By Heart
Tiago Rodrigues
- Director Tiago Rodrigues
- Date 10.18.Fri. 7:30pm 10.19.Sat. 2:00pm 10.20.Sun. 2:00pm
- 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 Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon (Portugal), 2013
- 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,
IntroductionFor 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.
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.
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
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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
