productions, while venues sit empty.
18. The conversation moves between Spanish and English, with Janibeth code-switching naturally, and the host's tone is warm and admiring throughout, with frequent shared laughter.
19. Theater educators, performing arts students, improvisation practitioners, and anyone interested in arts as a tool for social-emotional learning in schools would find this episode directly relevant.
20. Listeners expecting a production how-to, a discussion of specific plays, or content unrelated to Puerto Rico's performing arts community would not find what they need here.
