Friday, 16th September | 20.15
Saturday, 17th September | 20.00
LA PELANDA | SALA 2 | 1h 15′

theatre

Tiago Rodrigues

By Heart

national premiere

written and performed by Tiago Rodrigues
Text with fragments and quotes by William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, among others
set, props and costume Magda Bizarro
english translation Tiago Rodrigues, revised by Joana Frazão
executive production on the original creation Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes
a production Teatro Nacional D. Maria II after an original creation by the company Mundo Perfeito
co-producers O Espaço do Tempo, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal

In By Heart, Portuguese playwright and actor Tiago Rodrigues teaches a poem to 10 people. These 10 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 10 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.
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. As George Steiner himself would put it in an interview to the TV program Beauty and Consolation: “Once 10 people know a poem by heart, there’s nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do about it. It will survive”. But, bottom line, By Heart is a training program for the resistance that only comes to an end when the 10 new soldiers know a poem by heart.

BIOGRAPHY

Tiago Rodrigues (born in 1977) is the artistic director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, in Lisbon. He is an actor, playwright and director whose subversive and poetic theatre has made him one of Portugal’s leading artists. At the age of 21 he quits theatre school to work with Belgian company tg STAN having co-created and performed several performances, touring in over than 15 countries. In 2003 created the company Mundo Perfeito together with Magda Bizarro, where he pursued a work heavily based on artistic collaboration and collective processes being produced by renowned festivals such as alkantara festival, kunstenfestivaldesarts or Festival d’Automne à Paris and touring in countries such as Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States of America. His pace of work is astonishing: with Mundo Perfeito he has created more than thirty plays between 2003 and 2014. In that period, Rodrigues has also collaborated with artists from Belgium, Lebanon, the Netherlands and Brazil. One of his last performances, Three fingers below the knee, was awarded with two prizes: Best Performance 2012 by Portuguese Author’s Society and a Golden Globe by the Portuguese TV channel SIC.
In the meantime, he has collaborated with other companies, choreographers and filmmakers. He has also been involved in teaching in schools like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s contemporary dance school PARTS, in Brussels and in other theatre and dance schools in Portugal and abroad, also included in university programs such as “The Autonomous Actor” at Stockholm’s Theatre School. He has also done work as curator and in artistic community projects.
Deeply rooted in a collaborative theatre tradition, he has recently created pieces that stand out by the way in which they manipulate documents with theatrical tools, combining both public and private life and challenging our perception of social or historical phenomena.