By Heart

Tiago Rodrigues

 
  • Director Tiago Rodrigues
  • Date 10.18.Fri. 7:30pm 10.19.Sat. 2:00pm 10.20.Sun. 2:00pm
  • Conversation with Artists 10.19.Sat. 2:00pm
    After the performance, a conversation with the artist will take place.
  • Language English, Korean
  • Accessibility Korean subtitle
  • Notice This performance is partly done with the auciences so that duration of this performance is subject to change
  • Rating 13 and over
  • Venue SFAC Theater QUAD
  • Duration 90-120 min.
  • Premiere 2013 Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon
  • Based on an original creation by the company Mundo Perfeito
  • Tickets 50,000won
  • Executive production Festival d’Avignon

 

Memorizing poetry by heart, the power of theater comes to life

A beautiful and profound story about the memories created together by the audience, sonnets by Shakespeare and Tiago Rodriguez, a director of festival d’Avignon,

Introduction

For the past eleven years, director and actor Tiago Rodrigues, newly-appointed director of the Festival d’Avignon, has offered with By Heart a heartrending show, the result of a request from his grandmother as she was going blind. Using a sonnet by William Shakespeare and the writings of George Steiner, Boris Pasternak or Ray Bradbury, the Portuguese artist offer a true dramatic manifesto to say the power of poetry through the creation of an unexpected community. Exploring the relationship between politics and literature, history and the personal, By Heart becomes a gesture of love.

Synopsis

'By Heart' is a piece about the importance of transmission, of the invisible smuggling of words and ideas that only keeping a text in your memory can provide. It’s about a theatre that recognises itself as that place of transmission of what you can’t measure in meters, euros or bytes. It‘s about the safe hiding-place that forbidden texts have always found in our brains and our hearts, as a guarantee of civilization even in the most barbaric and desolate times.
In By Heart, Tiago Rodrigues teaches a poem to ten people. These ten people never saw the performance and they have no idea which text they will be learning by heart in front of the audience. While teaching them, Rodrigues unfolds a mix of stories of his soon-to-be-blind grandmother and stories of writers and characters from books that are, somehow, connected both to the old lady and himself. The books are also there, on stage, inside wooden fruit crates. And as each couple of verses is taught to the group of ten people, improbable connections emerge between Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak, a cook from the north of Portugal and a Dutch TV program called Beauty and Consolation, and the mystery behind the choice of this poem is slowly solved.

Director
Tiago Rodrigues

Tiago Rodrigues



The first ambition of Portuguese actor Tiago Rodrigues is to play with people who'd want to come together and invent shows. His encounter with the Belgian company tg STAN in 1997, when he was about 20, definitively confirmed his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group. He would develop his acting, his dramatic writing, and his taste for the collective. The freedom of performance and decision given him then would forever influence his future shows.
Tiago Rodrigues thus found himself repeatedly and early in his carrer in a position of instigator, and little by little came to direct and write projects he “stumbled upon.” In parallel to that, he also wrote screenplays, articles, poems, prefaces, op-eds, etc.
In 2003, he co-founded with Magda Bizarro the company Mundo Perfeito, with which he created many shows without settling down in any specific location, becoming the guest of many national and international institutions. In France, he notably performed his Portuguese version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in 2015, and Sopro in 2017, which, like all his plays translated into French, were published by Les Solitaires intempestifs. By Heart is presented in 2014 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which later invites him to lead an "occupation" of the theater during two months in spring 2016, during which he created Bovary. Director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021, Tiago Rodrigues nevertheless continues to create shows using the limited means he has appropriated as his own artistic syntax. On a larger scale, he has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theatre. In 2022, he accepts the Comédie de Genève's invitation to be its first associate artist, and creates Dans la mesure de l'impossible, based on the testimonies of people working in humanitarian aid.

Credits

Playwright·Director·Performer Tiago Rodrigues
English translation Tiago Rodrigues, revised by Joana Frazão
Extracts·quotations from William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner et Joseph Brodsky
Set Design·Costume·props Magda Bizarro
General Manager André Pato
Sound Manager Pedro Costa
Executive production Festival d’Avignon
Based on an original creation by the company Mundo Perfeito
Coproduction O Espaço do Tempo, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal
Support Camões Centre culturel portugais à Paris for the 77th edition of the Festival d’Avignon
Support for creation Governo de Portugal - DGArtes
Executive production of the original creation Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes
Copyright Show Tiago Rodrigues
Subtitle Translation Yi Danbi, SPAF

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  • The difference here is what Rodrigues leads us to in the end: a statement about how the texts we hold in our memory become the “decoration for the house of our interior,” according to the literary critic George Steiner, whom Rodrigues quotes at length.
    - Maya Phillips, The New York Times, October 13, 2021
  • "Rodrigues himself appears in his By Heart, the second half of the double-bill. An idiosyncratic and ultimately profound meditation on the rewards and challenges of memorizing great literature, the piece, performed in English here, incorporates ten audience members who volunteer to commit a text to memory. Rodrigues interweaves sequences of onstage coaching with anecdotes and memories about what literature has meant to him, to his grandmother as she lost her sight and to people in repressive regimes throughout history."
    - Celia Wren, The Washington Post, March 8, 2015