"By Heart" de Tiago Rodrigues, extraits

“As you can see, there are ten empty chairs on the stage. I’d like for ten spectators to come sit on them. Before you accept my invitation enthusiastically, I need to add that those ten spectators will have to learn a text by heart. It’s a short text, not too difficult, but not too simple, either. It’s a manageable text. Those ten spectators won’t have to act. They won’t have to do anything in particular. Everything will be calm and normal.” For the past ten 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 likely to have a unique resonance in the Cour d’honneur.