Tiago Rodrigues / Teatro Nacional D. Maria II
www.teatro-dmaria.pt
| Work written and performed by: | Tiago Rodriguez |
| Fragments and quotes taken from works by: | William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner and Joseph Brodsky, among other authors |
| Sets, art, costumes and photographs onstage: | Magda Bizarro and Rita Mendes |
| Produced by: | Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, from an original creation by company Mundo Prefeito |
| Created with financial support by: | Governo de Portugal / DGArtes |
| Co-produced by: | O Espaço do Tempo y Maria Matos Teatro Municipal |
In By Heart, author and director Tiago Rodrigues –present artistic director at the prestigious Teatro Nacional D. Maria II and one of the most celebrated artists in Portugal- teaches ten persons a poem previously unknown by them. These ten people have never seen the show and haven’t a clue of what text they will have to memorise in front of the audience. As he works with them, Rodrigues displays a series of experiences from his nearly blind grandmother mixed with other stories by writers and characters from books which are somehow related to the old woman as well as to himself. The books are also there onstage piled in wooden fruit boxes. So, as every couple of verses is taught to the group of ten people from the audience, improbable connections emerge between Nobel Prize Boris Pasternak, a cook from the north of Portugal, and a Dutch television programme called Beauty and Consolation; and thus the mystery behind the choice of that particular poem slowly unfolds.
By Heart –in a direct reference to the act of memorising- is a play about the importance of the possibility of smuggling words and ideas only achieved by the ability to retain a text in your memory. It is about a theatre that recognises itself as that place of transmission for everything that can’t be counted in metres, euros or bytes. It talks about the safe hiding place texts have always found in our brains and our hearts, as a guarantee for civilisation even during the most barbarian and desolate times. As George Steiner himself would say in an interview for the television programme Beauty and Consolation: “Once ten people have learnt a poem by heart there’s nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do. The poem will survive”. In short, By Heart is a training program for resistance that is only completed when the ten new soldiers learn a poem by heart.
The show’s world premiere took place at the Matia Matos Theatre in Lisbon on November 19th, 2015. Before coming to Madrid as part of the 33rd Festival de Otoño a Primavera, the play could be seen in Spain, to the acclaim of audiences and critics at the Alhóndiga in Bilbao (in March 2014), and at the Escenas do Cambio Festival in Santiago de Compostela (in February 2015).