Tiago Rodrigues. By Heart

Text, direction and performance Tiago Rodrigues
Scenography, costumes and props Magda Bizarro
General Manager André Pato
Sound Manager Pedro Costa
Executive production of the original creation Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes

Assistant in Lithuania Augustas Gornatkevičius
Translation Tiago Rodrigues, revised by Joana Frazão (English), Agnė Pulokaitė (Lithuanian)
Extracts and quotations from William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner and Joseph Brodsky 
Translation of Sonnet 30 by William Shakespeare into Lithuanian Sigitas Geda, Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė

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 for creation Governo de Portugal - DGArtes 

Duration 105 min
Premiere 2013

Performance
If you had to choose a book to turn to when you could no longer read, which one would it be? Taking this question as its starting point, “By Heart” hymns the power of poetry, memory and freedom on stage.

For the past twelve years, director, playwright, actor and currently also director of the Festival d’Avignon, Tiago Rodrigues, has taken his heartrending show By Heart around the world showing it on different continents for more than 350 times. 

Tiago Rodrigues says that the show is based on his connection with his grandmother “I’ve always had a very strong link with my grandmother. It expressed itself in our shared love for books and for reading. As she grew older, my grandmother learned that she was going blind. So she gave me a mission: to choose a book for her to learn by heart before losing her sight completely. As soon as she told me about it, I knew that, one day, I would share that story.”

The Portuguese artist offers a true dramatic manifesto to state the power of poetry through inviting ten volunteers on the stage and creating an unexpected community which will together memorize a text by heart. In a world where most of us memorize nothing more poetic than passwords and pin numbers, what is the point of a theatre piece built around the spectacle of 10 people learning a text by heart?

'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. Tiago Rodrigues, gives us a hymn to the power of poetry, memory and freedom. 

Theatre as a Weapon
“By Heart” is 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 said: “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.

Press

"Literature is the great love of my life. And yet I’ve never liked memorization or recitation […]. But the playwright and actor Tiago Rodrigues has changed my mind. […] 
Rodrigues uses his memorization exercise to create an intimate performance that connects people through text. […]
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