By Heart
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.
Credits:
Text: Tiago Rodrigues, with fragments and quotes by William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, among others
Written and performed by: Tiago Rodrigues
Set, props and costume: Magda Bizarro
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 Governo de Portugal – DGArtes
Executive Production on the original creation: Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes
Recommended age: 12+
Duration: 90 – 120 min. (without intermission)
Show premiered at 20th of November 2013, at Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon (Portugal)
Tour dates:
8 – 10 October 2025: SIRENOS – Vilnius International Theatre Festival, Vilnius (Lithuania)
14 – 15 outubro 2025: Battersea Arts Center, Londres (Reino Unido)
16 October 2025: Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton (United Kingdom)
24 – 25 October 2025: UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Los Angeles (USA)
28 – 29 October 2025: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (EUA)
3 – 4 November 2025: L’Alliance New York – French Cultural Center, New York (USA)
21 – 24 January 2026: Points communs, Nouvelle scène nationale de Cergy-Pontoise et du Val d’Oise, Cergy (France)
27 – 31 January 2026: Théâtre de la Croix Rousse, Lyon (France)
11 – 12 maio 2026: Onassis Stegi, Atenas (Grécia)
14 - 16 May 2026: Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa, Milan (Italy)
23 May 2026: Scène 55, Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art & Création, Mougins (France)
More information:
Anne-Mathilde Di Tomaso – Festival d’Avignon
anne-mathilde.di-tomaso@festival-avignon.com
Léa Dony – Festival d’Avignon
lea.dony@festival-avignon.com
Fotografia: © Christophe Raynaud de Lage – Festival d’Avignon
